The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  ... the edifice for the new bondage stands everywhere in readiness. ... All the economic weather signs point in the direction of diminishing freedom. ... He who desires to be a weather vane of a tendency of development had better abandon these old-fashioned ideals as quickly as possible.30

  Thus, for Weber, capitalism and socialism were not two contradictory systems (which they might be conceived of if one used property as the axis of difference) but two faces of a common type—bureaucracy. And for Weber, bureaucracy was identical with rationalized administration and the class on which it was built, the clerical and managerial stratum in politics as well as in the economy. The future, then, belonged not to the working class but to the bureaucracy.

  Before the First World War orthodox socialist theory believed that the proletariat would expand and that the middle class was destined to perish. In Germany, the “old” middle class of independent entrepreneurs, small farmers, and self-employed professionals did begin to decline, but so, too, did the industrial working class: from 1895 to 1925, the proportion of wage laborers in industry as compared to the labor force as a whole dropped from 56.8 percent to 45.1 percent.31 Between the two a new stratum was emerging—the white-collar salaried employee, clerical and professional; and their number was growing steadily. How was this to be explained?

  The first person to call attention to this new sociological phenomenon and to study it consistently was Emil Lederer, the social analyst and editor of the influential Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozial-politik. In an essay in 1912 Lederer called this group “the new middle class.” Historically the bourgeoisie had been called the middle class because it stood between the land-owning class and the working class. With the decline of the gentry the grand bourgeoisie became the ruling class of great financiers and the industrialists; but between them and the working class—and now taking over the term middle class—was what Marx called the petty bourgeoisie: the small trader and independent small businessman, the self-employed professional and independent artisan. Now, within the enterprise, in the position between employers and workers was a new stratum. Lederer called it a “new middle class,” less for its function than from its social evaluation which was based upon their own self-esteem and the esteem of others. “This middle position between the two classes,” Lederer wrote, “a negative characteristic rather than definite technical function, is the social mark of the salaried employees and establishes their social character in their own consciousness and in the estimation of the community.” 32

  A year later, in an essay on “Zum sozialpsychischen Habitus der Gegenwert,” Lederer spelled out the psychological differences between the classes, in the context of the changeover of society from a traditional to a rational mode of economic conduct. What was distinctive, he said, was the varied life “rhythms” of the different social strata in modern economic organization. For the manual worker life is irregular, his existence atomized by external forces such as business conditions; the week, at best, is the unit of his economic life. For the salaried worker there is a steadiness of life which is shaped by the expectation of a yearly salary; his “economic unit” is the month. The civil servant regards the year as the axis of his life, but in addition he looks forward to regular promotions as his horizon for the future. It is in these different “rhythms” that Lederer found the sociological distinctiveness of the different strata.33

  The major theoretical analysis of this new phenomenon was made by Lederer and Jacob Marschak in a famous essay, “Der Neue Mittelstand,” which appeared in 1926 in the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik.34 Here the analysis was put in the framework of a “theory of historical development,” and on the basis of revising existing theory of “historical classes.” “The war and the revolution,” the authors point out,

  gave a tremendous impetus to the growth of the salaried employees’ class ... for war economy means the expansion of big business, as well as extensive “organization,” or bureaucratization which multiplies the functions of the salaried employee. But neither the termination of the war ... nor the abandonment of the war economy re-established the social stratification of the pre-war period.

  In addition,

  both state and municipalities have extended their activities by operating industrial enterprises under direct management. These tendencies towards municipalization and nationalization have brought into being legions of public servants which, properly speaking, are neither the consequence of the capitalistic system nor of the industrialization of the national economy.

  These tendencies, the authors pointed out, derive from the “large expansion of the manifold functions which the modern ‘service state’ performs.” 35

  After a detailed statistical analysis of the growth of the salaried employee—as a technical worker, clerical employee, salesperson, and public employee—the authors concluded:

  It follows from the statistical data ... that the rapid growth of the employees’ class must be regarded as a consequence of a continuous economic development, particularly of big business, and of the new methods of business organization. ... The rapid increase of the employees enhances their effective power and activity as a group, particularly in the large cities where we find them concentrated in large numbers. ... All these facts have as a further consequence that the employees, by their sheer numbers, offer a counterweight to the increasing numerical strength of the laboring class.36

  For more than a decade, a fierce debate raged in German sociology about the characterization of this “new middle class.” Left-wing writers regarded the salaried employee as simply a “white-collar proletariat” whose “mass character” would lead to the adoption of working-class attitudes. Some optimistic sociologists saw in the “new middle class” a factor for social solidarity which would act as a balancing group between the employers and industrial workers and provide cohesion for the enterprise, if not the society. Theodor Geiger predicted that the new middle class would be “crushed” between the capitalist class and the industrial proletariat, while Schumpeter argued that because of the increase in the number of salaried employees, the world of the future would be a world of bureaucracy.37 Those who saw the “new middle class” only in economic terms, as did Lederer and Marschak, predicted that a position “between the classes” was no longer possible and that in a society increasingly self-conscious of group interests so that employment relations were arbitrated by law, the new middle class would organize itself collectively and probably ally itself with the trade union movement.

  But the growing number of empirical studies made one thing clear: that the new middle class, in part because of its social origins (most of the white-collar workers were recruited from the declining older middle class), in part because of the ethos of “clean cuff occupations” was stubbornly determined to maintain a self-image and a self-esteem which was “middle class.” 38 And when the depression hit, and Hans Fallada asked the question in the title of his novel, Little Man, What Now?, the answer given by the new middle class, like the old middle class, when the center and liberal parties collapsed, was by and large to shift their support to the Nazis rather than to the working-class parties.39 Thus, the “new middle class,” an expected product of economic and social development, had an unexpected but distinctive political consequence which had not been anticipated either by the Marxists or by the sociologists in Germany.

  Marx had defined the mode of production at any given historical stage as a correspondence between the forces of production (technical equipment and organization of labor) and the social relations derived from the character of the ownership of the means of production. The post-Marxist separation of manager from owner, the bureaucratization of enterprise, the complication of occupational structure, all made the once clear-cut picture of property domination and social relations ambiguous. Marx had asserted, further, that the centralization of production and its concentration would act as a “fetter” upon the production of goods, but in the hundred years since Capital the Western world had s
een a burst of productivity and technological growth undreamed of by any of the Utopians of the time.

  It was this very ambiguity of the character of the social relations, and the success of technology, which brought into focus the “forces” of production and revived the concept of industrial society as an alternative to the distinction between capitalism and socialism. Just as, in relation to the problem of authority, the concept of bureaucratization saw capitalism and socialism not as different but as variants of a common type, so too, on the issue of social development, the concept of industrial society subsumed the two social systems under a common rubric. As Raymond Aron, who, more than any other modern writer, is identified with the concept of industrial society, points out in his lectures:

  The sociological problem which has provided the main theme of this book [18 Lectures on Industrial Society] is that posed by Marx and Marxism—especially as the latter is expounded in Capital. ... [Marx] tried to understand the laws of its development ... the central phenomenon in Marx’s view was that of accumulation. He believed that the essence of capitalism was to be found in the accumulation of capital. By choosing economic growth as the central subject of this investigation I have taken up the Marxist theme of accumulation in the terminology and using the concepts of modern economics. ...

  Instead of capitalism I have chosen industrial society (or technical, scientific or rationalized society) as the principal historical concept. ... Beginning with this concept of industrial society I have then distinguished several different types of industrial society and have introduced the ideas of models of growth and phases of growth. These four concepts, industrial society, types of industrial society, models of growth and phases of growth represent the successive stages of the theory.40

  If one focuses the problem on stages of development and economic growth, the paradox is compounded, for while there are communist states in the world today, none of them have replaced or succeeded any capitalist society (and none are socialist in the egalitarian sense envisaged by the founding fathers). And, having taken over power in economically backward countries, these communist regimes concentrate primarily on the function which Marx historically attributed to capitalism, namely, the development of the productive forces—the technological equipment—of the society, and usually by forced modes of capital accumulation. (In any precise sense, because these are hierarchically stratified and politically coordinated societies organized around profit, even though for the State rather than for private purposes, they come closest to Marx’s glimpse of “state capitalism” as a possible social form, which he hinted at in volume III of Capital, than any other appropriate sociological designation.)

  In that historical sense “communism,” then, is not a “next” stage in history but simply one of a number of alternative modes of industrialization. What these regimes create are “industrial” societies, but through specifically political, rather than market, mechanisms.

  The emergence since the end of the Second World War of more than fifty new states, most of them economically “underdeveloped,” committed to the goal of economic growth, has tended to reinforce a distinction between pre-industrial and industrial societies. As Aron points out:

  My visit to Asia helped to convince me that the major concept of our time is that of industrial society. Europe, as seen from Asia, does not consist of two fundamentally different worlds, the Soviet World and the Western World. It is one single reality: industrial civilization. Soviet and capitalist societies are only two species of the same genus, or two versions of the same social type, progressive industrial society.41

  Aron organized the concept of industrial society around the axis of economic growth. If one takes a broader, societal view, the sociological concept of industrial society may be seen as a compound of four themes which are associated, principally, with four thinkers: St. Simon, Durkheim, Weber, and Colin Clark.

  For St. Simon (and Comte who followed him) industrial society was to be contrasted to military society. The latter was organized around plunder, waste, display; the former around the orderly output of goods. For St. Simon, there were four dimensions to an industrial society: it was concerned with production; its methods were those of order, certainty and precision; it would be organized by “new men,” engineers, industrialists, planners; and it would be based on knowledge. What one had here, in short, was the prescription of the “New Atlantis” that Francis Bacon had once prophesied.

  For Durkheim, the world of “organic solidarity” was a world of specialization, complementarity, and interdependence. The ruling principle—in Talcott Parsons’s emendation of Durkheim—is “structural differentiation.” In industrial society, there is a separation of the economic system from the family system, the work place from the home. With the breakup of the traditional “collective conscience,” core beliefs are to be organized around occupational codes and mediated through professional ethics.

  For Weber, the theme is rationalization and universalism. A single ethic and style begins to pervade all society: these are the norms of impersonality, the emphasis on performance and achievement, the criteria of efficiency based on least cost, and the introduction of a rational calculus (a Zweckrationalität) in all areas of administration.

  For Colin Clark (as first expressed in his Conditions of Economic Progress, 1940) economic sectors, as defined by the distribution of labor, could be classified as primary (extractive), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services), and the weights of each sector in a society would be a function of the degree of productivity (output per capita) in each sector. Economic progress, thus, was defined as the rate of transfer of labor from one sector to the other, and this rate was a function of the differential productivity between the sectors. In this fashion Clark could account easily for the changeover to industrial society.

  While the phrase “technological imperatives” is too rigid and deterministic, in all industrial societies there are certain common constraints which tend to shape similar actions and force the use of common techniques. For all theorists of industrial society (and to this extent Marx as well) the locus (or primary institution) of the society is the industrial enterprise and the axis of the society is the social hierarchy which derives from the organization of labor around machine production. From this point of view there are some common characteristics for all industrial societies: the technology is everywhere the same; the kind of technical and engineering knowledge (and the schooling to provide these) is the same; classification of jobs and skills is roughly the same. More broadly, one finds that the proportion of technical occupations increases in each society relative to other categories; that the spread of wages is roughly the same (so are the prestige hierarchies); and that management is primarily a technical skill.

  Industrial societies are economizing societies, that is, they are organized around a principle of functional efficiency whose desideratum is to get “more for less” and to choose the more “rational” course of action. Thus a decision to use natural gas rather than coal as an energy fuel will be dictated by comparative costs, and the decision of how to schedule work will depend upon an appropriate combination of materials and skills available. Ideology, to this extent, becomes irrelevant and is replaced by “economics” in the guise of production functions, capital output ratios, marginal efficiency of capital, linear programming and the like. To that extent, too, the distinction between “bourgeois economics” and “socialist economics” fades; and if one is concerned with optimization and maximization, there is no distinction at all.42

  Industrial society, as St. Simon insisted, was the application of technical knowledge to social affairs in a methodical, systematic way. With industrial society, thus, has come the technicien—the French usage is more apt than the English “technician,” for its sense in French is much wider—the trained expert in the applied sciences. It has implied, too, that those who possessed such knowledge would exercise authority —if not power—in the society.

  St. Simon’s vi
sion of industrial society, a vision of pure technocracy, was a system of planning and rational order in which society-would specify its needs and organize the factors of production to achieve them. Industrial society was characterized by two elements, knowledge and organization. Knowledge, he said, was objective. No one had “opinions” on chemistry or mathematics; one either had knowledge or not. The metaphors St. Simon used for organization were an orchestra, a ship and an army, in which each person fulfils a function in accordance with his competence. Although St. Simon clearly outlined the process whereby a nascent bourgeoisie had superseded the feudal nobility, and though he predicted the rise of a large working class, he did not believe that the working class would succeed the bourgeoisie in power. As he tried to show in his sketch of historical development, classes do not rule, for society is always governed by an educated elite. The natural leaders of the working class would therefore be the industrialists and the scientists. He foresaw the dangers of conflict, but did not regard it as inevitable. If an organic society were created, men would accept their place as a principle of justice. The division of labor meant that some men would guide and others would be guided. In a society organized by function and capacity, doctors and engineers and chemists would employ their skills according to objective needs, not in order to gain personal power. These men would be obeyed not because they are masters but because they have technical competence; to be obedient to one’s doctor, after all, is a spontaneous but rational act. For this reason the St. Simonians, in a set of phrases that later were used by Engels, gave their new social hierarchy the slogan, “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his performance,” and the industrial society, as they describe it, was no longer the “rule over men, but the administration of things.”

  The administration of things—the substitution of rational judgment for politics—is the hallmark of technocracy. The evolution of industrial society has emphasized a double aspect of this role, of function, and of method. “The technical employee,” as Lederer and Marschak point out,