Analyzing the Age

...Science, let alone the search for truth, is not identical with "intellectual technology" and hardly seems capable by itself of animating, or legitimating, a social system...

...Still, as he observes, "probably more substantial change was introduced in the lives of individuals in the 19th century by the railroad, steamship, electricity, and telephone, and in the early 20th century by radio, automobiles, motion pictures, aviation, and high-speed vertical elevators, than by television and computers, the main technological items introduced in the last 25 years...

...Indeed, the radical mystique of the revolutionary potential of the "Third World" itself implies essential similarities between all developed societies...

...I hope my remarks will not be read as lending support to the criticism, prevalent in some circles, that Bell ignores the continuing capitalist nature of Western society...

...New Left and counterculture denouncers of the "ocracies"?bureaucracy, technocracy and meritocracy"?have also accepted "post-industrial" as a shorthand label for their hydra-headed antagonists and, recalling Bell's earlier sponsorship of the phrase "end of ideology," have anathematized Bell himself as a "technocrat," an apologist for the emerging social order...

...Much of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society presents in detail the evidence for these trends, drawing on census data, economic time series, manpower statistics, registers of scientific personnel, and the recent history of science-or what Bell, in laying stress on its socially innovative role, calls "intellectual technology...

...Reviewed by Dennis H. Wrong Professor of Sociology, New York University The coming of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society has been a long-awaited event...

...Some erstwhile New Leftists have recently fallen back on traditional Marxist?or Leninist-conceptions of "property relations," "imperialism" and "exploitation of labor" as the defining features of American society, at least, and the sources of its social evils...

...Yet, acute and perceptive as he is in discussing these issues, he is vague and unsatisfactory on the identity of the groups and coalitions in conflict over them...

...The Coming of Post-Industrial Society is genuinely a "venture," as Bell describes it, rather than a thematically unified whole...

...Bell is at best tentative and empiricist, at worst cagily evasive, rather than disenchanted or pessimistic...

...Thus one is left wondering "what it all means" even while persuaded of the accuracy of the trends Bell reports...

...A chapter on "Who Will Rule...

...Nonetheless, it induces doubts about Bell's neat comparisons, often presented in tabular form, of the contrasting dimensions of "pre-industrial" (essentially feudal), "industrial" and "post-industrial" societies...

...No fashionable rhetoric about "future shock" here...

...the enhanced importance of the state at the expense of the market in social decisions and as the patron of the knowledge industry that productivity now so heavily depends on...

...These chapters are immensely informative, although Bell occasionally succumbs to the temptation to display a knowingness about scientific and technical matters that is tangential to his major themes...

...I am curiously reminded of Bell's own trenchant criticism of C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite, where he complained that the book set the stage for a real political analysis, then stopped short of beginning the play...

...This group has at different times been assigned the parts of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the Marxist drama and occasionally even both at once, as in formulations treating it as an outgrowth of the "old middle class" that is nevertheless the carrier of an ultimately anti-capitalist tendency (stemming from its antagonism to the planlessness of the market and the vulgarities of commercialism...

...Bell writes, for example: "The Protestant ethic was the ethos of capitalism and the idea of socialism the ethos of Soviet society...

...The widespread acceptance of "post-industrial" by publicists at opposite ideological poles suggests that the phrase imaginatively condenses-or "resonates," as Alvin Gouldner would say-a shared sense of new social realities that breaks through the limits of received categories and conceptual distinctions...

...It is not the technocrat who ultimately holds power, but the politician...

...Pessimism, moreover, may often be the response to the world that most preserves major human values, as well as the one that provides the truest vision of the future...

...Although the "unity of theory and practice" is an appealing slogan, such unity is no easy thing to forge and the most eloquent yea-saying may be less helpful than realistic skepticism...

...greatly expanded re-search-and-development budgets...

...Clearly, the changes Bell depicts have large implications affecting the texture and routines of everyday life...

...Sensitive, though, to the charge that he is the ideologist of a new technocracy, Bell again and again, almost compulsively, insists "that political decisions are the central ones in the society and that the relationship of knowledge to power is essentially a subservient one...

...is the shortest and sketchiest in the book and reads almost as an addendum, designed to refute the familiar Leftist accusation that the author is a technocrat or a "new mandarin...

...Daniel Bell's characterization of the more economically developed societies in general, and the United States in particular, as "post-industrial" has for nearly a decade carried a certain cachet in quite diverse circles...

...Perhaps uncertainty is unavoidable, given the baffling complexities and irregularities of modern society...

...In the same way, the ethos of science is the emerging ethos of post-industrial society...

...yet he also notes that if one excludes defense, space and atomic energy, "by 1966, Europeans already had 30 per cent more scientists and engineers engaged in civilian-oriented R & D or industrial and environmental fields than did the United States...

...Belief in the eventual access to power of a "new class" of technicians, managers and professionals goes back to the last century...

...In a final section entitled "Coda," presumably to suggest its tentative nature, Bell reviews current controversies over meritocracy and "equality of results," as well as the tension between the highly organized social structure of post-industrial society and the cultural antinomianism and neoromanticism that surfaced so flamboyantly in the '60s...

...Norman Birnbaum, in the New York Times Book Review, has accused Bell of excessive sobriety and skepticism, amounting to pessimism and lack of "metaphvsical passion," for his failure to project any vision of political action that might transform contemporary society into a more worthy and humane social order...

...It was, after all, Max Weber and not Karl Marx who uncannily foresaw a world of "specialists without vision, sensualists without heart," the people who seem to represent the least attractive aspects of post-industrial society...

...These seem to reflect too strained a search for conceptual parallelisms and symmetries, too contrived a typological elegance...

...Contemporary American radicals have little affection for the Soviet Union and its satellites, but they are almost as disinclined to give those countries close attention as were their predecessors a few decades ago whose lingering faith in the Soviet mvth was threatened by accounts of the brutalities of Stalinist rule...

...In recent years there has been a plethora of efforts to impute a shaping political role to the scientific and managerial stratum...

...Unmistakably, scientists and bureaucrats, whose "capital" is their expertise rather than their title to property, have become more vital to the functioning of modern society, whereas the old industrial working class has stabilized in numbers and, in an economy of rising productivity, lost much of its militance...

...His book, however, lacks a much needed focus, not only because he fails to deal with the actual and prospective political outlook of the new class, but more significantly because he neglects the possible obsolescence of classes themselves as political actors and of class conflict as the motor of social change...

...The government commissions and scientific associations for which Bell prepared some of the papers incorporated into the present volume have readily taken up his term...

...In any case, I do not think that "pessimism" or "despair" (let alone lack of "metaphysical passion") are appropriate critical categories in evaluating a work of social-historical analysis...

...a decline in the role of private property and inherited status, as opposed to educational credentials, in social stratification...

...Bimbaum's charge would be more suitably directed at Barrington Moore Jr.'s Reflections Upon the Causes of Human Misery...

...Because Bell locates the post-industrial tendency in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as in Western Europe and America, he has been attacked for espousing a version of the "convergence theory...

...Bell correctly rejects the more extravagant and empirically unsup-portable of these interpretations...

...The overall case he makes for the reality and the magnitude of the shift in occupational composition and the new role of theoretical science as the fountainhead of technological innovation-the chief defining traits of post-industrial society-Is beyond doubt...

...The major features of post-industrial society are by now well enough known to require only brief mention: a rise in the proportion of the labor force providing services rather than producing goods or extracting raw materials from the earth...

...I agree with Birnbaum, however, that Bell may be mistaken in seeing the United States as a vanguard society...

...To me...

...One hopes that the discussion it is already deservedly arousing will help the author to tighten and develop his argument in its sequels...

...Western Europe, Canada and perhaps even Japan may already have gone further in creating political movements and institutional forms capable of containing and civilizing the more frightening potentials of post-industrial society...

...I can see that Protestantism and socialism have developed into comprehensive ideologies legitimating their social orders, but how can this happen to science, defined by Bell as "a creed which establishes the norm of disinterested knowledge...

...Bell provides a richly learned review of the concept's major variants, from Saint-Simon to Marx to Veblen to the neo-Trotskyist attempts to define the society emerging from the Soviet Union's "revolution betrayed...

...He promises a future book devoted to the latter theme...

...What, then, are the emerging political conflicts and alignments in post-industrial society...

...others, buoyed by the student revolts of the late '60s, have seen the university as the seedbed of a vastly expanded and radicalized intelligentsia equipped with skills that are functionally indispensable to modern society and capable therefore of transforming it...

...This is nonsense, for to note structural similarities between capitalist and Communist developed societies is not to deny ongoing differences...

...Some New Left writers, often in polemics against Bell, have identified bureaucrats and experts as a new ruling-class enemy...

...With reference to the defining criteria of "post-industrial" itself, Bell repeatedly tells us that America is the first and only society in which an actual majority of the labor force is no longer engaged in the production of goods...

...One suspects that these criticisms of Bell are largely motivated by a desire to hang on to ancient Marxist notions of capitalists as the "class enemy" and capitalism as the root of all evil...

...the increasing necessity of scientific and technical knowledge as a prerequisite for political and economic decision making, which has elevated the university into one of society's central institutions...

...The Marcusean concept of scientific rationality as a drive for domination of nature and ultimately man, rather than as a quest for truth or knowledge as such, makes more sense in this connection, despite its demonical overtones...