The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  138Marx, “Author’s Preface,” Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago, 1904), p. II.

  139Weber, General Economic History (London, n.d.), p. 354. Weber was so impressed with the pervasiveness of rationalization in Western life that in 1910 he wrote an essay entitled “The Rational and Social Foundations of Music,” in which he compared the Western organization of the division of the octabe with the musical forms of China, Japan, Arabia, Islam, and Black Africa, to show the distinctiveness of Western modes in the rise of polyphony and counterpoint as the basis of the rationalization of music.

  140These themes are explored in a work in progress on the character of contemporary culture. Parts of this work have appeared in several publications in recent years. The essay “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” The Public Interest, no. 21 (Fall 1970), reprinted in Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, eds., Capitalism Today (New York, 1971), deals with the emergence of the “adversary culture” in relation to the changes of capitalist ethos; the essay “Sensibility in the Sixties,” Commentary (June 1971), discusses the break-up of traditional methods in painting, literature, and criticism in the search for novelty and experience in the arts; the essay “Religion in the Sixties,” Social Research (Fall 1971), argues that “when religions fail, cults appear,” and analyzes the rise of different cults in the sixties. An earlier formulation of the theme of the “disjunction of culture and social structure” is in the volume Science and Culture, ed. Gerald Holcon (Boston, 1965). An earlier exploration of the break-up of formal syntax in the arts is in my essay “The Eclipse of Distance,” Encounter (May 1963).

  141Herbert A. Simon, “The Changing Theory and Changing Practice of Public Administration,” in Contemporary Political Science, ed. Ithiel Pool (New York, 1967).

  142See Raymond Vernon, Sovereignty at Bay (New York, 1971). About 4,000 U.S. firms have a total of 17,000 foreign affiliates, but most of these are simply sales offices or some other loose trading relation. The 500 largest firms in the United States own about 2,500 manufacturing firms, but the largest 187 own more than 80 percent of these. For a lucid summary of the statistics and a fanciful speculation about the fate of these firms, see Norman Macrae’s supplement, “The Future of International Business,” The Economist (January 22,1971).

  143Forbes (November 15, 1971), p. 77.

  144Samuelson’s observations are from a talk reprinted in the Sunday Times financial section (July 30, 1972), p. 12.

  145Adapted from The Economist (January 22,1971). p. xvii.

  146Lin Piao, “Long Live the Victory of the People’s War” (Peking, New China News Agency, September 2, 1065), reprinted in Samuel B. Griffiths, Peking and Peoples’ War (New York, 1966), pp. 51-114.