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Dennis H. Wrong Commentary Magazine. Vol. 29 • June 1960 • No. 6 FOR nearly two decades now articles and reviews by Daniel Bell have been appearing in our better journals of ideas and opinion. He has been so ubiquitous a figure, expressing himself on so... ...In an essay which has already acquired justified celebrity as one of the very few available critiques of the fashionable notion of "mass society," Bell ably traces the origin of the idea to European reactionary and aristocratic-elitist thought... ...BUT these are essentially matters of sensibility and are perhaps of secondary importance in what is not, after all, a personal testament but a series of uncommonly knowledgeable political and sociological interpretations... ...There is, in fact, a dialectic between European and American experience that Bell misses-the much advertised postwar "Americanization" of Europe and the belated American adoption of reforms long advocated and in some cases long instituted by European socialist parties both helped dampen the fervors of the 30's, the decade whose epitaph Bell is writing once more in so many of these essays... ...The proponent of absolute ends, on the other hand, refuses to separate means and ends: he may simply recommend exemplary conduct or he may argue that "from good comes only good, but from evil only evil follows... ...The trouble is that it is almost impossible to believe Bell's claim that, for himself at least, it represents a bitter, hard-won wisdom, that in giving up the delights of ideology he is really surrendering something for which he has a strong appetite... ...Arthur Koestler's dichotomy of the Yogi and the Commissar refers to the extreme versions of each ethic... ...Except for this discussion of contemporary radicalism abroad, a review of theories of Soviet society, and some reflections on the thought of the early Marx, the essays in The End of Ideology deal with American life... ...Now if one equates "ideology" with secular messianism few will want to deny the essential rightness of this judgment after all that has happened in this century... ...Bell quite illegitimately identifies the Communist, the fanatic, the totalitarian extremist with the ethic of absolute ends... ...And he is careful to note that "a repudiation of ideology, to be meaningful, must mean not only a criticism of the utopian order but of existing society as well... ...Perhaps by stressing this somewhat esoteric consideration he is simply trying to avoid another rundown of the usual causes cited to explain the failure of American socialism: the lack of a feudal past, the influx of immigrants, the high standard of living, and so on... ...But by now we know this story so well in so many of its ramifications that several of these essays have inevitably lost the flavor of originality they had when they first appeared... ...And then we are told for the umpteenth time how many good books are sold and how many symphony orchestras flourish in the United States, as if these conceivable indications of the average cultural level were in any way relevant to the arguments of Ortega and T. S. Eliot which bear solely on the opportunities for high culture... ...Bell is perhaps our most conscientious and reliable historian of the return from the 30's, of the assimilation of once-radical intellectuals and trade unionists into a society which they succeeded in modifying without transforming... ...His references to the pessimism, disenchantment, et al... ...Bell argues that socialism failed as a movement in the United States because American socialists of all breeds never resolved the contradiction between ethical idealism and the requirements of effective political action... ...I find, however, that on at least two occasions Bell's centrism and "moderationism" lead him rather seriously astray on substantive questions... ...The other is the "end of ideology" of the title: the abating in our prosperous postbourgeois era of the ideological conflicts between left and right which have for so long dominated Western politics... ...of his "generation" (he is a great player of the generations game) therefore ring hollow, and he simply sounds smug when urging the young to renounce this evil fruit... ...It is all very well to affirm with Machiavelli that "men commit the error of not knowing when to limit their hopes" (this quotation heads the final and title chapter of The End of Ideology), but the reality and indestructibility of their hopes need to be insisted on with equal force... ...His tone becomes avuncular: ah yes, young intellectuals naturally want to be fired with romantic passions-that is a rite de passage of their vocation... ...For Bell will not finally concede the reality of anything out there in the world to justify rebellion and rejection... ...So the American habit of establishing and joining a multitude of voluntary associations serving all conceivable purposes is invoked to refute the view that we are a rootless, alienated mass, although the very disposition to create such "artificial" social groups might as readily be considered evidence for as against our rootlessness... ...Bell has in fact had several different careers: youthful radical journalist in the early 40's, teacher of social science, labor editor of Fortune, globe-trotter for international committees of intellectuals... ...If so, and Bell goodnaturedly accepted the designation, we are here confronted with the spectacle of a centrist engaged in finding his own image reflected in the society around him, a society founded, he argues, on the politics of moderation and the culture of the middle class, yet strong and vital enough to blunt the critical assaults of both the cultural aristocrat and the utopian radical... ...In an often penetrating discussion of the "New Left" here and abroad-Dissent, the British "angries," the post-Hungary defectors from Communism on the continent-Bell fails to note the paradox that American radicals denounce mass culture in accents echoing European elitist or "Establishment" values, while young British leftists manifest immense sympathy and curiosity about American culture and are envious of the fluidity of status and the absence of stuffy, gilded institutions like the monarchy on this side of the Atlantic... ...He catches Jaspers, Ortega, and other mass theorists in a number of extreme and romantic overstatements before turning to a defense of American society against the charges of social atomization, cultural mediocrity, and compulsive conformism leveled by these thinkers and their epigoni... ...Nor is he lacking in sympathy for such an outlook, observing that the young intellectual unavoidably feels that "the middle way is for the middle-aged, not for him... ...Now that he has returned to academic life as associate professor of sociology at Columbia, the publication of this collection of his more ambitious essays suggests an effort to indicate his intellectual resting places... ...Yet the grouping together of his essays in The End of Ideology reveals his intellectual concerns to be rather more consistent and narrowly focused than regular readers of his magazine pieces might have anticipated... ...he recognizes the widespread hunger for heroism, passion, a transfiguring cause... ...force, for all politics involves the use of force at some level... ...Yet there is an irritating cageyness about all this... ...If the end of ideology applies to the Western world as a whole and reflects the stability of mature, increasingly egalitarian industrial societies, then the American immunity from divisive ideological passions which Bell consistently emphasizes as the unique virtue of our political system is no longer exceptional... ...Especially if one sees history as tragic... ...He has been so ubiquitous a figure, expressing himself on so many subjects, that readers must have occasionally wondered if there were more than one person writing under the name... ...Koestler's pseudo-tragic polarity is also a false one because though a man acts by following an ethic of responsibility somewhere, unless he is a totalitarian, "he reaches the point where he says: 'Here I stand... ...But this is not to deny the illumination it casts on particular issues and these essays amply attest to that... ...But he manages seriously to distort and oversimplify the thought of Max Weber, from whom he borrows the notion of an inevitable tension between ethics and politics... ...Marx and Dewey, especially as interpreted by Sidney Hook, to whom the book is dedicated, are Bell's chief intellectual mentors in developing, exploring, and illustrating these themes in their bearing on a range of topics including the bureaucratization of American capitalism, the decline in the militancy of the labor movement, the inadequacies of Mills's theory of an American "power elite," the rapid swings of the intellectual zeitgeist since the 30's, and the continuing boredom and emptiness of industrial work and what might be done to alleviate it... ...In his famous essay "Politics as a Vocation," Weber contrasted an "ethic of responsibility" with an "ethic of absolute ends... ...One is what used to be called "American exceptionalism": the view that political and sociological concepts derived from the study of European societies seriously distort our vision if applied to the American scene... ...Bell wants to reserve rational, expedient, "responsible" conduct for the politics of compromise and moderation which he favors, so he stands Weber's distinction on its head and obscures the fundamental dilemma of means and ends in politics which Weber grasped more profoundly than anyone else, the dilemma, in Weber's words, that "if one makes any concessions at all to the principle that the end justifies the means, it is not possible to bring an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility under one roof or to decree ethically which end should justify which means... ...By the former he meant the recognition that to make changes in the world one must take into account its imperfection and be prepared to use ethically questionable means, i.e... ...In fact the Communist does not, like the saint, "live his end," but is at the very opposite pole, completely dissociating means from ends, and ultimately, in his worship of the "organizational weapon" of the party, collapsing the latter into the former... ...Range, variety, and versatility are the talents with which Daniel Bell is commonly credited... ...One is struck, nevertheless, with how good the best of them are, a category in which I would place those dealing with the U.S... ...While Bell, finally, is right to chide leftist critics of mass culture for ignoring544 COMMENTARY the possible conflict between the claims of cultural excellence and social justice, he himself then suppresses the issue by descending to the sorriest level of apologetics in defense of American culture... ...But unhappily history is unable to accommodate them, for the Age of Ideology has ended and anyway we have learned that "the tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society... ...It is possible to discern a certain formal inconsistency between the two themes... ...Bell is aware of the intensity with which many intellectuals "ache for the lost Arcadia" of the 30's... ...Each group seems to wish that its own country resembled more closely its image of the other... ...Probing the point at which economic problems of wage determination, national mobilization policy, technological rationalization, andBOOKS IN REVIEW 543 shifts in business leadership and the sources of investment funds become or touch on political conflicts, Bell refuses to be frightened by the formidable abstractions or the arrogant professionalism of the economists and determinedly locates what they have to say in its larger social and historical context... ...I have more reservations about his treatment of political and cultural issues... ...Dwight Macdonald recently described Bell as a congenital centrist... ...I can do no other.'" Perhaps it is a measure of the ultimate limitations of centrism as a political philosophy that it so obscures the central, utterly irresolvable dilemma of politics...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10149
END OF IDEOLOGY?
To the Editors: In his review of Touraine's book The Post-Industrial Society (NYR, April 6), Tom Bottomore writes that his description does not differ widely from formulations by Brzezinski and myself and then goes on to say: "Brzezinski and Bell however conceive it as a society in which major social divisions have been overcome [here there is a footnote to Aron] …and the general course of social development is determined by a relatively harmonious process of economic growth." And here there is a footnote reference to Brzezinski. But these are not my views and what Mr. Bottomore has done is to make an amalgam on the basis, I suspect, of the general views attributed to the "end of ideology" theory and the fact that Brzezinski has acknowledged that my work on the post-industrial society stimulated his thinking. Regarding "the end of ideology," which was published twelve years ago, and dealt specifically, as its subtitle indicated, with the 1950s, if Mr. Bottomore would read my last chapter he would see that I said specifically that there is always an emotional hunger and yearning for ideology and that these impulses are always present among young intellectuals. Regarding the theory of post-industrial society, I first began propounding these ideas in 1962 and have explored different dimensions in almost a dozen essays since. A number of these essays have stated specifically that the onset of such a society inevitably creates new kinds of social divisions. My long monograph (in the volume Indicators of Social Change, edited by Sheldon and Moore for the Russell Sage Foundation) sketches the class structure of this emerging society; my discussion of the student revolt in the middle and late Sixties is attributed, in part, to the "organizational harnesses" that a post-industrial society imposes with its concept of career, as a new kind of work harness was created by the industrial revolution; the divisions between a new scientific class and a working class are discussed in an essay in Survey (London), Spring, 1971, etc., etc. These essays have appeared in diverse places and I have found, on a number of occasions, that critics have attributed views to me which they have picked up secondhand or, as seemingly the case with Mr. Bottomore, by amalgam. In any event, readers may be able to judge at first hand since Basic Books will be publishing at the end of the year a book of my own entitled The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Daniel Bell
Tom Bottomore replies: I am sorry if I have misrepresented Daniel Bell's views. However, I should make clear that my brief comment was not based upon Mr. Bell's earlier writings on the "end of ideology," but mainly upon the more recent exposition of his ideas in the essay on "post-industrial society" in The Public Interest (Winter and Spring, 1967). The other essays to which he refers in his letter do not seem to me to change the general picture. What Mr. Bell does is to describe, as I said in my comment, a relatively harmonious process of economic growth, directed by a "knowledge elite." Of course, he recognizes that there will be some sectional conflicts—for example, between the technical intelligentsia and the literary intellectuals, or between professional administrators and technical specialists (see his contribution to Indicators of Social Change, edited by Sheldon and Moore, pp. 199-200)—but he does not envisage any fundamental social conflict between those who dominate society and those who are dominated. Thus, quite unlike Touraine, he does not conceive the possibility that a new radical movement may develop which will continue in another form the working class and socialist movement of the past hundred years. In his essay on "Labor in the Post-Industrial Society" (Dissent, Winter, 1972) Mr. Bell makes his own position unmistakably clear. Industrial society in the West, he says, was marked by three distinctive features: "the growth of the large corporation…the imprint of the machine and its rhythms on the character of work; and labor conflict, as the form of polarized class conflict, which threatened to tear society apart" (p. 187. Note well the profoundly conservative sense of this expression "tear society apart"; a socialist would say that class conflict was, and is, a positive factor in the creation of a new society). Mr. Bell goes on to say that "All three of these elements are markedly changed in the post-industrial society"; and he sums up his view of class divisions by arguing that while labor issues may become "increasingly salient and even rancorous" (in the economic sphere), and while "some unions may even turn from concern with income and consumption to problems of production and the character of work…it is unlikely that these will become ideological or 'class' issues" (p. 189). In short, Mr. Bell does just what I said he did. He denies the existence, or likely emergence, of profound social divisions and "class" politics. He even reaffirms in this most recent article the old "end of ideology" thesis, in spite of the disclaimer in his letter. On the evidence of these essays Mr. Bell remains what he was in the 1950s, and what I always took him to be: namely, a conservative technocrat.
Originally published in 1960, this collection of essays focuses on the protean nature of American society and the decay of Marxism and other systematic ideologies in the West...Arthur Schlesinger Jr. [has] admired the book's 'unflagging confidence, trenchancy, and authority.'
A very polished book. The overall argument on the relationship of declining religious and rising national feeling is highly appropriate and particularly significant. Bell is obviously completely conversant with recent work by Habermas, Chartier, Gordon, Baker, and Crow, to name but a few authors whose findings he weaves into his own purpose. I was also taken with his thought on the relationship between national feeling in France and the awareness of France's changing place in the world, and with that, of Britain's surprisingly swift advance from 1688 to the middle decades of the eighteenth century. His pages on 'Great Men' as the vehicles of national sentiment are likewise very thoughtful.
Praise for earlier editions:
No one could consider himself politically literate without an intimate knowledge of the issues foreseen in The End of Ideology.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/BELINY_R.html |
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