Theory, myth, and ideology

POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

63

As a result, there is growing up within political science an implicit

new paradigm for the study of advanced industrial societies which

assumes that as the result of various postulated social, economic, and

technological changes there now exists a number of what can be called

Heisler entitles a collection of readings 

Politics in Europe. Structures and Processes in

Some Post-Industrial Democracies 

(New York: David McKay, 1974) but never tells us

what the word means, implying it has something to do with being "advanced" and "af-

fluent." Other political scientists tell us that their book grows out of "increasing in-

terest in the concept of post-industrial society," Lawrence Mayer and John C. Burnett,

Politics in Industrial Societies. A Comparative Perspective 

(New York: John Wiley,

1977), P. vii but then go on to say "the term post-industrial has become something of a

catchword and often implies a difference in kind rather than degree, we prefer to use the

concept of a mature industrial society," 

Ibid. 

They then go on to use the terms post-and

advanced-industrial interchangeably, saying the difference is a "matter of degree." Pp.

362-373. M. Donald Hancock says that "A minimum definition of post-industrial socie-

ty, as it is presently emerging in the United States and parts of Western Europe, is that it

is a socioeconomic system in which, white-collar or service or service strata have dis-

placed blue-collar workers as the dominant labor force," and beyond that there is little

agreement. "The United States, Europe, and Post-Industrial Society," 

Comparative

Politics 4 

(1971): P. 132. One of the few political scientists to try to use the term

systematically is Bell's associate Samuel Huntington, "Post-Industrial Politics: How

Benign Will It Be?" in James William Morley (ed.), 

Prologue to the Future. The United

States and Japan in the Post-Industrial Age 

(Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1973, Pp.

89-127.) A systematic critique of Bell is found in the work of sociologist Benjamin S.

Kleinberg, 

American Society in the Post-Industrial Age. Technocracy, Power and the

End of Ideology 

(Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1973). A substantially different use of

the term is found in M. Donald Hancock, 

Sweden. The Politics of Post-Industrial

Change 

(Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1972). Hancock says a post-industrial society

"can be defined as one in which the primacy of capital accumulation and industrial ac-

cumulation yields to the potential primacy of redistribution...." (P. 7), and speaks of

societies "attaining post-industrial complexity, affluence, and redistributive poten-

tialities...." (P. 269). Hancock's usage is nearer to those of Alain Touraine and Herman

Kahn than that of Bell (see below). Victor Basiuk accepts and uses the term but is skep-

tical of alleged shifts in political power and believes applied knowledge is of more in-

creasing importance than theoretical. See 

Technology, World Politics and American

Policy 

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), Pp. 259-274. In the voluminous 8

volume 

Handbook of Political Science 

edited by Nelson Polsby and Fred I. Greenstein

(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975) the term appears in only three articles, being

mentioned in passing by Bell's associates Kahn (Vol. VII, P. 411) and Huntington (Vol.

III, P. 95) and several times in another article, "Science Policy" by Harvey M.

Sapolsky, Vol. VI, Pp. 79-110. In the massive international survey 

Science, Technology

and Society. A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective 

edited by Ina Speigel-Rosing and Derek

de Solla Price (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977) the term is not indexed, though it

appears twice in an essay by American political scientist Sanford Lakoff. Despite this

mixed scholarly usage and reception, numerous college courses are now being given

with post-industrial in their titles.

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64

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

post-industrial societies, so different socially from previously existing

industrial societies that they must (in a reductionist assumption) con-

stitute a different class of political entities, with their own special

characteristics and dynamics. The United States and Canada, Japan,

Australia, the wealthier nations of Western Europe, and even in some

treatments Eastern Europe and the USSR are considered to fit into

this new category of post-industrial. Given these intellectual

developments it would appear both salutary and necessary that

political scientists take a close look at the concept of post-

industrialism in order to ascertain its logical coherence, its empirical

validity, and its implications—whether it be valid or not for political

science both descriptive and normative.

Treatments of and reference to the concept of post-industrialism

now abound, but the central figure in its introduction and populariza-

tion has been Professor Bell, and primary reference will be to his work

and ideas. Though he introduced and used the concept in a number of

papers both before and after the publication of his major work on the

subject, his most extensive and relatively systematic exposition is

found in 

The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 

published in 1973.4

A subsequent major book, 

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

published in 1976, deals with some of the same themes. Apparently it

stands, in the corpus of Bell's work, as a substitute for originally pro-

jected volumes on the politics and culture of post-industrial society

which were to have supplemented the primarily socio-economic focus

of the original exposition, and its nature and conclusions in

themselves are significant for the light they shed on the validity and

usefulness of Bell's central thesis. Somewhat ironically, Bell himself

rarely uses the concept of post-industrial society in his later

writings—which is rather as though Marx were to have coined the con-

cepts of surplus value and the class struggle and then gone on to com-

ment on economic and political development without making use of

them.'

4. Critical reaction was mixed with much of it hostile. Christopher Lasch argued

that "the case for the transition to post-industrial society cannot easily be refuted,

because it was never stated with any precision to begin with," 

New York Review of

Books, 

October 18, 1973, leading to an angry polemical exchange. Norman Birnbaum

wrote that it "lacks theoretical drive, and its argument is repetitive—not all of it consis-

tent." 

New York Times Book Review, 

July I, 1973. Joseph Featherstone was more

mildly critical in a review essay "A Failure of Political Imagination," 

New Republic,

September 15, 1973 and September 22, 1973. Despite such reactions the term caught on

widely among social scientists.

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