A Quest for Values
WHITFIELD, STEPHEN J.
A Quest for \alues The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys, 1960-1980 By Daniel Bell Abt. 370pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American...
...Bell continues to describe his economic views as socialist, but he opposes uto-pianism and does not actively inveigh against the private control of capital, refusing to share the conviction of the Frankfurt School that praxis makes perfect...
...Histemperate-ness pulls him toward the center, toward mediating scholarly differences rather than exacerbating antagonisms...
...In proposing, therefore, that the state rather than corporate capitalism be disciplined, he has located a dilemma liberals must address, often on the turf of adversaries not known for their compassion...
...Indeed, with the proportion of the industrial proletariat to white collar workers declining, Bell suggests, information counts more than labor...
...Here Bell has incisively grasped one strand of the culture of the '60s and followed it back to Sade, Dostoyevsky, Gide, and others...
...I specialize in generalizations," he replied...
...His early history of American socialism was deeply engaged in the crisis of belief, too...
...I think, though, that his case is an unduly feverish one, and is misleading in its survey of the soul of contemporary expression...
...In advocating a religious revival, he admits that he is personally without faith...
...He would sooner modulate and qualify an idea than overstate it...
...The need for moderation is perhaps the clearest lesson Bell draws from totalitarianism, which exposes the lethal consequences of overcommitment to a single vision...
...Moving from technology and economics to politics, Bell turns somber...
...Two decades ago, there were virtually no computer scientists in America, now there are 250,000...
...these recurrent questions which are, I believe, cultural universals...
...The result is "overload...
...What ultimately matters are values...
...The development of Western ideas and institutions fascinates him...
...If his writings are sometimes prey to the simplifications that vex all ambitious intellectual enterprise, one nevertheless wonders whether he is not more often penalized by his own enormous erudition...
...In the final essay in this book, Bell points to a "return of the sacred" that will enhance our understanding of " the meaning of tragedy, the nature of obligation, the character of love," the rendezvous with death...
...Fidel Castro's reckless disdain for means, apparent in his statement, "History willabsolveme," invited the sort of corruption that Bell warned against in "The End of Ideology in the West" (1960), his most resonant essay...
...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis...
...More important, a resurgence of piety, whatever its benefits to the psyche, can only complicate the political controversies that have already become so recalcitrant...
...Forwhen the artist is privileged to explore the demonic and the freakish, the criminal and the insane, chaos ensues...
...Still, he remains beguiled by Marx's analyses and treats them with discriminating insight, even as his sense of complexity induces him to argue that capitalism no longer resembles the bogeyman in classical economic texts...
...Bell does not worry enough about citizens who happen to find themselves outside any theological consensus that may emerge...
...He is too alert to the past to claim freshness and striking originality, to be daring...
...Today a fourth of the work force is classified professional, technical or managerial...
...It is as if someone who is tone deaf were asking musicians to play louder and with more feeling...
...Unlike most sociologists, Bell, a former managing editor of this magazine, has a historical perspective...
...In 1952 he published a brilliant monograph on American socialism, but the traces of empirical social science are invisible...
...Bell does not elaborate on the appropriate Federal response to public demands, and he does not specify the overload point...
...And this collection of essays engages us because of Daniel Bell's fecundity of illustration, the snap of his prose, and the resilience of his interest in the convictions by which we act and work and bear our finitude...
...It surely makes a difference what set of transcendant beliefs will be revitalized...
...The Winding Passage evokes the marvelous as it describes the nascent world of the microcomputer...
...He is a shrewd expositor of sociological problems, but his reputation does not rest on his contributions to methodologyAnd though he has testified to an absorption in theory, he is not in any obvious way a theoretician...
...That is why The Winding Passagecom-plements The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976...
...the accurate representation of social reality has never been sufficient...
...He also knows that overload threatens other political economies (such as Poland's...
...author, "Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism "What do you specialize in...
...Despite the lapse in its prescriptions, Bell's final essay does fit in with the rest of his thought...
...The generalizations he specializes in lack the abstraction that entices colleagues to test their merits and establish rival schools...
...Yet he clearly has no nostalgia for the economic system that preceded the welfare state, nor does he scoff at the efforts of the once unrepresented to renegotiate the social contract...
...His serving on several government commissions, as well as teaching at Columbia and Harvard, have prompted Leftists to charge him with being an adviser to the power elite...
...His curiosity is vast, his allusions are frequently intimidating (this time around, however, the medieval Tunisian philosopher Ibn Khaldun is not cited...
...Bell did become an authority on unions, but that was as the labor editor of Fortune and not as a narrow scholar...
...If efficiency is the goal of modern economies, and equality is the aim of the state, the touchstone of culture is self-realization...
...Modernism has destroyed our defenses against evil and accelerated the descent into nihilism...
...Consequently, no one any longer believes that an invisible hand guides our fortunes, and we have come to expect not merely favorable political decisions but entitlements that are increasingly difficult to subsidize...
...But it is an esthetic that has been emphasized at the expense of the moral, Bell argues...
...In fact, his formulation of this problem makes him one ofthemost relevant American liberals...
...Daniel Bell proclaimed that self-def-inition in 1938, and since then his intellectual style has remained consistent...
...He emphasizes kinkiness at the expense of rational and humane examples of art that proved tenacious even in the '60s, ignoring the voices (from Saul Bellow to John Updike) who seem most likely to endure...
...And the miniaturization spawned by the invention of the transistor in 1948 has led to a knowledge explosion that institutions have not adapted to yet...
...While he calls himself a liberal, he prizes stability more than justice, fearing that the public pursuit of egalitarian ideals could produce fiscally ruinous claims against the state...
...the professor asked a graduate student...
...His ideas do not create disciples or generate grants that teams of researchers apply for...
...Disputes that once were resolved or camouflaged in the market are now formally decided in Washington...
...Bell adroitly identifies some of the ramifications of the changes wrought by science-based industries, thus perpetuating the tradition of technocratic prophecy expounded on in his essays on Fourier and Veb-len...
...The West's failure to foster a credo for skeptical and sensible minds has always haunted him...
...The management of an intricate economy and the imperatives of modern warfare have swollen the powers of the Federal government...
Vol. 64 • February 1981 • No. 3
