POST-INDUSTRIAL
SOCIETY
75
United States." Whether this fact has any deeper roots or significance
than inclination, time, or the availability of data is difficult to judge.
Bell makes no case for American exceptionalism in this context and,
indeed, is forced to implicitly renounce such a position in order to de-
fend himself against critics, especially Europeans, who hold that much
of what evidence he adduces for the importance of science and
technology in the American economy is a reflection of military spen-
ding, based on American mobilization for global war." Yet at the
same time Bell—at the very least paradoxically—denies that what is
happening in the United States will necessarily happen elsewhere, thus
explicitly rejecting Marx's method of discussing British capitalism and
telling other nations they could see their future history written in it."
(He also concurrently avoids Marx's blunder of basing his economic
analysis of capitalism on Britain and looking to France—a radically
different country economically—for illustration of the working-out of
class conflict in politics, sowing confusion for generations of
followers.) For good or ill, however, Bell's analysis of post-industrial
economics, politics, and even culture" is essentially American in pro-
venance.
But Bell does talk, as we have seen, about the possibility of both
capitalist and socialist post-industrial societies coming into existence,
and the general tenor of his writings seems to imply that, as economic
growth continues in various countries, they too will become post-
industrial. Herman Kahn in equating post-industrial status with
economic development and affluence explicitly universalizes this con-
cept, and Bell has apparently never seriously objected to this inter-
pretation publicly." Other commentators using the concept have ex-
34. This point has often been made by Bell's critics. See Marvin E. Olson in
"Review Symposium: The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,"
American Journal of
Sociology
80 (1974) P. 238 and Tilton in Tilton and Bell,
op. cit.,
P. 730.
35. Thus the French scholar Jean Floud holds "Post-industrial
society turns out to
be another name for the American Wehrwirtshaft." Bell, Floud,
et. al.,
Technocracy
and Politics,"
Survey
17 (1971) 35.
36. Bell and Tilton,
op. cit.
P. 748.
37. In
Coming,
P. 13, Bell writes of a projected volume to deal with culture in post-
industrial society.
The Cultural Contradictions
is apparently designed to fulfill that
function as well as fleshing out the discussion of the political realm which the
Coming
downplays, and its discussion centers more exclusively on American than even the
Com-
ing
does.
38. On pages 460-461 of
Coming,
Bell reproduces without cavil certain listings
from the work of Kahn as part of a larger discussion which draws heavily on Kahn. In
this context, it is anticipated that the year 2000 the United States, Japan, Canada, Scan-
danavia, Switzerland, France, West Germany and the Benelux countries will be
"visably post-industrial" and'the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Italy, East Ger-
many, Czechoslavakia, Israel, and Australia, and New Zealand will be "early post-
industrial."
76
THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
tended it to western Europe and especially to Sweden" and, as noted,
the Japanese are particularly eager to embrace the idea of post-
industrial status. 4°
Let us focus on a few of the postulated characteristics of post-
industrial society which are empirically observable in order to deter-
mine whether any such societies do in fact exist. Perhaps the most im-
portant characteristic of post-industrial society is the postulated
growth of the service industries. Post-industrial theory insists that ser-
vice industries are growing at the expense of the blue-collar industries
and that this change correlates with a rise in skill levels of workers and
an expansion of the role of theoretical knowledge in society. The
literature on the subject is vast and murky, flawed at the outset by its
own problems of definition.°' Both corporation lawyers and Dallas
39. See, as examples, Hancock,
Sweden, op. cit.,
and "The United States,
Europe..."
op. cit.
and his "Elite Images and System Change in Sweden," in Leon N.
Lindberg,
Politics and the Future of Industrial Society
(New York: David McKay, 1976)
Pp. 167-190. See also in the Lindberg volume Robert Inglehart, "The Nature of Value
Change in Post-Industrial Societies," Pp. 57-99. Inglehart, however, uses the terms
"post-industrial" and "advanced industrial" synonymously in an earlier article, "The
Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational. Change in Post-Industrial Societies,"
American Political Science Review
65 (1971): Pp. 991-1017, and abandons the use of the
term post-industrial in one published slightly later "Political Dissatisfaction and Mass
Support for Social Change in Advanced Industrial Society,"
Comparative Political
Studies
10 (1977): Pp. 455-472. Whether this represents on his part a theoretical conver-
sion, shift with prevailing fashions, or sheer whim is impossible to guess. Usages such as
post-industrial or even "advanced industrial" when applied to European politics are
almost always those of American observers rather than of Europeans themselves. For
an attempt to speculate on the relevance of the new ideas about the impact of
technology on politics (including those of Bell (in Britain see Robert Williams "The
Technological Society and British Politics,"
Government and Opposition, 7
(1972): Pp.
56-84.
40. See, for example, Taketsugu Tsuratani, "Japan as a Post-Industrial Society,"
in Lindberg,
op. cit.,
Pp. 100-125.
41. A preview of the post-industrial theorists' argument about the importances of
services is provided by Victor Fuchs, "The First Service Economy,"
The Public Interest
No. 2 (Winter 1966): Pp. 7-17. Bell has frequently been attacked
(cf.
Tilton in Tilton
and Bell,
op. cit.,
731) for his use of "services" as, in his own words, a "research,
education, and government."
Coming, op. cit.,
P. 15. His position is directly attacked
in Gershuny,
op. cit.,
Pp. 56-69 and Richard B. Halley and Harold G. Vatler,
"Technology and the Future as History: A Critical Review of Futurism,"
Technology
and Culture
19 (1978): Pp. 70-78. Gary Geppert, "Post-Affluence: The Turbulant
Transition to a Post-Industrial Society,"
The Futurist,
VIII (1974): Pp. 212-215 accepts
the notion of a coming service economy but in a context of scarcity. See also Victor
Ferkiss,
Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality
(New York: Braziller, 1969) Pp.
109-110, and Kumar,
op. cit.,
Pp. 200-205, 258. For background see Joachim
Singlemann, "The Sectoral Transformation of the Labor Force in Seven Industrialized
Countries 1920-1970,"
American Journal of Sociology
83 (1978): Pp. 1224-1234. Gid-
dens, commenting on the effort of Ralf Dahrendorf and others to claim that the "ser-
vice class" provides "a bridge between rulers and ruled" argued congently for the im-
portance of distinguishing adequately "between class and the division of labor,"
op.
cit.,
P. 187, pointing up the fact that much of Bell's argument would be irrelevant even
if it were true.