The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  The second change—the expansion of services in the economic sector—has been most striking in the United States, but has occurred in Western Europe as well. In i960, a total of 39.5 percent of the workers in the enlarged Common Market area were in services (defined broadly as transport, trade, insurance, banking, public administration, personal service). Thirteen years later, in 1973, the proportion had risen to 47.6 percent. A change of this kind usually goes in two phases. The first—the observation of Colin Clark who first decribed the phenomenon thirty years ago—was a shift to services at the expense of agriculture, but with industrial employment growing as well. But in Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and the United Kingdom, the service-oriented sectors have now grown at the relative expense of industrial employment (since agriculture has reached almost rock-bottom), and this is beginning to take place throughout Europe as well.9

  The Soviet Union is an industrial society, and it is likely that post-industrial features will appear in that country as well. The striking fact, however, is that this book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, has been the object of an extraordinary range of attacks in the Soviet press, from serious discussions in academic journals, such as Problems of Philosophy, or intellectual weeklies such as the Literary Gazette, to ideological polemics in the official Party theoretical magazine Kommunist and vulgar and highly distorted accounts in Pravda. It would seem as if a decision had been made by the Party’s ideological committee to attack this book as an ideological threat to Party doctrine. The reasons are quite clear. From the Soviet point of view there is a “historic” conflict between capitalism and communism in which the “objective laws of history” prove the ultimate victory of communism. And this is still a central tenet of the faith—at least for export purposes. On a theoretical level, my discussion denies the idea that one can use monolithic concepts such as capitalism or socialism to explain the complex structure of modern societies. More directly, since the Party doctrine bases its view of history on the inevitable victory of the proletariat (and justifies the repressive rule of the Party in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”), how can one sustain that dogma when the proletariat is no longer the major occupational class of a post-industrial society?

  This was precisely the problem of a remarkable book by some members of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science, Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution, which appeared during the “Prague Spring,” in 1967, under the sponsorship of the social-science director Radovan Richta. In this book, the Czechoslovak sociologists explored the possibility of new “interest conflicts,” if not “class conflicts,” between the new scientific and professional strata and the working class in socialist society. Clearly, such a discussion was highly embarrassing to Marxist doctrine, and the theme a threat to the ideological justification of the Party. After 1968, Richta, who remained in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet occupation, abjectly and ignominiously repudiated the implications of his work.

  The theme of post-industrialism applies primarily to changes in the social structure (the techno-economic order) and only indirectly to those in the polity and the culture, which comprise the other major realms of societal structure. One consequence of this is to widen the disjunction between the realms, since each now operates under axial principles that are contrary to the other.

  When capitalism arose as a socio-economic system, it had a tenuous unity: an ethos (individualism), a political philosophy (liberalism), a culture (a bourgeois conception of utility and realism), and a character structure (respectability, delayed gratification, and the like). Many of these elements have withered or remain as pale ideologies. What is left is a technological engine, geared to the idea of functional rationality and efficiency, which promises a rising standard of living and promotes a hedonistic way of life. A post-industrial change begins to rework the stratification system of the society, to provide a more sophisticated technology, and to harness science more directly to instrumental purposes. Yet it is not at all clear that science, as a “republic of virtue,” has the power to provide a new ethos for the society; more likely it is science itself that may become subverted. What this means is that the society is left with no transcendent ethos to provide some appropriate sense of purpose, no anchorages that can provide stable meanings for people.

  In effect, what a post-industrial transformation means is the enhancement of instrumental powers, powers over nature and powers, even, over people. In the nineteenth century, utopian and socialist thinkers believed that any enhancement of man’s power would necessarily be progressive, since it would mean the decline of religion and superstition and a proof of the greater powers and self-consciousness of Man. Yet this has proved to be a delusion. Instruments can be put to varied use. The kinds of use depend upon the values of a society, the entrenched nature of a privileged class, the openness of the society, its sense of decency or—as we have learned so viciously in the twentieth century—its bestiality.

  A post-industrial transformation provides no “answers.” It only establishes new promises and new powers, new constraints and new questions—with the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history.

  DANIEL BELL

  PREFACE

  Since the rise of human settlements (or of our written records of these), there have been, according to Arnold Toynbee, twenty-one different civilizations, of which Western society, as a cultural unity, is one. But Western society alone is a huge historical canvas. Within Western society there has been a bewildering variety of interweaving elements, whether these be the differentiation of religions, the rise and fall of political empires, or the succession of socio-economic systems. The task for the sociologist or historian is to devise an intelligible unit of study.

  One can, within a time-space frame, identify the structural features common to diverse societies and the more enduring and consistent patterns of change. Necessarily, these are on some level of abstraction.

  Such an analytic approach, however, risks flattening out what may be distinctive and meaningful in the history of a particular society and generation. (Trotsky once remarked that fifty years is a short time in the life span of a social system; but it is almost the entire conscious lifetime of a particular person.) So, one can take the vicissitudes of a particular society (a territorial unit bound by a common past and ethos, and organized in a political sovereignty) and trace its rich yet idiosyncratic rate on the basis of its history, the character of its people, its “national will,” and the like.

  Yet it is also obvious that while its history may be individual, every society shares elements with other societies—religion, culture, economy, technology—that cut across the particular social organization of a people and influence them in specific ways. Spanish Catholicism is like, yet different from, Irish Catholicism. For some purposes we may focus on the common elements in Catholicism, for others on the national characteristics that create the differences. American capitalism is like, yet unlike, Japanese capitalism (in such crucial dimensions as managerial practices and responsibility for the worker); one’s purpose dictates the focus of attention.

  In this book, I have taken “industrial society” as my intelligible unit of study. Industrial society is a concept that embraces the experiences of a dozen different countries and cuts across the contrasting political systems of such antagonistic societies as the United States and the Soviet Union. Industrial society is organized around the axis of production and machinery, for the fabrication of goods; pre-industrial society is dependent on raw labor power and the extraction of primary resources from nature. In its rhythm of life and organization of work, industrial society is the defining feature of the social structure—i.e. the economy, the occupational system, and the stratification system —of modern Western society. The social structure, as I define it, is separate analytically from the two other dimensions of society, the polity and the culture.

  But when u
sed statically, the phrase “industrial society,” like “capitalism,” is deceiving, because these are not fixed social forms. Just as the corporate and managerial capitalism of the twentieth century is vastly different from the family capitalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the industrial society of the twentieth century, with its dependence on technology and science, is far different from the manufacturing society of the previous two centuries. No social system—or national society—has a patent on the future, and the sociological problem is to identify the character, and if possible the trajectory, of change: the initiating and resisting forces, the reinforcing and disintegrating elements.

  The thesis advanced in this book is that in the next thirty to fifty years we will see the emergence of what I have called “the post-industrial society.” As I emphasize, this is primarily a change in the social structure, and its consequences will vary in societies with different political and cultural configurations. Yet as a social form it will be a major feature of the twenty-first century, in the social structures of the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe. The concept of post-industrial society is on the level of abstraction.

  I take the United States as my singular unit of illustration, not only because it is the one I know best, but because the processes of change are more advanced and visible here. It also allows me to deal with the particular, and gain the advantages of immediacy and recognition while retaining the context of sociological generalization.

  Unlike Marx, however, who believed that the fate of England (his example of capitalist industrial society) foreshadowed the fate of all such societies, I do not believe in a deterministic trajectory. A post-industrial society is not a “substructure” initiating changes in a “superstructure.” It is one important dimension of a society whose changes pose management problems for the political system that arbitrates the society, just as changes in culture and life-style bring about confrontations with tradition, or the rise of new social groups, and the visibility of disadvantaged groups, raises issues of power and distribution of privilege in a society.

  This, then, is a view from the twenty-first century. It is an attempt, methodologically, to use a new kind of conceptual analysis, that of axial principles and axial structures, as a way of “ordering” the bewildering number of possible perspectives about macro-historical change. It is an effort, empirically, to identify the substantive character of structural changes in the society as these derive from the changing nature of the economy, and the new and decisive role of theoretical knowledge in determining social innovation and the direction of change. It is a venture into the future.

  “In any experiment of thinking,” John Dewey wrote in Art As Experience, “premises emerge only as conclusions become manifest.” This was the case with the concept of the post-industrial society. The chapters that make up this book were written in the last five years, and I had been struggling with the idea for some five years before that. Since the concept is a speculative one, and deals with possibilities in the alternative futures of society, there could be no linear development of the argument but only an exploration of diverse themes. Each essay was composed on a separate occasion, yet each was thought of as part of a mosaic. I have rewritten the essays in the last two years to emphasize these interrelationships and to identify the five dimensions of the concept post-industrial society. All of this is elucidated in detail in my Introduction. In addition, I have written a forty-thousand-word Coda to explore the major questions that a post-industrial society will have to confront in the decades ahead. The purpose of this preface is to express my gratitude to the persons and institutions that made this work possible.

  The original formulation of the concept of the post-industrial society was presented at a forum on technology and social change in Boston in 1962 in a long, unpublished paper. Robert Heilbroner chaired that forum, and I want to thank him for his comments at the time and for intermittent discussions over the decade.

  In 1965, a small grant from the Carnegie Corporation, to explore the idea, enabled me to acquire some research materials and the part-time help for a year of Dr. Virginia Held of the Philosophy Department of Hunter College. Dr. Held prepared a number of memoranda, some of which were incorporated into the working papers of the Commission on the Year 2000, and some of which I have used in Chapter 5. The discussions with Dr. Held were important to my early formulations.

  The idea of the post-industrial society became one of the “base-lines” of the Commission on the Year 2000, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is reflected in the five volumes of Working Papers circulated by the academy and in the book Toward the Year 2000 (1967), a selection of materials from the commission. I am indebted to John Voss, the executive director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for his generous help, and to Stephen Graubard, editor of Daedalus and a long-time intellectual companion, with whom I discussed many of these ideas and tested them against his broad historical knowledge.

  My greatest debt, institutionally, is to the Russell Sage Foundation and its president, Orville Brim. A grant from the foundation in 1967 at first released me from one-third of my teaching schedule at Columbia and allowed me to organize an experimental graduate seminar at Columbia on modes of forecasting. The foundation also subsidized my research in the next few years. In 1969-1970 I spent a sabbatical year as a visiting fellow at the foundation, where this book began to take shape. Chapter 3, in somewhat different form and entitled “The Measurement of Knowledge and Technology,” appeared in the volume Indicators of Social Change, edited by Eleanor Bernert Sheldon and Wilbert Moore, of the Russell Sage Foundation. I want to thank Dr. Sheldon, especially, for her editorial comments on that essay.

  During the past decade I have pursued several overlapping and divergent intellectual interests: the work on the post-industrial society, the development of social indicators, the interest in long-range social forecasting and the year 2000, an assessment of theories of social change and the idea of axial structures as a way of organizing the field of macro-sociology, and a large concern with what I have called the disjunction of culture and social structure. The Russell Sage Foundation has been tolerant with me as I rattled about from one theme to another, occasionally publishing small chips from these rough-hewn blocks of manuscript. This book is the first of several, to be published in the next years, that will give these concerns coherence. I want to thank Orville Brim for his patience, and trust he will find some reward in this book.

  In June 1970, Ralf Dahrendorf and I organized a small international seminar in Zurich, sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom, for a discussion of the idea of the post-industrial society. Chapter 6 is the essay that formed the basis for the discussion. Subsequently, a number of critical and dissenting papers were written by Dr. Jean Floud of Nuffield College, Oxford, Professor Francois Bourricaud of the Sorbonne, Professor Giovanni Sartori, rector of the Faculty of Law at the University of Florence, Professor Peter Wiles of the London School of Economics, and Professor Ken’ichi Tominaga of the University of Tokyo. These papers were published in Survey (London), Winter 1971, and the interested reader may find them profitable.1

  More personally, I have an enduring obligation to my friend Irving Kristol who, though suspicious of all social science and particularly of large-scale generalization, brought an astringent mind to every essay and insisted on an esthetic order in their presentation.

  My secretary at the Russell Sage Foundation, Vivian Kaufman, and my secretary at Harvard, Mrs. Ann Merriman, have all the virtues that writers pray their secretaries may have. Miss Mari Tavitian did the typing 01 the Coda. Neal Rosenthal, of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was unflaggingly helpful in providing some of the statistical data in Chapter 2. Mrs. Judith Burbank brought some of the statistics in Chapter 3 up to date. Mrs. Anne Freedgood, both friend and former editor, read the manuscript and made useful textual suggestions. Regina Schachter of Basic Books was most patient with me as she sheph
erded the manuscript through galleys and page proofs.

  No writer is ever a proper judge of his own prose, and my most severe yet loving critic has been my wife, Pearl Kazin Bell, who edited the manuscript in its entirety.

  March 1973

  Cambridge, Mass.

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  THIS is an essay in social forecasting. But can one predict the future? The question is misleading. One cannot, if only for the logical reason that there is no such thing as “the future.” To use a term in this way is to reify it, to assume that such an entity is a reality.1 The word future is a relational term. One can only discuss the future of something.2 This essay deals with the future of advanced industrial societies.

  Forecasting differs from prediction. Though the distinction is arbitrary, it has to be established. Predictions usually deal with events—who will win an election, whether or not a country will go to war, who will win a war, the specification of a new invention; they center on decisions. Yet such predictions, while possible, cannot be formalized, i.e. made subject to rules. The prediction of events is inherently difficult. Events are the intersect of social vectors (interests, forces, pressures, and the like). While one can to some extent assess the strength of these vectors individually, one would need a “social physics” to predict the exact crosspoints where decisions and forces combine not only to make up the event but, more importantly, its outcome. Prediction, therefore (and Kremlinology is a good example), is a function largely of the detailed inside, knowledge and judgment that come from long involvement with the situation.