Daniel Bell's Balancing Act

...after no country, whether democratic or despotic, has been able to translate Marxist theory into daily practice...

...Rereading Cultural Contradictions today, one cannot help but be impressed by how its author anticipated so much of what would later emerge in the world of "theory": the crisis of representation and objective truth in philosophy, the "new historicism" and its emphasis on performance and self-presentation, and the relationship of capitalism and culture as modes of production and consumption...

...No less a thinker than Edmund Wilson, who should have known better, sought to persuade readers of To The Finland Station that Lenin was fulfilling in deed what Marx had left unrealized in doctrine, while James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution depicted the world in a state of cataclysmic crisis...

...writing career with The New Leader, where at age 23 he became managing editor...

...it is political wisdom born of the woe of historical experience...

...But the book appeared in 1960, a few years before the tumultuous rise of the New Left, a student-based phenomenon more in the nature of a sudden mutation than a long-developed movement, and young activists had no patience with a message that counseled skepticism and sobriety...

...In 1932, at the age of 13, he joined the youth wing of the Socialist Party...

...Among other exercises, it explored the exhaustion of Utopian, millennialistic notions and the failure of Marxism to come to grips with the uniqueness of American history...

...As Marx and Weber had seen, capitalism erodes everything standing in its way, and modernism celebrates the end of all that is certain, orderly, purposeful...

...In the universe illuminated by Bell, the old distinctions between Right and Left scarcely obtain...

...Both deny mimesis, the conviction that the world can be directly copied or imitated, for according to both postmodern theory and Madison Avenue advertising it is constructed out of our own fabrications and symbolic formations...

...Andy Warhol, Bell notes, fumed commodities into art objects and, as a bo-hemian, sold them to the bourgeoisie...

...Neoconservatives are reluctant to acknowledge that modern capitalism negates its own spiritual origins and produces a society without binding principles...

...During the War years Bell expressed a Veblenian distrust of business for failing to bring about full, efficient production and for excluding union representation from industrial advisory boards...

...Some critics on the Left had already been uneasy with Bell's previous volume...

...Such a balancing act of contrary perspectives and principles is more than a sign of high intelligence...

...knowledge codified into abstract systems of symbols as a means of organizing decisions affecting production and administration...

...By 1940, following the earlier Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact and the recent fall of France, he left graduate school at Columbia University to begin a John Patrick Diggins, a past NL contributor, is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and author of Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy...

...Written at age 30 for a conference at Princeton University, it was initially published in 1952 and has now been reissued (Cornell, paper, 222 pp., $ 16.95) with a valuable Introduction by historian Michael Kazin, who surveys the literature surrounding the controversial subject...

...Does Bell offer a way out of this awful impasse in modern thought...

...What do modern literary theory and commercial capitalism have in common...

...Bell prefers the latter, yet as Weber pointed out, a leader with a genuine "calling" for politics must somehow fuse the two...

...Bell is a curious species of wise man, however, a sage without a following...

...Oddly, critics tried to refute Bell by demonstrating that particular Socialists were practical rather than ideological, leaving the question of socialism's failure unanswered...

...The crisis of capitalism is the curse of modernism, which Bell views as the inexorable outcome of developments in art, philosophy and literature leading to a sense of nothingness the abyss that awaits consciousness without an object...

...He is not mentioned in the massive Encyclopedia of the American Left, nor are Theodore Draper, Sidney Hook and Reinhold Niebuhr, other eminent contributors to The New Leader who carried on the seemingly thankless task of opposing Stalinism in the name of democratic socialism...

...The genius of Bell's Afterword is to show that developments in economics and intellectual life almost mirror one another...

...The limitless drive of modern capitalism destroys the moral foundations of the Protestant ethic it arose from, an angst-driven ethic that has its roots in Calvinism and the paradoxes of predestination and salvation...

...and an ethic of consequences, requiring one to calculate the outcomes of actions and take responsibility for them...

...The year it originally appeared Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President, America was still celebrating its victory over both the Third Reich and the Great Depression, and in a triumphal mood Americans looked to their country as the symbol of success...

...Such changes would take place regardless of whether a given political culture leaned toward capitalism or socialism, Bell maintained...

...For the postmodernist a sense of the self has disappeared into the conditions that shaped it, particularly the artificial linguistic constructions emphasized by literary theorists or the images devised by advertising...

...Second, and perhaps more telling, in the last several decades the field of "theory" in America has been dominated by the French connection with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard...

...Although a study conducted in the early '70s named him one of the 10 most respected intellects in America, there is no "Bellian" school of thought or galaxy of disciples...

...When he went to work at Fortune after the War, he became concerned less with the conflict between labor and capital than with their symbiotic convergence due to organizational imperatives...

...In the final passages he turns to religion, but, as with Weber a century earlier, Bell's words suggest how difficult it is to have a sense of the sacred without belief in God...

...Although Weber was concerned with the origins of capitalism, he knew its fate would be the "iron cage" of bureaucratic rationalization that undermines innovation, religiosity and the work ethic...

...For Bell, though, the "basic question" was the one German economic theorist Werner Sombart raised at the turn of the century: Why is there no socialism in America...

...The Depression convinced many radicals that the objective conditions for capitalism's collapse had ripened and a revolution of some sort was just around the corner...

...Bell elaborates on Weber's forebodings, observing how modern consumption and acquisitiveness have obliterated the last vestiges of asceticism and moral striving, giving way instead to a hedonistic "boundlessness" devoid of natural limits...

...That depicted the rule of family capitalism and business managers being supplanted by technical elites...

...He considers himself a liberal in politics, a conservative in cultural matters, and a radical in economics...

...Bell pointed to the stubborn, ideological positions of America's Socialist leaders, who strove for moral purity instead of pragmatic compromise as they deluded themselves with expectations of socialism receiving a kind of divine deliverance...

...First, the Academic Left that evolved from the New Left had little respect for Bell, a figure from the Old Left, and hence paid little respect to his writings...

...This sensibility toward bureaucratic structures was a contribution of German social scientist Max Weber to Bell's education...

...Fortunately, the Afterword in the new edition provides Bell an opportunity to comment on the latest stage of Western intellectual life...

...Daniel Bell has been able to hold three...

...As he himself once noted, his collection of essays entitled The End of Ideology is clearly the most cited and least read of books...

...As Weber had hinted earlier in the century, the Marxist fixation on the mode of production would be outmoded by its own creations...

...Even well over three decades later after the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe...

...Even poststructuralism, deconstruction and "the linguistic turn" are presaged in Bell's observation that the "underlying problem" of modernism is "a breakup in the very discoursesthe languages, and the ability of a language to express an experience...

...When the book first appeared Christopher Lasch, among others, tended to dismiss it as wrongheaded in holding culture responsible for what should be blamed on economics...

...A "Twentieth Anniversary Edition" of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic, paper, 363 pp., $ 15.00) has recently been issued, with an illuminating 56-page Afterword by Bell...

...Bell's own thesis derived from Weber's distinction between two contrary imperatives: an ethic of conscience, requiring one to act on principle alone...

...He seeks to live in a society that accepts pluralism and pragmatic compromise, prudently values the sacred and traditional, yet is willing to transform existing conditions for the sake of social justice...

...Those who accuse Bell of exaggerating the eschatological dreams of the Marxist Left should pay attention to the heady ideological atmosphere of the 1930s in which he came of political age...

...Then, at City College of New York, Bell studied the writings of Robert Michels, the German anatomist of social democracy, and gained an insight into the oligarchical thrusts of all organized political systems...

...In their view the antagonist of modern society is not the market but the milieu, not only avant garde culture but the Academic Left and its nihilistic ideas...

...The beginning of the Afterword is a coda to Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, done in 1904-05...

...Others ascribed the phenomenon to America's having skipped the feudal stage of history or having enjoyed the ballot before the struggle between labor and capital took place in industrial society...

...I think there are two reasons Cultural Contradictions did not receive the recognition it deserved in the '70s...

...Both the academic and the advertiser look upon culture as something to be shaped rather than known...

...and as in the world of haute couture, the assumption is that nothing can be original unless it springs fresh from Paris...

...This was a strange stance in Lasch's case, since he would himself come to worry about exactly the same issues the book discussed, especially the waning of traditional morality in the face of modernity...

...and, what is more, after the U.S...

...His mother, a widowed garment worker, and her anarchist cousins discouraged him from getting close to the Communist Party...

...A modernist such as T. S. Eliot felt deeply a tension between self and society...

...has proved in successive elections to be moderately Centrist the New Left has yet to acknowledge Bell's prophetic insights...

...Indeed, Bell grew up surrounded by writers certain that the political universe as they knew it would never be the same...

...In American intellectual history the disillusioned ex-Marxist usually travels only in one direction: from Left to Right, from a rejection of socialism to a defense of capitalism...

...Another Weberian perception informs Bell's first book, Marxian Socialism in the United States...

...Samuel Gompers chose the route of responsibility rather than conviction, but the American Federation of Labor brought the country no nearer to socialism than did the Socialist Party...

...the labor force moving into service sectors...

...and information instantly transmitted by computers...

...A fitting conclusion, at least for those of us who prefer difficulty to doctrine...

...Bell's "Winding Passage" (to use the title of one of his 15 books) defies the typical careers of renegades from radicalism...

...Bell was careful to stress that it was not the "counterculture" of the '60s, with its quest for immediate gratification, that undermined the older Puritan morality of hard work, thrift and sexual restraint: "The breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system, in fact, was brought about by the bourgeois economic systemby the free market, to be precise...

...Sombart had attributed the cause to America's higher level of consumption and material abundance ("roast beef and apple pie...

...Perspectives DANIEL BELL'S BALANCING ACT BY JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS The test of a "first-rate intelligence," observed F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the ability of one mind to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and still function rationally...

...The Coming of Post-Industrial Society...

...A quarter century after examining the false assumptions of American Marxism, he dealt with another American dilemma in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: If Marxism failed because its proponents tried to live up to its rigid doctrinal beliefs, capitalism would fail for asking Americans to live without any worthwhile beliefs...

...Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ralph Lauren see a world of impermanence, of fleeting images and spectacles in which there is no conscious subject, only consumers responding to an array of representations...

...This is the source of the contradiction of capitalism in American life...