The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...luncheon...

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...Paul Gottfried...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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