POST-INDUSTRIAL
SOCIETY
87
issues in a political system with a divided bureaucracy, a virtually un-
manageable Congress, and a weak chief executive. Experts abound,
but coordination of policy is a chimera.
Other western democracies present hardly more inspiring pictures,
with leading statesmen making pessimistic pronouncements about the
future of democracy," while other analysts question whether the
historic social democratic compromise between productivity and
equality of distribution will continue to be viable or whether its
breakdown will lead to the breakdown of capitalist democracy entire-
ly."
More and more political issues have technical aspects—or at least
such aspects are perceived more than in the past—and expert opinions
fill the air, but the opinions conflict and the decision-making process
seems not much less incremental and irrational than ever. Indeed Bell
himself seems to voice a pessimism verging on despair regarding the
ability of our society to make the kind of rational decisions his theory
predicts as he perceives a rising tide of irrationalism in the larger
culture of capitalist society.
67
The coming of post-industrial society
65. The report of a study group of the influential
Trilateral Commission quotes
former German chancellor Willy Brandt as saying Western Europe has "only 20 or 30
more years of democracy left in it." C.L. Sulzberger, "Danger for Democracies,"
Washington Star
June 13, 1975.
66. Alan Wolfe, "Has Social Democracy a Future?"
Comparative Politics
11 (1978)
Pp. 100-125.
67. "In both doctrine and life-style, the anti-bourgeois won out. This triumph meant
that in the culture antinomianism and anti-institutionalism ruled"....and the traditional
bourgeois organization of life—its rationalism and sobriety—now has few defenders in
the culture.... To assume, as some social critics do, that the technocratic mentality
dominates the cultural order is to fly in the face of every bit of evidence at hand."
Cultural Contradictions, op. cit.,
P. 53. The relation of this theme to that of the
Com-
ing is
not apparent at first, though Bell is clear in stating that he believes the social and
cultural order can operate according to different norms and that indeed the clash he
postulates between them may be the basis for revolutionary potential. Whether his
discussion of culture is adequate or not theoretically is not at issue here, though see
Roger D. Abrahams, "Contradicting Bell" in Review Symposium: The Cultural Con-
tradictions of Capitalism,
American Journal of Sociology
83 (1977): Pp. 463-369. But
from an historical point of view it can be argued that Bell oversimplifies in identifying
capitalism with the Puritan ethic as he does in the section "From the Protestant Ethic to
the Psychedelic Bazaar" in
Cultural Contradictions, op. cit.,
Pp. 54-80 since capitalism
originated in luxury if not indeed in vice. See Werner Sombart,
Luxury and Capitalism
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967). In any event, as a self-styled
"friend" notes, Bell may be mistaken about the present state of American culture as the
result of living in a highly unrepresentative milieu. See Andrew Greeley,
No Bigger
Than Necessary
(New York: New American Library) Pp. 153-163.
88
THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
was supposed to mean the end of ideological bedevilment but, the
house having been swept clean, seven and more new devils of ideology
seem to have entered in.
Some writers on the politics of post-industrial society, indeed, ac-
tually embrace the concept of what might be called neo-
ideologization. Following Bell's premise—extrapolated by
Kahn—that post-industrial society is one in which the old problems of
economic scarcity have been put behind us, and therefore, implicitly
the problem of traditional economic class conflict and ideologies
based on such conflict, they postulate that post-industrial society will
see the rise of new conflicts which will be more difficult to resolve
since they will stem from questions of taste and values." Illustrations
are not far to seek. Striking workers can agree with employers over
wage demands and even questions about the incidence of taxation can
be compromised in principle. But what kind of viable compromise can
be created between proponents of abortion and "right-to-life" en-
thusiasts, or between supporters and opponents of "gay rights." If
post-industrial society is by definition post-scarcity and post-
economic society, its politics will be a politics of "life style" issues im-
herently less amenable to rationalization than older political issues.
Many of those who speak of post-industrial society therefore predict
an increasingly conflict-ridden and politically unmanageable society
as these new issues come to dominate politics." Above all, there will
be struggles between the new technocratic elites and the increasingly
frustrated masses." Even Bell himself sometimes seems to lean in this
68. Inglehardt,
op. cit.,
Tsurani,
op. cit.
69. Bell's colleague Huntington, after noting that "To a considerable degree, the
post-industrial society is not at all political..." goes on to argue that it will be highly
conflict ridden and "could be extraordinarily difficult to govern." "Post-industrial
Politics: How Benign...,"
op. cit.,
Pp. 164, 177, and suggests elsewhere that "it would
be argued that political parties are the political form peculiarly suited to the needs of in-
dustrial society and that the movement of the United States into a 'post-industrial'
phase means the end of the party system as we have known it." "The Democratic
Distemper,"
The Public Interest
No. 41 (Fall, 1975) P. 23. Todd La Porte and C.J.
Abrams suggest that a major cause of the instability in post-industrial society will be a
perceived discrepancy between the supposed ability of society to solve its problems
through technocratic means and its actual ability to do so. "Alternative Patterns of
Post-Industria: The California Experience," in Lindberg,
op. cit.,
Pp. 19-56.
70. See, for example, Duchene,
op. cit.,
P. 24 who writes that "Early industrialism
produced anarchism and fascism.... The post-industrial society might have to accept
them as endemic, and face recurrent outbreaks, much as traditional society sufferred
the plague." Bell himself sees conflicts of and within the meritocracy,
ibid.,
Pp.
129-130, including "a conflict between elites and masses who want their own form of