Daniel Bell (born May 10, 1919, New York, New York, USA - died January 25, 2011, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American sociologist and journalist who used sociological theory to reconcile the fact that, in his opinion, were the inherent contradictions of capitalist societies. He introduced the concept of a mixed economy, combining private and public elements.
Biography
He was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Jewish immigrant workers from Eastern Europe. His father died when Daniel was eight months old and the family lived in poor conditions throughout his childhood. For him, politics and intellectual life were closely intertwined even in his early years. His experience was formed in Jewish intellectual circles: she was a member of the Socialist Youth League from the age of thirteen. He later became part of the radical political milieu of City College, where he was close to the Marxist circle, inwhich also included Irving Kristol. Daniel Bell received a bachelor's degree in social science from the City College of New York in 1938 and studied sociology at Columbia University during 1939. During the 1940s, Bell's socialist leanings became increasingly anti-communist.
Career
Bell has been a journalist for over 20 years. As editor-in-chief of The New Leader (1941–44) and one of the editors of the Luck magazine (1948–58), he wrote extensively on various social topics. He began teaching academically, first at the University of Chicago in the mid-1940s and then at Columbia in 1952. After serving in Paris (1956–57) as director of the Congress for Cultural Freedom Seminar Program, he received his doctorate from Columbia University (1960), where he was appointed professor of sociology (1959–69). In 1969, Daniel Bell became professor of sociology at Harvard University, where he remained until 1990.
From the mid-1950s until his death in 2011, he combined very active academic research with lecturing, journalism, and political activities.
Proceedings
Three major books by Daniel Bell: The Coming Post-Industrial Society (1973), The End of Ideology (1960) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). His writings represent a significant contribution to the sociology of modernity, through a general analysis of social and cultural trends and revisions of leading social theories. His work was basedon an early rejection of the Marxist scheme of radical social transformation brought about by class conflict. This was replaced by a Weberian emphasis on bureaucratization and the disillusionment of modern life with the depletion of the dominant ideologies anchored in socialist and liberal utopias. The rise of a service industry based on knowledge rather than private capital, coupled with a restless hedonistic culture of consumption and self-fulfilment, has opened up a new world in which the relationship between economics, politics and culture and political strategies needs to be rethought.
The sociologist Daniel Bell, like Weber, was impressed by the multifaceted complexity of social change, but like Durkheim, he was haunted by the uncertain place of religion and the sacred in an increasingly profane world. The sociology and public intellectual life of the scientist has been directed towards solving these basic problems for more than sixty-five years.
Daniel Bell's extensive conclusion reflects his interest in political and economic institutions and how they shape the individual. Among his books are Marxist Socialism in the United States (1952; reprinted 1967), Radical Law (1963), and Reforming General Education (1966)), in which he attempted to define the relationship between science, technology, and capitalism..
He has received numerous awards for his work, including the American Sociological Association (ASA) Award (1992), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) Talcott Parsons Award forSocial Sciences (1993) and the Tocqueville Prize of the French Government (1995).
Daniel Bell's post-industrial society
He describes his occurrence as follows.
The phrase "post-industrial society" is now widely used to describe the extraordinary changes taking place in the social structure of the developing post-industrial world, which does not completely replace the agricultural and industrial worlds (although it transforms them in a significant way), but introduces new principles of innovation, new ways of social organization and new classes in society.
Idea content
The main expansion in modern society is "social services", primarily he alth care and education. Both are today the main means of increasing productivity in society: education by moving towards the acquisition of skills, especially literacy and numeracy; he alth, reducing morbidity and making people more fit for work. For him, the new and central feature of post-industrial society is the codification of theoretical knowledge and the new relationship of science to technology. Every society exists on the basis of knowledge and the role of language in the transmission of knowledge. But it was not until the twentieth century that it became possible to see the codification of theoretical knowledge and the development of self-conscious research programs in the deployment of new knowledge.
Social change
In the preface to the new editionIn his 1999 Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell described what he considered important changes.
- Decrease in the percentage of the labor force (of the total population) employed in manufacturing.
- Professional change. The most striking change in the nature of work is the extraordinary growth in professional and technical employment and the relative decline in skilled and semi-skilled workers.
- Property and education. The traditional way of gaining a place and privilege in society was through inheritance - a family farm, business, or occupation. Today, education has become the basis of social mobility, especially with the expansion of professional and technical jobs, and even entrepreneurship now requires a higher education.
- Financial and human capital. In economic theory, capital used to be considered mainly as financial, accumulated in the form of money or land. The human is now seen as an essential feature in understanding the power of society.
- Coming to the fore is "intelligent technology" (based on mathematics and linguistics) that uses algorithms (decision rules), programming models (software) and simulations to launch new "high technologies".
- The infrastructure of the industrial society was transport. The infrastructure of the post-industrial society is communication.
- Knowledge theory of value: industrial society is based on the labor theory of value, and the development of industryoccurs with the help of labor-saving devices that replace capital with labor. Knowledge is the source of invention and innovation. This creates added value and increases returns to scale and often saves capital.
