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Daniel Bell (born May 10, 1919 in New York City) is a sociologist and a professor emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a director of Suntory Foundation and a scholar in residence of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received honorary degrees from Harvard, the University of Chicago, fourteen universities in the United States, and Keio University, in Japan. Currently he lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife Pearl Bell, a scholar of literary criticism. He has received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the American Sociological Association in 1992, and the Talcott Parsons Prize for the Social Sciences by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993. He was also given the Tocqueville Award by the French government in 1995.

Bell graduated from City College of New York with a bachelor of science and social science. He started his career as a journalist, being a managing editor of The New Leader magazine (1941–1945), a labor editor of Fortune (1948–1958) and later co-editor (with his college friend Irving Kristol) of The Public Interest magazine (1965-1973). In 1960 Columbia University awarded him a Ph.D. degree. He taught sociology first at Columbia (1959–1969) and then at Harvard until his retirement in 1990. Bell also was the visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in 1987. He served as a member of President’s Commission on Technology in 1964–1965 and as member of President’s Commission on a National Agenda for the 1980s in 1979.

Daniel Bell once described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

He is best known for his contributions to post-industrialism. His most influential books are The End of Ideology (1960), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Two of his books, the End of Ideology and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism were listed by the Times Literary Supplement as among the 100 most important books in the second half of the twentieth century. Only Isaiah Berlin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, had two books so listed.

Bell's son, David A. Bell, is a dean and professor of French history at Johns Hopkins University, and his daughter, Jordy Bell, was an academic administrator and teacher of, among other things, U.S. Women's history at Marymount College, Tarrytown, New York, before her retirement in 2005.

The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society Bell outlined a new kind of society - the post-industrial society. He argued that post-industrialism would be information-led and service-oriented. Bell also argued that the post-industrial society would replace the industrial society as the dominant system. There are three components to a post-industrial society, according to Bell:

• a shift from manufacturing to services
• the centrality of the new science-based industries
• the rise of new technical elites and the advent of a new principle of stratification.

Bell also conceptually differentiates between three aspects of the post-industrial society: data, or information describing the empirical world, information, or the organization of that data into meaningful systems and patterns such as statistical analysis, and knowledge, which Bell conceptualizes as the use of information to make judgments. Bell discussed the manuscript of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society with Talcott Parsons before its publication.

External links

• Bell's The End of Ideology chapter 13