Guide for the Modern Perplexed:

...And it succeeds when diverse sources of information yield a fresh view of familiar problems...

...His loyalty to this tradition, which steadfastly valued the humane use of intelligence beyond particular doctrines, has enabled him, while ranging widely, to probe deeply...

...These virtuoso essays conclude with “Work and Its Discontents,” Bell’s notable analysis of the American cult of efficiency...

...After showing how these two roads have led to an impasse, Bell concludes with a fine piece of advocacy for “meaning in work: the other road...

...The Myth of Crime Waves” shows that there has been an actual decline of crime in this country...

...Less brilliantly flamboyant than “the lost,” less pompously parochial than “the beat,” this generation has been more stoic temperamentally, more mobile vocationally, more derivative intellectually...

...These essays gradually-acquired their own distinctive identity—the critical acumen without “the restless vanity” (of which his Introduction speaks), the tragic sense with the earthy humor, the empirical eye with the philosophic context...

...In delineating the impasse, Bell critically analyzes some of the principal concepts used to interpret American society in the past decade...

...Bell’s language is deliberately literary, but his insights are often clinical: “In the Christian trials of conversion (i.e., a genuine experience that transformed one’s life) one had to be lost to be saved...

...The reason why there has been no revolt against them, as they, in asserting a radical politics, had ousted their elders, is that they led their own ‘counter-revolt.’ They had both iliad and odyssey, were iconistic and iconoclastic...

...The Capitalism of the Proletariat” reformulates an old paradox, by indicating that unions have reached their limits of membership and bargaining power while proletariat is being replaced by salariat, as a theory of American trade unionism...

...and so there is, almost, an infinite regress...

...The Racket-Ridden Longshoremen” illustrates the intricate web of economics and politics from which daily newspaper headlines are spun...

...He saw, more clearly than most of us, that the rancorous sterility of the past decade had its roots in “the exhaustion of ideas,” that futile ideologies encourage fanatic ideologues...

...The Professor consistently remains disdainful of intellectual exercises which oversimplify “the complexities of life...

...as practiced by C. Wright Mills, simply “belies the resources of a free society: the variety of interest conflicts, the growth of public responsibility, the weight of traditional freedoms (vide the Supreme Court, an institution that Mills fails to discuss), the role of volunteer and community groups...

...Bell has wandered much in the two decades since, as a prodigy of the Young People’s Socialist League, he edited THE NEW LEADER...

...Young Arthur Schlesinger’s staccato on the liberal trumpet has been counterpointed by young William Buckley’s crescendo on the conservative comet...

...Today, experiences are transposed from the moral to the psychological level, and to become ‘ecstatic’ (literally, ‘ex-stasis,’ or outside one’s self) one has to ‘let go’ completely...

...It is a demanding form as compared with the academic research report, and, instead of ordering new data into conventional rubrics, it seeks to supply “a perspective—a way of becoming sophisticated about the world...

...Ideas are handled as clinical symptoms in the diagnosis of a spiritual condition...

...This impasse poses grave questions...

...But consciousness of self has become so inbred that even an impulse to ‘let go’ becomes self-conscious...

...which coincides with the break-up of the ruling class, has differentiated the traditional elite: “Today, there is an ‘upper class’ and a ‘ruling group.’ Being a member of the ‘upper class’ (i.e., having differential privileges and being able to pass those privileges along to one’s designees) no longer means that one is a member of the ruling group, for rule is now based on other than the traditional criteria of property: the modern ruling groups are essentially coalitions, and the means of passing on the power they possess, or the institutionalization of any specific modes of access to power (the political route, or military advancement...

...If one accepts again the heritage of the old socialist and humanist tradition of worker protest, then the work place itself, and not the market, must be the center of determination of pace It is appropriate that “the old and tempo of work...

...They were intense, hortatory, naive, simplistic and passionate, but...

...The Failure of American Socialism” is by now a classic of historical introspection on the meaning of programmatic Marxism in America...

...His brilliant analytic essays began to illuminate, one after another, the dark corners of the mind of the decade...

...This is the traditional style of the social commentator as ideologue, but futile in a time and place that have seen the end of ideology...

...Ripened in a milieu where controversy was acute and often acerb —but where rational understanding prescribed the rules of the game— Danny Bell became a talmud chochem instead of a polemicist...

...Bell’s own concern with “the variety of interest conflicts” is revealed in two first-class essays in economic sociology...

...Where the deprecators of mass society oversimplify American culture, theorists of the “power elite” ignore its political and economic complexities...

...Bell’s mode of presentation, the analytic essay, has had few distinguished practitioners among academic social scientists in America— or in Europe since the passing of Karl Mannheim...

...It has been more gifted than creative, more clever than profound, more prudent than philosophic, more ideological than political...

...Ten Theories in Search of Reality” exemplifies his mature critical power at work, dissecting the numerous efforts to predict Soviet behavior from varied assumptions...

...These gifted performing artists have only reworked the traditional repertory of political plainsong...

...In Part III—”The Exhaustion of Utopia”— we relive the transitional years during which Danny Bell became the distinguished Professor Daniel Bell...

...Crime as an American Way of Life” uncovers the embourgeoisement of criminality, which has become “a queer ladder of social mobility...

...The generation’s turn has come to move into the seats of the mighty...

...The “ambiguities of theory” in recent years reflect the effort to contain the “many meanings” of American life within one-dimensional categories...

...The decades have scarred this generation with distinctive marks...

...after the Moscow Trials and the Soviet-Nazi pact, disenchanted and reflective...

...In the second part of the book Bell illustrates his point by a set of essays on “the complexities of life” in America whose depth and power is barely suggested by their titles...

...The generation has needed—now it is 40 and life has begun—to take a good look at itself...

...America is run by 60-year-olds and this generation is now around its symbolic 40th birthday, when, in America, life begins...

...In “The Mood of Three Generations,” the only essay which explicitly characterizes the psychic transformation, Bell writes: “Our intellectual nestors were in their late twenties and early thirties when they made their mark as a new generation...

...The Prospects of American Capitalism” traces the intellectual rehabilitation of capitalism through the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith...

...The essay on public opinion in industrial disputes invades a sacred precinct of academic social psychology—attitude research in industry—with clarifying effect...

...The latter’s synthetic concept of countervailing power is shown, however, to deal inadequately with critical political issues...

...His historical culture, philosophical power, literary skill and human sensitivity have fashioned a personal instrument of social analysis that operates independently of academic convention...

...The social psychology of ideas, which has served lesser minds as a facile vehicle for prefabricated generalizations, becomes an empirical and even systematic technique in Bell’s hands...

...Bell then dissects the popular concept of national character as a master key to American civilization, concluding “that the rubric itself is at fault, that the ambiguity lies really in the term America, which is a cluster of many meanings...

...The fullness of life must be found in the nature of work itself...

...This remarkable book is the intellectual autobiography of the generation that will be reshaping American life over the next two decades...

...The Break-Up of Family Capitalism...

...he has worked for Fortune and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, lectured in Europe and debated in Asia, but he has never turned his back on the tradition in which he grew up...

...and from them and their experiences we have inherited the key terms which dominate discourse today: irony, paradox, ambiguity and complexity...

...Bell shows that this ideological fad...

...The End of Ideology is subtitled “On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties,” an exhaustion which has deprived American intellectuals of the main mobilizer of energies among their predecessors—since “few issues can be formulated any more, intellectually, in ideological terms...

...Author, “The Passing of Traditional Society” DANIEL BELL has produced a guide for the modern perplexed...

...These 16 papers, originally prepared for very different occasions, are unified by a style of thought and expression...

...To the objection that he is proposing “small” solutions to large problems, he advises us to “look where the eschatological visions have led...

...socialist and humanist tradition” should be his final theme...

...What dreams, as its own poetic prodigy once asked, have shaped its responsibilities...

...For these reasons, the theory of the mass society no longer serves as a description of Western society but as an ideology of romantic protest against contemporary life...

...is not yet fully demarked and established...

...The final essay, “Two Roads From Marx,” imaginatively explores the themes of alienation and exploitation in socialist thought...

...This is what Daniel Bell’s essays do superbly...

...It is the generation of World War I babies who vaguely experienced the estheticized ’20s, vibrated to the ideologized ’30s, equivocated through the militarized ’40s and equilibrated in the globalized ’50s...

...His final words: “The specifics are there: what is needed is a change of fundamental attitude...

...Nurtured on the ideological controversies of its elders, its own public style has been more polemical than profound...

...The Ambiguities of Theory” begins by putting currently fashionable ideas in appropriate perspective, reminding those who take snide pride in belittling American “mass society” that bringing the masses into the society from which they were historically excluded has been a democratic response to “the great challenge posed to Western—and now world—society over the last 200 years: how, within the framework of freedom, to increase the living standards of the majority of the people and at the same time maintain or raise cultural levels...

...Bell’s portrait of this generation is also an account of its intellectual history...