Recently I re-read a couple of Daniel Bell books – just finished a volume he edited with Irving Kristol called 'Capitalism Today'. The striking think about the essays by economists such as Bob Solow, Robert Gordon and martin Bronfenbrenner is that there are remarkable parallels between the late 70s and today. This struck me to when I first started my re-doing Bell phase with The Post-Industrial Society, a couple of years ago, but has become more striking now the crisis is upon us. The terms in which people wrote then about the turning point in capitalism are very similar to those being used now. There's a lesson for us there but I'm not sure whether it's about the severity of the crisis or the resilience of capitalism.
Last post for a few days as I'm taking a well-deserved break in the Scottish highlands, with Team of Rivals for reading.
Diane, you're right in this. It's rather disappointing to find that mention of Bell in certain sociological circles is rather frowned upon. For example I think the work of Krishnan Kumar, especially his book 'From Post-Industrialism to Post-Modern Society', is typical of the way Bell has been dismissed. I think that one of the really interesting parts of Bell's analysis back in the seventies of what he called post-industrialism was his tripartite divisions of society in to separate realms whose principles, being different, meant that change in one did not necessarily effect the other realms. So, for example, changes in the techno-economic realm where innovation supersedes whatever preceded it according to the principle of efficiency is not mirrored automatically in the cultural realm. This has largely been ignored, even by those who are sympathetic but seems to me to be enormously suggestive of why some of the predicted benefits of technological change have not appeared.
I agree with you although the point has been made by others in different terminology – perhaps it's the ideological baggage Bell carries that does him a disservice in getting full credit for his foresight. The bit I think he missed was globalisation in all its late 20th century glory.