The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys 1960-1980
Bell, Daniel
THE WINDING PASSAGE: ESSAYS AND SOCIOLOGICAL JOURNEYS 1960-1980 Daniel Bell / ABT Books / $25.00 Arnold Beichman Daniel Bell opens this collection of his "middle of the journey" essays with a...
...Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School (which gave America Herbert Mar-cuse) was once heard to complain that his writings and lectures had sought to create nothing more than a theoretical methodology: "How was I to know that they would try to realize it with Molotov cocktails...
...On the contrary, he has invested his substance in rare classical engravings and, more importantly, his time and intelligence in thinking and writing about American society and the post-industrial age...
...This theme evolves from Bell's earlier view of the older, radical tradition which "intellectually and esthetically" accepts the premises of modernism...
...More disturbing, given the breakdown of traditional values in Western society, has been, as Bell argues, the concomitant disappearance of "the idea of shame, and the reduction of the idea of guilt, as a regulator of moral conduct...
...In "Modernism and Capitalism," an essay which preceded publication of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell spelled out his belief structure-"I am a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.'' A few years ago, Bell wrote that ' 'the death of socialism is the unrealized fact of this century...
...For as Schumpeter wrote: "Unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest...
...When he was told that the heart is usually on the left, he replied in a famous line, "We have changed all that...
...Had he and other intellectuals read or remembered Tocqueville's essay in The Old Regime and the French Revolution ("How towards the middle of the eighteenth century men of letters took the lead in politics and the consequences of this new development"), the last decade might have been quite different...
...k of it myself...
...The first consists of superb explications of our present condition such as "Ethnicity and Social Change" or "Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self...
...The disenchantment with traditional religion has evoked alternative responses as a substitute: rationalism, existentialism, civil religions, political religions, and estheticism (which Bell defines as "the belief that it was the task of art to gratify the subterranean demands of human impulse which religion had not been able wholly to exorcise...
...Luke, who set down the parable of Jesus...
...The second contains polemical exercises such as "Vulgar Sociology" and "The Once and Future Marx...
...Bell is a sociologist, a leader in his profession, and one of the adornments of the Harvard faculty...
...It is not the first time in contemporary history that the pupil has outdistanced the teacher...
...But like his great precursors-Weber, Durkheim, Par-eto, Parsons, and Aron-he is more than that...
...I think Bell ignores here the powerful influence of the Bill of Rights, particularly the right to freedom of expression, without which the capitalist system could not promote "hedonism and pornotopia...
...Bell's underlying theme, which threads many of these 17 essays, is how post-modernism and the "new sensibility" brought the democracies to heel...
...The capitalist system, says Bell, has also contributed to the destruction of traditional bourgeois life ("of sobriety and delayed gratification") by the furious promotion "of hedonism and pornotopia...
...the former, an attack on C. Wright Mills, the latter, a demolition job on Michael Harrington, and an obituary for a defunct ideology...
...While it may be true that capitalism "creates no values of its own," it has learned to accept the values which a modern democratic state creates, even though those very values may destroy the system...
...The schema of these essays has a logic which successfully leads to the last paper in the book, titled "The Return of the Sacred...
...As I read Bell's critique of these "modernist" intellectuals who ignored dissenting voices, I was reminded of Sganarelle in Moliere's Le Medecin Malgre Lui, the fake doctor who insisted that the heart was on the right side...
...he is also a great preacher seeking to understand purpose and design in a universe dominated by Man, the unpredictable...
...It is the Hobhouse Memorial lecture Bell delivered at the London School of Economics...
...All the earlier essays- the critique of technology, Marxism, the intellegentsia in American society, liberalism, modernism, Jewish identity-are subsumed by Bell's concern with the secularization and profanation of modern life which, in the name of modernity, has led to "a turning away from the authority of the past, the shrinking of the realm of the sacred and the Faustian quest for total knowledge...
...THE WINDING PASSAGE: ESSAYS AND SOCIOLOGICAL JOURNEYS 1960-1980 Daniel Bell / ABT Books / $25.00 Arnold Beichman Daniel Bell opens this collection of his "middle of the journey" essays with a strange confession: "These are the essays of a prodigal son . . . seeking a return to the straight way of my ancestors...
...Bell believes that a long era of disbelief in the sacred is coming to a close because of the exhaustion of modernism, the aridity of Communist life, and the tedium of the "unrestrained self.'' The theme of modernism was the word "beyond"-beyond nature, beyond culture, beyond tragedy...
...Its representative figures, Norman O. Brown and Michel Fou-cault, ha.ve "pressed the logic of modernism towards its most radical theoretical conclusions" intellectually, while "sociologically they have sounded a note which became expressed by the cultural mass, and in more extreme form by the porno-pop culture of the day...
...Bell's essays fall into two categories...
...I cannot believe that Bell remains a socialist, but that he remains a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture is quite evident from these essays...
...The latter-day Sganarelles have sought to subvert high culture"in its radical extension of self'-in order to destroy the individualism of bourgeois life...
...The new transcendency will seek "a resurrection of memory," will search for continuity, and fight for the reinstatement of a private sphere as against "the mega-structures of organization...
...The intellectual bridges to the post-modernist age are Marx and Freud...
...known Bell for some years would I, or anyone else who has known him, make the accusation that he has "wasted his substance with riotous living...
...According to an affecting memoir in the book about his Jewish identity, Bell's ancestors are the Hebrew prophets, not St...
...In other words, the "new sensibility" became intertwined with political radicalism, a phenomenon unintended by these older intellectuals...
...Nor having Arnold Beichman, a political scientist, is the author of Nine Lies About America...
...With this sense of limits may come, Bell predicts, new religions which will not be cultist, romantic, ordependon "the involuted self...
...The key word in the post-modern age seems to be "limits"-a limit to growth, a limit to arms, to torture, to hubris, and a limit to spoliation of the environment...
...There is much, much more to discuss in this volume, the latest in what might be called "The Continuing Education of Daniel Bell...
...Reading him recalls Thomas Henry Huxley's comment after he read Darwin's Origin of Species: "The only thing I don't understand about the theory of evolution is why didn't I think of it myself...
...Although all the essays in this book have had prior publication, they deserve re-reading' or publication in book form because they show the intellectual maturation of one of our keenest social philosophers...
...The Argument on the Future of Religion...
...A decade ago he singled out Philip Rahv, Robert Brustein, Lionel Abel, and Irving Howe as the allies of modernism whose semi-literate campus epigones of the late sixties and seventies had merely carried out "the premises of modernism through to their logical conclusions...
...Yet if Bell still insists on his prodigal filiation, I, as a surrogate father, will welcome him with this review as the fatted calf...
Vol. 14 • January 1981 • No. 1
