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
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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.