Daniel Bell (born May 10, 1919, New York, New York, USA - died January 25, 2011, Cambridge, Mass.) Is an American sociologist and journalist who used sociological theory to reconcile what he believes to be were the inherent contradictions of capitalist societies. He introduced the concept of a mixed economy, uniting private and state elements.
Biography
He was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a family of Jewish immigrant workers from Eastern Europe. His father died when Daniel was eight months old and his family lived in poor conditions throughout his childhood. For him, politics and intellectual life were closely intertwined even in his early years. His experience was formed in Jewish intellectual circles: she was a member of the Socialist League of Youth from the age of thirteen. Later, he became part of the radical political environment of City College, where he was close to the Marxist circle, which also included Irving Kristol. Daniel Bell received a bachelor's degree in social sciences from City College in New York in 1938 and studied sociology at Columbia University during 1939. During the 1940s, Bell's socialist inclinations became increasingly anti-communist.
Career
Bell has been a journalist for over 20 years. As editor-in-chief of The New Leader (1941–44) and one of the editors of Udacha magazine (1948–58), he wrote a lot on various social topics. He began academic teaching, first at the University of Chicago in the mid-1940s, and then at Columbia in 1952. After serving in Paris (1956–57) as director of the Congress Workshop program for cultural freedom, he received his doctorate from Columbia University (1960), where he was appointed professor of sociology (1959–69). In 1969, Daniel Bell became a professor of sociology at Harvard University, where he remained until 1990.
From the mid-1950s until his death in 2011, he combined very active scientific research with lecturing, the work of a journalist, and political activity.
Proceedings
Three major books by Daniel Bell: The Coming Post-Industrial Society (1973), The End of Ideology (1960), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). His works represent a significant contribution to the sociology of modernity, thanks to a general analysis of social and cultural trends and revisions of leading social theories. His work was based on an early rejection of the Marxist scheme of radical social transformation caused by a conflict of classes. This has been replaced by a Weberian emphasis on bureaucratization and the frustration of modern life with the depletion of dominant ideologies enshrined in socialist and liberal utopias. The growth of knowledge-based services rather than private capital, coupled with a hectic hedonistic culture of consumption and self-realization, has opened up a new world in which the relationship between economics, politics and culture, and political strategies needs to be rethought.
The sociologist Daniel Bell, like Weber, was impressed by the multifaceted complexity of social change, but, like Durkheim, he was haunted by the uncertain place of religion and the sacred in an increasingly profane world. Sociology and social intellectual life of the scientist were aimed at solving these basic problems for more than sixty five years.
Daniel Bell's extensive conclusion reflects his interest in political and economic institutions and how they shape a person. Among his books are Marxist Socialism in the United States (1952; reprinted in 1967), Radical Law (1963) and Reform of General Education (1966), in which he tried to determine the relationship between science, technology and capitalism .
He received many awards for his work, including the American Sociological Association (ASA) Award (1992), the Talcott Parsons Award of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) for Social Sciences (1993) and the French Government Tocqueville Award (1995).
Daniel Bell Postindustrial Society
He describes its occurrence as follows.
The phrase “postindustrial society” is currently widely used to describe the extraordinary changes taking place in the social structure of the developing postindustrial world, which does not completely replace the agrarian and industrial worlds (although it transforms them in a significant way), but represents new principles of innovation, new ways of social organization and new classes in society.
Idea content
The main expansion in modern society is “social services”, primarily healthcare and education. Both that and another is today the main means of increasing productivity in society: education by advancing towards the acquisition of skills, especially literacy and numeracy; health, reducing the incidence and making people more adapted to work. For him, a new and central feature of post-industrial society is the codification of theoretical knowledge and a new attitude of science to technology. Every society exists on the basis of knowledge and the role of language in the transfer of knowledge. But only in the twentieth century did it become possible to see the codification of theoretical knowledge and the development of self-conscious research programs in the deployment of new knowledge.
Social change
In the preface to the new 1999 edition of his Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell described the changes that were important in his opinion.
- A decrease in the percentage of labor force (of the total population) employed in production.
- Professional changes. The most striking change in the nature of work is an extraordinary increase in professional and technical employment and a relative decrease in skilled and semi-skilled workers.
- Property and education. The traditional way to gain a place and privileges in society was through inheritance — a family farm, business, or occupation. Today, education has become the basis of social mobility, especially with the expansion of professional and technical jobs, and even entrepreneurship now requires higher education.
- Financial and human capital. In economic theory, before capital was considered mainly as financial, accumulated in the form of money or land. Human is currently regarded as an essential feature in understanding the strength of society.
- “Intelligent technology” (based on mathematics and linguistics), which uses algorithms (decision rules), programming models (software) and simulations to launch new “high technologies”, comes to the fore.
- The infrastructure of the industrial society was transport. The infrastructure of the post-industrial society is communication.
- The theory of knowledge of value: an industrial society is based on a labor theory of value, and the development of industry occurs with the help of labor-saving devices that replace capital with labor. Knowledge is a source of invention and innovation. This creates added value and increases returns to scale and often saves capital.