The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  The six chapters of this book are interrelated, as I have indicated, by an exploration of diverse themes that rotate, so to speak, like a pin-wheel, rather than give a linear exposition of an argument.

  Chapter 1 is a discussion of theories of social development in advanced industrial society. The starting point, necessarily, is Marx, but in two rather unfamiliar ways. The conventional view of the future of capitalism is derived from Volume I of Capital, in which Marx predicted the centralization of enterprise, the polarization of society into two classes, and the inevitable economic crisis of the capitalist system. But much less well known is a highly different and fascinating scheme of social development that Marx laid out piecemeal in Volume III; there he predicted the separation of ownership from control in the management of enterprises; the rise of a white-collar administrative class which would become disproportionate to the industrial working class; and new modes of the availability of capital through the centralization of the banking system. The development of capitalism has in fact followed Marx’s second schema, not his first. The difference between the two is that in Volume I Marx was positing a “pure” theory of capitalism, as a simplified model, divorced from the complications of an existing reality; in Volume III he was dealing with actual empirical tendencies.

  The second way in which Marx becomes relevant is that in his view of the economic substructure of society, the mode of production was divided into two parts—the social relations of production (property) and the forces or techniques of production (machinery). In the development of capitalism, he thought, the social relations would become most central, leading to a highly polarized class struggle. But that polarization has not taken place, and what has become most important is the emphasis on technique and industrialization. The theory of industrial society, which has been advanced most notably by Raymond Aron, takes off from the second of these two aspects of Marx’s theory of the mode of production.

  The theories of social development in the West—those of Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Emil Lederer, Joseph Schumpeter, Raymond Aron—are, as I try to show, “dialogues ’ with these different schemata of Marx. The essential point of difference comes in the theory of bureaucracy, of which Max Weber has been the master. For Weber, socialism and capitalism were not contradictory systems but, from the imperatives of functional rationality, two variants of the same social type, bureaucracy. Industrial development in the Soviet Union has followed Marx’s dimension of “technique,” but along the lines of bureaucratic development predicted by Weber. The confrontation with Bureaucracy, and the new class it spawns, was the problem for Trotsky in confronting the fruits of the Russian Revolution.

  Today both systems, Western capitalist and Soviet socialist, face the consequences of the scientific and technological changes which are revolutionizing social structure. Communist theorists have shied away from the implications of these changes, except for the remarkable study of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science, under Radovan Richta, which emerged during the Prague “thaw.” Contrary to most Communist theorists, Richta acknowledges the possibility of “interest” if not “class” conflicts between the new scientific-professional stratum and the working class in socialist society.

  In accepting the model of industrial society as the common framework of Western social development, the first chapter sketches the major differences between pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial society as a basis for comparative analysis of social structures. The concluding section provides an overall view of the concept of postindustrial society which is developed in the subsequent chapters.

  Chapter 2 explores, within the framework of the United States, two of the five major dimensions of the post-industrial society: the change from a goods-producing to a service economy, and the changes in the occupational slopes, wherein the professional and technical class emerges as the predominant occupational group in the post-industrial society. Within that context, a number of themes are explored, dealing largely with the future of the working class: the theories of the “new working class”; the historical strength of trade unionism as a blue-collar force and its increasing difficulties in achieving future goals, such as control of work, within the straits of a service economy and foreign competition.

  The dimensions of knowledge and technology are the themes of Chapter 3. The initial problem, which arises from the changing nature of the two, has to do with the pace of change. There are multiple confusions about this idea because few people have ever been able to define exactly what is changing. In terms of technology, probably more substantial change was introduced in the lives of individuals in the nineteenth century by the railroad, steamship, electricity, and telephone, and in the early twentieth century by radio, automobiles, motion pictures, aviation, and high-speed vertical elevators, than by television and computers, the main technological items introduced in the last twenty-five years. The real effect of the “pace of change” has come not from the various technological items, but from a tightened social framework, which has brought isolated regions and classes of a nation into society, and has multiplied the degree of contact and interaction between persons through the revolutions in communication and transportation. But along with a greater degree of interdependence has come a change of scale—the spread of cities, the growth of organizational size, the widening of the political arena—which has made individuals feel more helpless within larger entities, and which has broadened the span of control over the activities of any organization from a center. The major social revolution of the latter half of the twentieth century is the attempt to master “scale” by new technological devices, whether it be “real-time” computer information or new kinds of quantitative programming.

  Within this context, Chapter 3 seeks to define “knowledge”: to analyze the nature of its exponential growth; to specify the actual ways in which knowledge develops through branching; and to define technology, measure its growth, and specify the modes of technological forecasting. The second half of the chapter is a detailed statistical effort to sketch the structure of the knowledge class—the distributions of professional occupations and the major trends among them —and the allocation of resources for a technical society, which is the distribution of money for research and development.

  The private corporation in capitalist society (or the enterprise in socialist economies) is bound to remain the major organizational mode of society to the end of the century. Given the logic of the firm in both cases—the logic of functional rationality—it becomes less meaningful to talk about capitalism or socialism than about the “economizing” and “sociologizing” modes which are present in both systems. Each of these is a “logic” responsive to a different end. The “economizing” mode is oriented to functional efficiency and the management of things (and men treated as things). The sociologizing mode establishes broader social criteria, but it necessarily involves the loss of efficiency, the reduction of production, and other costs that follow the introduction of non-economic values. Within the context of the United States, Chapter 4 scrutinizes the logic of these two modes and argues that the balance between the two is a primary question for post-industrial society.

  A post-industrial society is one in which there will necessarily be more conscious decision-making. The chief problem is the stipulation of social choices that accurately reflect the “ordering” of preferences by individuals. The Condorect paradox, as developed by Kenneth J. Arrow, argues that theoretically no such social-welfare choice can be created. What remains therefore is bargaining between groups. But in order to bargain, one has to know social benefits and social costs. At present the society has no such mechanisms to do social accounting and to verify social goals. Chapter 5 deals with the adequacy of our concepts and tools for social planning.

  Finally, the significance of the post-industrial society is that:

  1. It strengthens the role of science and cognitive values as a basic institutional necessity of the society;

  2. By making decisions more
technical, it brings the scientist or economist more directly into the political process;

  3. By deepening existing tendencies toward the bureaucratization of intellectual work, it creates a set of strains for the traditional definitions of intellectual pursuits and values;

  4. By creating and extending a technical intelligentsia, it raises crucial questions about the relation of the technical to the literary intellectual.

  In sum, the emergence of a new kind of society brings into question the distributions of wealth, power, and status that are central to any society. Now wealth, power, and status are not dimensions of class, but values sought or gained by classes. Classes are created in a society by the fundamental axes of stratification. The two major axes of stratification in Western society are property and knowledge. Alongside them is a political system that increasingly manages the two and gives rise to temporary elites (temporary in that there is no necessary continuity of power of a specific social group through office, as there is continuity of a family or class through property and the differential advantage of belonging to a meritocracy).

  Chapter 6 thus deals primarily with the relationship between technocratic and political decision-making. Against the dreams of the early technocrats such as Saint-Simon, who hoped that the savants would rule, it becomes clear that political decisions are the central ones in the society and that the relationship of knowledge to power is essentially a subservient one.

  Any new emerging system creates hostility among those who feel threatened by it. The chief problem of the emerging post-industrial society is the conflict generated by a meritocracy principle which is central to the allocation of position in the knowledge society. Thus the tension between populism and elitism, which is already apparent, becomes a political issue in communities. A second set of problems arises from the historic independence of the scientific community and the contradictory problems generated by its tradition of autonomy, its increasing dependence on government for research funds, and the service it is called upon to perform. These questions come to a head in the university, which is the primary institution of the post-industrial society. And finally, the deepest tensions are those between the culture, whose axial direction is anti-institutional and antinomian, and the social structure which is ruled by an economizing and technocratic mode. It is this tension which is ultimately the most fundamental probem of the post-industrial society. These questions are sketched in the Coda.

  What I am arguing in this book is that the major source of structural change in society—the change in the modes of innovation in the relation of science to technology and in public policy—is the change in the character of knowledge: the exponential growth and branching of science, the rise of a new intellectual technology, the creation of systematic research through R & D budgets, and, as the calyx of all this, the codification of theoretical knowledge.

  The attitude to scientific knowledge defines the value system of a society. The medieval conception of natural science was that of “forbidden knowledge.” The divines feared that “knowledge puffeth up” and that it “hath somewhat of the serpent.” During the Christian centuries, “nature,” in quite a special sense, had been consigned to the Satanic order. The Faustus legend used by Marlowe testified to the fascinated dread of natural science for the Middle Ages.53 By the turn of the seventeenth century, the belief in man’s expansive power had begun to replace the earlier vision of fear. In Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, which he intended to replace the mythical Atlantis of Plato’s Timaeus, the King is no longer the philosopher but the research scientist. And on the frangible island of Bensalem, the most important building, Salomon’s House, is not a church but a research institute, “the noblest foundation ... that ever was upon the earth and the lantern of this kingdom.” Salomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days Works, is a state institution created “for the production of great and marvelous works for the benefit of man.” As one of the “Fathers” of Salomon’s House describes its purpose: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motion of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” 54

  Until now, this boundless ambition has ruled the quest for knowledge. At first man sought to conquer the natural order; and in this he has almost succeeded. In the last hundred years he has sought to substitute a technical order for the natural order; and in this he is well on his way.55 The post-industrial society, at root, is a recasting of this technical quest in even more powerful form. But now there is a question whether man will or will not want to proceed. This is the openness of history.

  CHAPTER

  I

  * * *

  From Industrial to

  Post-Industrial Society:

  Theories of Social

  Development

  THE sociologist is always tempted to play the prophet—and if not the prophet, the seer. From 1850 to 1860, as he sat each morning in the reading room of the British Museum, Marx thought he heard in every faint sound of riot or each creaking downturn of the business cycle the rumblings of revolution and the abrupt transformation of society. In this respect, Marx’s anxious awaiting was squarely in the center of the preoccupation that attended the rise of sociology since its beginnings in the nineteenth century: namely, the scanning of the historical skies for the portents of “the new class” which would overturn the existing social order. Henri de Saint-Simon, the master of August Comte and one of the fathers of modern sociology, initiated this quest in 1816 when he began publishing, irregularly, the periodical L’Industrie (popularizing there the word industrialism) and describing in it the society of the future. Past society, said Saint-Simon, had been military society in which the chief figures were priests, warriors, and feudal lords—the “parasites” and consumers of wealth. The new industrial society, he said, would be ruled by the producers—the engineers and the entrepreneurs, the “coming men” of the times.

  Different times, different men, different images. Writing in 1840, Tocqueville predicted the possible outcome of the new mass democracy he saw emerging in modern society:

  A multitude of similar and equal individuals are working to procure themselves petty and vulgar satisfactions. ... Above these men there rears a monstrous tutelary power [the state] which provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and the trouble of living.1

  Thirty years later, the historian Jacob Burckhardt, observing the transformation of German society, wrote in a letter to a friend:

  the military machine ... is bound to become the model of existence ...the military state will have to turn “industrialist.” These agglomerations of men in the great factories [will live under] a degree of definite and superintended poverty where everyone would wear the uniform and where the day would begin and end with the drum-roll; logically this is what should come.2

  Fifty years after Burckhardt, Thorstein Veblen returned to the Saint-Simonian theme. Revolution in the twentieth century, he said, could only be an “industrial overturn,” and if a revolution came in the United States—the if is italicized for as a practiced skeptic he was highly dubious of that prospect—it would not be led by a minority political party, as in Soviet Russia, which was a loose-knit and backward industrial region, nor by the trade unions, who were only “votaries of the dinner pail,” but by the production engineers who were the indispensable “General Staff” of the industrial system. “These main lines of revolutionary strategy,” he wrote in The Engineers and the Price System, “are lines of technical organization and industrial management; essential lines of industrial engineering; such as will fit the organization to take care of the highly technical industrial system that constitutes the indispensable material foundations of any modern civilized community.”3

  What is extraordinary about these efforts to sketch the contours of the new age
is the glimpse of truth each contains but also the shadow of complexity which falsifies the prediction. As Burckhardt added wryly, immediately after his own prediction of what “logically” should come: “I know enough history to know that things do not always work out logically.”4

  Our time, too, has not lacked for sociological seers. The habits of the past have been compelling, and even though previous experience warns of caution, the sense of social change is so vivid and the changes in social structure so dramatic that each sociological theorist of any pretension carries a distinctive conceptual map of the social terrain and a set of signposts to the society ahead.

  For the new states or underdeveloped countries the prognosis has been standard: they will become industrialized, modernized, and westernized, even though it is less clear that they will be communist or socialist, socially transformed by elites (military or political) or revitalized by masses. One skeptic, Clifford Geertz, has remarked that the category “transitional society” may become a permanent category in the social sciences. Yet for the tiers monde, though development may be long and arduous, there is a sense of a turning point in history and the beginning of a new age.

  For the advanced industrial societies however the picture is more clouded. Every seer has a sense that an age is ending (how many “crises,” oh Lord, have we experienced), but there is little agreement as to what may be ahead. This common apocalyptic note of a “sense of an ending” is, as Frank Kermode has noted, the distinctive literary image of the time.

  In sociology this sense of marking time, of living in an interregnum, is nowhere symbolized so sharply as in the widespread use of the word post—a paradox since it is a prefix denoting posteriority —to define, as a combined form, the age in which we are moving. For Ralf Dahrendorf, we are living in a post-capitalist society. What counts in industrial society, he says, is not ownership but authority, and with the diminution in the legal ownership of the means of production, there is, in consequence, a break between the economic and the political orders. The old industrial conflicts of bourgeoisie and proletariat, he says, are “institutionally isolated” and there is little carry-over from the job to other areas of life. (“If it is correct that with industry itself industrial conflict has been institutionally isolated in post-capitalist societies, it follows that his occupational role has lost its comprehensive moulding force for the social personality of the industrial worker, and that it determines only a limited sector of his social behavior.”) Authority is autonomous in each realm: