Daniel Bell

A Harvard academic and prominent figure in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Bell is best known as one of the theorists of post-industrialism. Bell's best known works are The End of Ideology (1960) and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973).

The End of Ideology has been a seminal text in the development of what has been called 'endism': the notion that history and ideology have come to an end thanks to the twin triumphs of Western democratic politics and the economic system underpinning it, capitalism. Bell himself in his later career has become somewhat worried by the right-wing slant of much 'endist' theory; although it is worth pointing out that in its day The End of Ideology was vigorously attacked by left-wing critics who claimed that it ignored the reality of life in the Third World and helped to maintain their status quo. For such critics, endism was merely another ideology, that of Western political liberalism, whose concern was to discourage the view that any opposition was possible.

The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, subtitled A Venture in Social Forecasting, suggested that we were on the brink of a new kind of information-led, service-oriented society that would replace the industrial-based model that had been dominant in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A post-industrial society has for Bell three main components: 'a shift from manufacturing to services'; 'the centrality of the new science-based industries'; and 'the rise of new technical elites and the advent of a new principle of stratification'.

Since The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was published, much of what Bell has forecast has indeed come to pass in the 'mass consumption' societies of the West, although, as many critics would be quick to point out, not without considerable social cost in terms of unemployment and job insecurity. Bell has, however, clearly foreseen the direction Western culture would take, and his work now looks to prefigure much postmodern thought, which has similarly emphasized the socially transforming power of information technology.

The need to break with the outdated narrative of modernism, which included within it an uncritical belief in industrial progress and exploitation of the material world, has come to be widely recognized, and in a very real sense most of the advanced Western economies could be described as post-industrial to at least some degree. Certainly, service-industries, knowledge-production, and information technology form an increasingly important part of Western life, particularly as regards wealth-creation. Whether they agree with Bell's particular vision or not, the kind of ideal society envisaged by most postmodernists is unmistakably post-industrial . (ed. Stuart Sim: Routledge)