Most Sundays I meet a couple of friends for a mini-philosophical salon (ok, a drink and chat), and last week Richard the Philosopher of Vagueness in Education (yes really!) asked if he could borrow Daniel Bell's 'The Coming of Post Industrial Society' from me.
I first read this as a student in the late 1970s & put it out of my mind until I was being interviewed by a nasty neocon columnist in the US about one of my books, Paradoxes of Prosperity. What was I saying, the nasty neocon asked, that Daniel Bell hadn't said better and 30 years earlier? When I recovered from the mauling, it was time to re-read the book, which did indeed turn out to be astonishingly prescient. Bell had underestimated two things about modern capitalism: the scale and scope of the organisational and social change being driven by new technologies; and globalisation, the way the reshaping of capitalism would cross borders. Still, it remains an impressive book, and one of its key points – the tension between technocratic decision-making by experts in a complex society and the pressures for ever more democracy and populism – is spot on.
Anyway, I tracked down the book on my shelves for Richard the Philosopher but decided I need to read it again in preparation for my next book. As his birthday's coming up I thought I might buy it for him, and found it's only available used, as are the other Daniel Bell titles I hunted for. I've ordered both Post Industrial Society and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (from O'Donoghue Books in Hay on Wye, via Abe – Sean O'Donoghue is a specialist social science bookseller), so if you're reading Richard the Philosopher, you'll have the book soon. But what a surprise to find Bell out of print. Even though those of a neocon persuasion obviously still love him, for me he's an interesting thinker full of insight about capitalism. Don't we need a bit of that these days?
The Enlightened Economist
Economics and business books
People get confused by Bell. Too often they drag their thoughts to cold war politics and position him as a cold warrior of a particularl regresive right wing politics. This is just not credible. His analysis of post-industrialism is still cogent and relevant and alternatives – post-Fordists and post-stricturalists – are beginning to seem a lot less useful than some of the details of Bell's aproach. I'm with Diane on this though – we need to go back and start reading him again – especially his controversial tri-partite division of society into seperate realms – techno/economic, political and cultural. It's been too quickly dismissed as implausible. (Even defenders of Bell tend to leave it out!)