The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  38 Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 10—11.

  39 It may not be amiss at this point to clear up a misapprehension that derives, perhaps, from those who know a thesis only from the title of a book and never read its argument. In The End of Ideology I did not say that all ideological thinking was finished. In fact, I argued that the exhaustion of the old ideologies inevitably led to a hunger for new ones. So I wrote at the time:

  Thus one finds, at the end of the fifties, a disconcerting caesura. In the West, among the intellectuals, the old passions are spent. The new generation, with no meaningful memory of these old debates, and no secure tradition to build upon, finds itself seeking new purposes within a framework of political society that has rejected, intellectually speaking, the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions. In the search for a “cause,” there is a deep, desperate, almost pathetic anger ... a restless search for a new intellectual radicalism.... The irony ... for those who seek “causes” is that the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals.... The young intellectual is unhappy because the “middle way” is for the middle-aged, not for him; it is without passion and is deadening.... The emotional energies—and needs—exist, and the question of how one mobilizes these energies is a difficult one. The End of Ideology (Glencoe, III., 1960), pp. 374-375.

  40 The essay appears as chap. 2 of The End of Ideology. The argument is expanded in the next chapter of that book “Is There a Ruling Class in America?”

  41See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1942), p. 118.

  42 See Gerald Holton, “Scientific Research and Scholarship: Notes Toward the Design of Proper Scales,” Daedalus (Spring 1962).

  43 I did not want to publish the paper at that time because I felt that the idea was unfinished. Sections of the paper, which had been circulated at the forum in Boston, were printed without permission by the public-affairs magazine Current and by business publication Dun’s Review, from which, inexplicably, it turned up as a citation in the volume published by the Czechoslovak Academy of Science on the scientific and technological revolutions which were creating a post-industrial society. The degree of circulation of the paper in government circles, particularly by the Office of Science and Technology, was noted in an article in Science (June 12, 1964), p. 1321.

  44 On these earlier versions, see Technology and Social Change, ed. Eli Ginzberg (New York, 1964), chap. 3; The Reforming of General Education (New York, 1966); Toward the Year 2000, ed. Daniel Bell, (Boston, 1968). Different aspects of the nature of post-industrial society (incorporated in chaps. 5 and 6 of this volume) were presented at Syracuse in 1966, and at the seventy-fifth anniversary celebration of the California Institute of Technology. Those papers were included in the volumes Scientific Progress and Human Values, ed. Edward and Elizabeth Hutchings, Proceedings of the 75th Anniversary of the California Institute of Technology (New York, 1967); and A Great Society, ed. Bertram M. Gross, the Bentley Lectures at Syracuse University (New York, 1968). The “Notes on Post-Industrial Society” that appeared in The Public Interest, nos. 6 and 7 (Winter and Spring 1967) are abridgments of the Cal Tech and Syracuse papers.

  45 The question of intellectual priority always takes intriguing turns. In the notes and tables distributed to the Salzburg Seminar participants in 1959, I wrote: “The term post-industrial society—a term I have coined—denotes a society which has passed from a goods-producing stage to a service society.” I was using “post-industrial” in contrast to Dahrendorf’s “post-capitalist,” since I was dealing with sector changes in the economy, while he was discussing authority relations in the factory. Subsequently, I discovered that David Riesman had used the phrase “post-industrial society” in an essay entitle “Leisure and Work in Post-Industrial Society,” printed in the compendium Mass Leisure (Glencoe, Illinois, 1958). Riesman had used “post-industrial” to connote leisure, as opposed to work, but did not in any subsequent essay develop the theme or the phrase. I had quite likely read Riesman s essay at the time and the phrase undoubtedly came from him, though I have used it in a very different way. Ironically, I have recently discovered that the phrase occurs in the title of a book by Arthur J. Penty, Old Worlds for New: A Study of the Post-Industrial State (London, 1917). Penty, a well-known Guild Socialist of the time and a follower of William Morris and John Ruskin, denounced the “Leisure State” as collectivist and associated with the Servile State, and called for a return to the decentralized, small workshop artisan society, ennobling work, which he called the “post-industrial state”!

  46 The major discussion is in chap. IV, “Post-Industrial Society in the Standard World,” esp. pp. 186–189. See Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000 (New York, 1967). The work appeared originally as vols. II and IIa of the Working Papers of the Commission on the Year 2000 (privately printed, 1966).

  47 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970), p. 9.

  48 See Keniston’s Youth and Dissent (New York, 1971), especially the chaptery “You Have to Grow up in Scarsdale.” For Goodman, see the introduction to Helen and Scqtt Nearing, Living the Good Life (New York, Shocken paper edition, 1971). Goodman is close to Penty’s view of the artisan guild society. Recently a group of young political scientists have argued that “important groups among the populations of Western societies have passed beyond (subsistence] stages,” and they use the concept of post-industrial society to denote a situation in which groups of persons “no longer have a direct relationship to the imperatives of economic security.” See, for example, Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies,” American Political Science Review (December 1971), pp. 991-1017.

  49 For evidence of the growing conservatism of each radical generation as the cohort gets older, see S.M. Lipset and E.C. Ladd, Jr., “College Generations—from the 1930s to the 1960s,” The Public Interest no. 25 (Fall 1971).

  50 This is a theme implicit in Lionel Trilling’s conception of the “adversary culture.” See Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York, 1965).

  51 The theory of Radovan Richta and his group in the Czechoslovak Academy of Science is discussed in chap. 1; that of Gorz and Mallet in chap. 2.

  52 It is surely too simple-minded to insist that since there are fewer and fewer independent entrepreneurs or self-employed professionals, all wage and salaried workers are members of the working class. And since the majority of workers are now on salary, rather than piece- or time-work, how can one call for a “dictatorship of the salariat?” And over whom?

  53 See Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London, 1949), chap. II, “Bacon and the Rehabilitation of Nature,” esp. p. 31.

  54 Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Famous Utopias, ed. Charles M. Andrews (New York, n.d.), p. 263.

  55 These are themes that I explore on the historical and philosophical levels in my essay, “Technology, Nature and Society: The Vicissitudes of Three World-Views and the Confusion of Realms,” given as the Frank Nelson Doubleday Lecture at the Smithsonian National Museum of History and Technology in December 1972, and to be published by Doubleday & Co. in a collected volume of those lectures.

  1 Aiexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1066), part IV, chap. 6, “The Sort of Despotisms that Democratic Nations Have to Fear,” pp. 666–667. I am indebted to J. P. Mayer’s Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Study in Political Science (New York, i960), pp. 121—122, for this and the following citation, but in both instances, in checking the original sources, I have extended his quotations.

  2The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, ed. Alexander Dru (London, 1955). Letter to Von Preen, April 26, 1872, pp. 151–152.

  3 Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System, Harbinger edition with an introduction by Daniel Bell (New York, 1963), p. 4.

  4 Op. cit., p. 152.

&nb
sp; 5 Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (Stanford, 1959). See chaps. VII and VIII, “Classes in Post-Capitalist Society (I) Industrial Conflict, (II) Political Conflict.” Quotations above are from pp. 272, 275–276, 301–303.

  6 George Lichtheim, The New Europe: Today and Tomorrow (New York, 1963), p. 194.

  7 Amitai Etzioni, The Active Society (New York, 1968), p. vii.

  8 Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition (New York, 1964).

  9 Sydney Ahlstrom, “The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics,” The Annals (January 1970).

  10The New York Times, November 26, 1970.

  11 This was the theme of a Daedalus-sponsored seminar in Paris, June 9–10, 1970. Eric Hobsbawm has written of “post-tribal societies,” arguing that social classes only begin at such stages of social development. See his essay, “Social History and the History of Society,’ in Daedalus issue entitled Historical Studies Today (Winter 1971), p. 36.

  12 Roderick Seidenberg, Post-Historic Man (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1950).

  13 Tom Burns, of Edinburgh, though scoffing at the phrase “post-industrial” society, talks of the “post-market society and post-organization society phase of industrialism” in “The Rationale of the Corporate System” (p. 50), unpublished ms. for the Harvard Program on Technology and Society, 1970. To this litany we should add “post-economic,” a possibility envisaged by Herman Kahn of a time when incomes will be so high that cost would be of little practical matter in any decision. (See his briefing paper, “Forces for Change in the Final Third of the Twentieth Century,” Hudson Institute, 1970.) In the logic of the situation, some radicals (vide the discussions in Social Policy, vol. I, nos. 1, 4) have talked of a ‘'post-scarcity” society, while Gideon Sjoberg and his collaborators have written of a “post-welfare” society. And in his new book Freedom in a Rocking Boat, Sir Geoffrey Vickers talks of a “post-liberal era.” In all, this is a catalogue of twenty different uses of the word post to denote some new phase in our society.

  14 It would be unfair and presumptuous to assume that all the epigones of Saint-Simon or Marx have gathered under the banner of the word post. There have been more daring adventurers who have tried to define in more forthright fashion the character of the new age.

  Thus Ralf Dahrendorf, in a later foray, describes a “service class society.” “Sociologists have given many names to this new society: post-capitalist and managerial, leisure-time and consumer’s, advanced industrial and mass society are but a small selection. It cannot do much harm therefore to add one further name and claim that Europe is well under way toward a service class society.” The service class, for Dahrendorf, is essentially the white-collar and particularly the professional and technical stratum in the society. (See “Recent Changes in Class Structure,” A New Europe? ed. Stephen R. Graubard [Boston, 1964], esp. p. 328.)

  Zbigniew Brzezinski writes of a “technetronic’ age in which “technology and especially electronics—hence my neologism “technetronic”—are increasingly becoming the determinants of social change, altering the mores, the social structure, the values, and the global outlook of society.” Brzezinski writes that he prefers the neologism “technetronic” to “post-industrial” because “it conveys more directly the character of the principal impulses for change in our time.” (See Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era [New York, 1970], esp. p. 9.)

  Jacques Ellul has called his vision the Technological Society, Marshall McLuhan the Global Village, and on a more trivial level Bertram Gross talks of the “mobiletic revolution,” while popularizer Alvin Toffler, after hovering over “transindustrial” and “post-economic,” settles on the term “super-industrial society.” It is intended to mean, he writes, “a complex, fast-paced society dependent upon extremely advanced technology and a post-materialist value system.” (Future Shock [New York, 1970], p. 434.) With Toffler it would seem that all the permutations and combinations of the “post” idea have been exhausted.

  15 Edward Shils, “Tradition, Ecology and Institutions in the History of Sociology,” in Daedalus (Fall 1970), issue on The Making of Modern Science: Biographical Studies, p. 825.

  16 I follow here the argument laid out by Abram L. Harris in “Pure Capitalism and the Disappearance of the Middle Class,” Journal of Political Economy (June 1939), with further elaboration from the passages in Marx he has identified. All page references to Capital indicated in the text are from the Kerr Edition, Chicago, 1906.

  17 Ibid., pp. 339–340.

  18 The first writer to explicate this model of “pure capitalism,” was Henryk Grossmann in his Das Akkumulations und Zusammensbruchsgesetz des kapitalistichen Systems (The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System) (Leipzig, 1929). Paul Sweezey makes the same assumption about the use of abstraction in his The Theory of Capitalist Development (Oxford, 1946).

  As Marx wrote in the author’s preface to volume I of Capital:

  ...The value-form whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labor—or the value-form of the commodity—is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy (p. 12, emphasis added).

  Marx elaborated this idea in an unfinished essay, “The Method of Political Economy,” which was published as an appendix to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago, 1906).

  19 Like all laws, Marx wrote, this “is modified in its working by many circumstances.” There were, Marx wrote, various “counteracting tendencies” principally the rise of new industries created by the growth of luxuries, the refinement of wants, the creation of new ones, etc., and these new industries absorb displaced labor and expand “unproductive” employment. Modifying as these are, they do not alter the basic features and nature of the capitalist economy.

  20 In the Theorien über den Mebrwert, the uncollected materials which Engels had not included in Capital but which was edited, after Engels’s death, by Kautsky (and which is sometimes called vol. IV of Capital), Marx says explicitly, in fact, that the middle class, standing between labor on the one side and the capitalists on the other, constantly grow “[ weighing ] heavily on the labor sub-stratum and [increasing] the social security of the upper ten thousand.” More specifically, he writes: “The size of the middle class increases and the proletariat will always form a comparatively small part of the populace (although it is still growing). This is indeed the true course of bourgeois society.” Cited by Hans Speier, The Salaried Employee in German Society, mimeographed translation, W.P.A. Project No. 465–97-3–81 (New York, 1939), pp. 9–10.

  A. L. Harris’s essay (op. cir.) contains detailed references to these sections in the Theorien which contain Marx’s discussion of the role of the middle class both outside and within the capitalist productive process.

  21 Paul Sweezey, op. cit., pp. 191 – 192. See chap. XI for “The Breakdown Controversy.”

  22 What is startling to realize is that, because of the origin of the word, the concept of capitalism was accepted so belatedly in economic literature and, in the article on “Capitalism” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences printed in 1930, Werner Sombart could point out that major economic texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ignored the term. He writes:

  The concept of capitalism and even more clearly the term itself may be traced pr
imarily to the writings of socialist theoreticians. It has in fact remained one of the key concepts of socialism down to the present time.... Despite the fact that capitalism tends to become the sole subject-matter of economics, neither the term nor the concept has as yet been universally recognized by representatives of academic economics. The older German economists and to a much greater extent the economists of other countries rejected entirely the concept of capitalism. In many cases the rejection was merely implicit; capitalism was not discussed at all except perhaps in connection with the history of economic doctrines, and when it was mentioned there was no indication that it was of particular importance. The term is not found in Gide, Cauwes, Marshall, Seligman, or Cassel, to mention only the best-known texts. In other treatises, such as those of Schmoller, Adolf Wagner, Richard Ehrenberg, and Philippovich, there is some discussion of capitalism but the concept is subsequently rejected. In the newer economics it is recognized as indispensable or at least useful, but the uncertainty as to its exact meaning is generally expressed by quotation marks about the word. “Capitalism,” Encyclopedia of the Social Scieiices (New York, 1930), vol. III, p. 195.

  23 Sombart is an unjustly neglected figure today in sociological history in part because, in his last years, he expressed some sympathy with the Nazis, and in greater measure, perhaps, because his writings, though extraordinarily suggestive were quite careless. This is probably best exemplified in his “debate” with Max Weber on the spirit of capitalism. Where Weber emphasized the role of the “Protestant ethic,” Sombart singled out the Jews as the major element basing himself on both the religious rules of Judaism and the migration patterns of Jews in the fifteenth century, arguing that the shift in the commercial center of the Western world from the Mediterranean basin to Antwerp and Holland followed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Yet his evidence about the Jews was sloppy.