Bell Daniel Biography

At the end of high school, he studied at the city college of New York, who graduated from the degree of bachelor in the field of natural and social sciences, after which he studied at Columbia University for another year. Most of the next twenty years he worked as a journalist and editor, but in the end of the X returned to the Columbia University, where he defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “End of ideology: about the exhaustion of political ideas in the years” “The end of ideology: on the exhaustical Ideas in The Fifties, which formed the basis of the book of the same name, which brought him wide fame.

After he taught sociology in Columbia from for a year, and then at Harvard University from a year until his resignation of the year. Daniel Bell, along with R. Aron, E. Shilz and a number of other American theorists, became known in years as one of the authors of the concept of deideologization, or the “end of ideologies”. In its first major work, the “End of ideology” “The end of ideology”, which created him a reputation as one of the leading American theorists in the field of social sciences, made a prediction of a sharp decrease in the significance of the universal ideologies of modern societies.

According to Bella, which defines ideology as a “historically determined system of beliefs that combines ideas with emotions, seeks to turn them into levers of social influence and, transforming ideas, transforms people also”, in the modern world, traditional ideological systems that arose in the 19th century and centered on the concepts of humanism, historical progress, human and social emancipation, and Those, have exhausted their potential and gradually go into the past.

Bell contrasted the liberal commitment to moderate social reformism, free market and individual freedoms with similar “programmatic” ideologies that claim to be valid. At the end of the 10ths, Bell proposed the concept of a “post -industrial society”, in which he justified the transformation of the industrial capitalist society as a result of the progress of science and technology into a new social system, different from the “traditional” industrial society and free from its contradictions.

In the book “The Mounting Post-Industrial Society” “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society”, which Bell himself called “an attempt to social prediction”, he put forward the thesis that in modern society there is a transition from the “shag civilization” of an industrial economy, based on corporate capitalism, to The “post -industrial society”, based on Knowledge Society, in which the central place will take the production and dissemination of information and knowledge.

All these changes, according to Bell, entail a deep transformation of the social landscape. Daniel Bell claimed that the transition to the “post -industrial society” would be accompanied by deep social changes, the main among which he considered the mitigation of social, and above all class, antagonisms, ensuring the “social world and order in abundance”, as well as the implementation of political discussions on the issues most significant for society.

This optimistic scenario of the development of modern society undergoes the transformation in its works “Cultural contradictions of capitalism”, in which Bell formulates the concept of multidimensionality of the social organism and develops the idea that in modern Western society there are serious unresolved conflicts between three “axial principles”: economic, oriented towards technical and economic efficiency, political, political, political, political focused on social and political equality, and cultural, focused on individual self -realization and consumer hedonism.

Since individual spheres of modern society have a certain independence, the sphere of culture with its irrational and hedonistic modernism may conflict with the “axial principle” of the economy, focused on efficiency and instrumental rationality. Therefore, Bell explains the crisis trends in the development of society by the conflict between the economy and society developing in accordance with the criteria of economic and administrative rationality, and the modernist culture that contributes to the destruction of their moral foundations.

The consequence of this situation is political instability, supplemented by economic instability. Thus, the “post -industrial society”, due to growing contradictions, may come to the danger of an even deeper gap between cultural and social life. The best means to overcome these crisis trends, according to Bella, are the free market system and the principles of order and sustainability based on the philosophy of liberal neoconservativeism.Bell turns to the discussion of the problems related to the complication and diversification of social and cultural life - the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” “The Cultural Contrandictions of Capitalism”, “The winding path” of “The Wining Passage”, as well as in numerous publications in the numerous publications in periodicals.

Bell, Daniel: The End of Ideology Bell, Daniel: The Winding Passage Daniel Bell: the coming post -industrial society. Daniel Bell: Social framework of the information society. Daniel Bell together with V. Inozemtsev: the era of disunity. Weekend information.