The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

...Essential for this shift is the symbiotic relationship that government and industries have already developed with centers of learning, whereby funds and incentives are supplied by the first and various services by the second...

...I speak particularly of the conclusion, whose critique of compensatory justice would almost serve to justify the purchase of the entire volume...

...Because of the intricacy of problem-solving, a special emphasis has now been placed on theoretical knowledge, the particular forte of an increasingly self-confident class of technical experts and the source for future social innovation, As the government, in response to changing cultural demands, has turned to this technocracy for advice, it has invested universities and foundations with political as well as intellectual significance...

...And were that to happen, it appears even less plausible that the social science faculties of the prestigious universities would fight for the meritocracy which Bell describes in such detail...

...Is not this intended statement of historical inevitability the type of exhortation most appropriate for an A.D.A...

...As such it represents a threat to the very meritocracy needed to create further social improvement...

...The decision of a Republican administration to increase deficit spending is viewed as a sign of "economic sophistication," and the allocation of tax monies to education as an expression of cultural concern (never as an accommodation to lobbying teachers...

...In fact the numerous quotations sometimes serve to blur rather than to illustrate his points...

...Educators have been summoned to formulate national policies, while "brain trusts" have become a necessity, and no longer merely an ornament, for the state...

...Moreover, according to one well-known Carnegie Institute Survey, it is the humanists and social scientists within the professoriate who have most conspicuously advanced such causes...

...Although this populism pretends to renew the liberal commitment to equality, "it is not for fairness, but against elitism...

...How well Clio has worked in this case to reconcile the wave of the future with the author's own conviction...

...A rather stark contrast seems to be present between them and the engineering and medical faculties...

...Its members are being drawn from the physical, natural, and above all the social sciences, while at the same time, the locus for the postindustrial community is moving from the firm and industry into the university...

...Paul Gottfried...

...As much as Professor Bell might wish to believe otherwise, it is not the descendants of Dixiecrats or Nebraskan farmers, but the members of his own guild, who are clamoring for open enrollment at colleges and for racial quotas as a professional qualification...

...Although there is an ever-present danger to oversimplify a book so monumentally constructed...

...According to Seymour Lipset this antithesis can be plotted along a wide spectrum of issues, encompassing both political and cultural values...

...An even more acute tension exists between the post-industrial technocracy and the current radical egalitarians...

...Bell examines this leveling with regard to the clamor for equality of result in education and hiring...

...Despite his faulty forecasting, his book can be read with profit...

...While social decision-making must presuppose an intellectual class selected on the basis of cerebral distinction, "contemporary populism, in its desire for wholesale egalitarianism, insists in the end on complete leveling...

...An alliance formed between technology and social engineering, originating in the universities and coming to shape the economic future of the West, was an integral part of what by now can be called an unrealizable dream...

...His comments on social change are, in the main, well-considered...

...The collaboration between technologists, on the one side, and social theorists, on the other, can only be based on a common set of values...

...Despite the sometimes awkward nomenclature (whereby the dominant concepts of a social organization are turned into its "axial principles," the organization itself into an "axial structure," and the concluding chapter into a "coda"), and even despite the massive erudition present on every page, the work can be thematically reduced to the following summary...

...and while several chapters would bear revising and condensing, other parts are worthy of our intellectual respect...

...One of them is the conflict between those who interpret science as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge and those who defend its ties to industry and the military...

...Nonetheless, the class he writes about, is largely fictitious...

...Bell argues rather cogently that reality has been thrice redefined in Western life: once as nature, next as technique, and finally as the social world...

...I doubt that engineers and manufacturers will soon turn for general leadership to social scientists...

...Bell adduces, in addition to a welter of statistics, some sound empirical evidence in defense of his thesis...

...He also asks whether the eclipse of these values would not bring about a return to ascribed social status and a consequent lessening of individual human achievement...

...He discusses the waning of class conflict in America in its traditional form of an almost ritualized confrontation between labor and management...

...What concerns me is simply to point out the improbability of the type of coalition which Bell imagines will eventually lead the postindustrial West...

...For however much Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, and even Daniel Bell, may still yearn for the realization of that vision, its incompatibility with reality becomes daily more evident...

...The same academic community—rather than populist pressure—has also, by and large, inspired the New Politics' demand for compensatory justice...

...I do not wish to draw moral judgments about the reasons for this gulf: as by contrasting the scientific rigor and down-to-earth focus of one group with the fanciful pose of alienation of the other...

...What relationship, if any, do the bearers of the counter-culture have to the proletariat that Marx describes in his books...

...In one particularly unfortunate passage, Bell asks rhetorically whether "Insofar as this society like every other is undergoing a multiple revolution of a diverse yet simultaneous character . . do we not need more conscious means of monitoring social change and the creation of mechanisms for anticipating the future...

...One is the movement from a "goods" to a "services" economy: a trend most dramatically in evidence in the United States where one half of the work force will soon be employed in technical and professional jobs...

...A digression into Marx's two schemes of social development, for instance, seems largely irrelevant to the chapter on bureaucratization into which it is set...

...Bell makes an even graver error in his analysis of the technocratic elite, which he believes is destined to control Western society...

...The effect is neither to refute this utilitarian socialist, nor even to maintain a continuity in the presentation...

...At present, Western society--in anticipation of other parts of the world—is making a transition from an industrially-based to a technocratically-oriented way of life...

...The social tension once so basic to middle-class industrial society, has by now been overshadowed by cultural and generational conflicts, in which the sides are drawn along ideological, and no longer economic lines...

...Basic to this changing reality are at least five developments which have come to shape our present economic and social situation...

...I also believe it possible to evaluate his main argument, repeatedly stated in the opening and closing chapters, without having to pass judgment on each of his references to those social thinkers either criticized or cited in support of his views...

...Bell discusses the soaring college enrollment as yet a further testimony to the growing social recognition of the universities and of all those associated with them...

...If inflationary rates are at all indicative (as most economists believe they are) of the relative needs experienced by a particular society, it is illuminating to note that while between 1965 and 1970 the price of the most durable goods rose by only 18 percent (and food costs by far less), the expense of services (such as education) went up by as- much as 42 percent...

...Perhaps Bell's most obvious difficulty is his inability to separate the task of social forecasting from his own liberal democratic values...

...So, too, the disproportionately long discussion on John Rawls in the final section, whose principle of fairness Bell tries to evaluate in considering the doctrine of equality of result...

...I do not think that any violence has been done here to Professor Bell's ideas...

...whereas the "disjunction" which Bell notes between the "anti-industrial, anti-institutional" counter-culture and the "functional rationality" of a technical elite increasingly coincides with the division between the academic intelligentsia (particularly social scientists) and the business-industrial community...

...luncheon...

...This change has both reflected and encouraged respect for the professions, whose members have already surpassed the business community in A Venture in Social Forecasting by Daniel Bell Basic Books $12.50 terms of social prestige...

...The reason for this fact (witness, for instance, the expanding college enrollments) is related to the growing complexity of both modern technology and social problems...

...According to Bell, the type of social changes analyzed have produced a number of stresses...

...He contrasts the abuses practiced under the guise of Affirmative Action with the liberal ideals of rationality and individualism...

...So much for the A.F.T.'s myth of unrelieved academic poverty...

...Both the cultural irrationalism apparent in our time (e.g., astrology and the cult of revolutionary violence) and the attack on the meritocracy have received no small support from the university, the supposed breeding ground for the guardians of a well-ordered future...

...Or, what is the connection of psychedelic drugs and tarot cards to a working-class movement...