Theory, myth, and ideology



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DANIEL BELL'S CONCEPT OF POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY:

THEORY, MYTH, AND IDEOLOGY

The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social

Forecasting, 

by Daniel Bell. New York: Basic Books, 

1973. Pp.

xiii, 507. $16.00.



The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 

by Daniel Bell. New

York: Basic Books, 

1976. Pp. xvi, 301. $14.95.



O

ne of the signs of weakness in contemporary American political

science is its susceptability to invasion from other disciplines.

To say this is not to argue that any academic field should ignore

developments in other fields

.

 and not be subject to cross fertilization



with them, any more than any nation should seek to hermetically seal

itself off from outside cultural influences. But just as national identity

and ultimately national power can be threatened by cultural conquest

from the outside, so can academic disciplines lose their bearings and

integrity by adopting paradigms from other fields which may not do

justice to the nature of their own data or help to answer the questions

they seek to resolve.

A case in point in contemporary political science is research and

teaching in the area of the politics of "developing" nations. In the

post World War II period, discussion of comparative politics was

overwhelmed by the belief, adopted from economics, that there were

such things as "underdeveloped" (actually a euphemism for poor or

backward) countries with special characteristics as defined by the

discipline of economics. Faced with the problem of enlarging their

focus from the nation states of Europe and North America in order to

deal with a horde of "new nations," students of comparative politics

allowed themselves to assume that there must be common political

characteristics of these "underdeveloped" nations which correlated

with their economic characteristics and a new subfield was born of this

seduction. Moreover, in the circumstances it was also natural to fur-

ther assume that—since economic criteria defined the new field of

study—in these nations economics was the dominant, independent

variable and politics the subordinate dependent factor. Needless to



62

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

say, the fruits of this mesallaince have been sickly and deformed, and

only in the past few years have political scientists begun to integrate

the study of these countries into paradigms of primarily political

significance.'

But if political science has been reasserting its integrity in resisting

the imposition of an often misleading economic paradigm on the

study of the less developed—i.e., less industrialized—nations of the

world, it has been increasingly subject to a new invasion from

without. This time the new paradigm originates in sociology and seeks

to reorient our study of the developed, advanced industrial nations.

This new frame of reference coalesces around the concept of "post-

industrial society," as developed by Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell

and a number of major and minor epigoni.

2

 The very thinness and



vagueness of the theoretical basis of "post-industrial" theorizing

paradoxically adds to rather than detracts from its influence. Thus we

find books and papers which use the term "post-industrial" in their

titles or refer to the term in their introductions, only to define or use

the term in various ways or not at all in the actual analysis of data or

exposition of material.' Yet increasing numbers of political scientists

seem to act on the maxim that where there is so much smoke (or haze)

there must be fire, and the term gains in currency.

1. For an evaluation of the current state of the study of the politics of developing

societies see Robert T. Holt and John E. Turner, "Crises and Sequences in Collective

Theory Development," 

American Political Science Review 

LXIX (1975) Pp. 979-994.

Pioneer attempts to assert the autonomy of political variables in that study include

Robert T. Holt and John E. Turner, 



The Political Basis of Economic Development.

(Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1966) and Samuel Huntington, 



Political Order in Changing

Societies 

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

2. One of the earliest contemporary usages is in Bertram Gross, "Space-Time and

Post-Industrial Society," CAG Occasional Papers, Comparative Administration

Group, American Society for Public Administration, May 1966. This antedates Bell's

usage but is not followed up by later systematic work on Gross' part.

3. The term is used, without explanation or elucidation in, for example, Warren

Moxley. "Post—Industrial Politics: A Guide to 1976." 



Congressional Quarterly Week-

ly Report, 

November 15, 1975, Pp. 2475-2478; Talcott Parsons, "Religion in Post-

Industrial America: The Problem of Secularization," 

Social Research 

41 (1974): Pp.

193-225; Richard L. Simpson, "Beyond Rational Bureaucracy: Changing Values and

Social Implications in Post-Industrial Society," 



Social Forces 

51 (1972): 1-6; Stanley

Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "Power, Politics, and Personality in Post-Industrial

Society," 



Journal of Politics, 

40 (1978): Pp. 675-717; Erazim V. Kohak, "Being Young

in a Post-Industrial Society," 

Dissent XVIII 

(February 1971): Pp. 30-40; Magorah

Murayama, "The Post-Industrial Logic," in Andrew A. Spekke (ed.), 

The Next 25

Years: Crisis and Opportunity 

(Washington: World Futures Society, 1975), Pp. 43-50;

Edward T. Mason, "The Corporation in the Post-Industrial State," 

California

Management Review, 

XII (Summer 1970): PP. 5-25. Political scientist Martin 

0.



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