The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  But the most important political consequence of all this is the passing of effective power, in almost all political systems, from the legislative and parliamentary bodies to the executive, and the re-emergence of what Bertrand de Jouvenel has called, in his elegant fashion, The Principate. How could it be otherwise when, in the nature of modern politics, foreign policy is no longer “diplomacy” but an unceasing round of strategic maneuver in which crucial decisions have to be taken speedily, and when, because of the new patterns of social change, the very need to plan policies, rather than lay down laws, gives the initiative to the executive?

  In the United States we have seen, in the past twenty-five years, the enormous transformation of the presidency to the Executive Office of the President, with the addition of new staff functions, such as the Bureau of the Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the National Security Council, directly within that office. In the long run, it is not the growth of the personal powers and prestige of the President that is important, but the institution alization of such crucial control and directing functions—as are now carried out by the Budget Bureau and the Council of Economic Advisers—in the executive which reinforces the structural shifts of power.

  Although these essential changes—the new role of the executive (or the charismatic leader), the conflict between technocratic rationality with political bargaining, and the orientation to the future— have been variously described, political theory has not yet absorbed these new circumstances into a new conceptual structure. Although the interest-group model has less and less relevance in allowing us to understand the transformation of America into a mobilized polity, even the later, sophisticated versions of this model—cast in terms of systems, and inputs and outputs21—repeat the same assumptions, using equilibrium rather than “balance of forces” as the flywheel of the model. Instead of models depicting government as a kind of umpire, mediating the inputs provided by conflicting interest groups and allowing them to issue forth in the output of decisions, a more adeuate picture would have to see the presidency as a system capable of ree action, even choosing which interests it allows to become inputs, and the executive itself bargaining—on the basis of technocratic decisions—with various interest groups in the society.22

  Beyond the question of a more adequate empirical model there is the more difficult problem of formulating a normative theory, which—taking into account the ineluctable elements of centralized decision-making, the extension of social or communal choices, and the need for conscious social planning (not to “direct” the society, but to facilitate desired social changes)—can set forth rational criteria consonant with the values of a free society. In the construction of such a theory, other elements of re-conceptualization may have to be taken into account. Such re-conceptualizations, by grouping familiar facts in a new way, may help us identify new problems that will be arising in the communal society.

  NUMBER, INTERACTION, DENSITY

  A mass society is one which is characterized not by large numbers, or rather by numbers alone, but by concentration and density. Large land-mass societies may have large populations, but in the past they were spread out over immense areas of land and were mainly segmental rather than integral in social organization. It is when segmentation breaks down and people come into increasing contact and interaction with each other—in large urban concentrations in the past, or through mass communication today—that the features of a mass society appear.23 Such features are (in the social structure) the divorce of the family from the occupational system, increased specialization, differentiation of function, multiplication of collectivities, hierarchies, formalization of rules, extension of universalism, and (in the culture) the secularization of beliefs, the emphasis on individual experience, the search for novelty and sensation, the syncretism of creeds and forms.24

  The mass society, in short, reflects what I have called in another context “the eclipse of distance.” While the initial changes are created by the new forms of transportation and communication which bring people into ready contact with each other in innumerable ways, the “eclipse of distance” is not only the foreshortening of time and space in flying across continents, or in being in instant communication with any part of the globe by television or radio, it is also, as regards the experienced time of the person, an eclipse of social, esthetic and psychic distance as well.25

  The United States, with all its historical particularity, has in many ways acquired these features of a mass society. Regionalism as a form of cultural segmentation has largely broken down, though some political influences remain. The family-based enterprise (farms, retail establishments, small manufacturing businesses) is of minor importance in the economy. The mobility of individuals, social and spatial, is unprecedented in history, and stupendous.26

  The effects of the increase in number, interaction, and density of population are enormous. Here, taking the communication pattern as a single variable, I shall seek to illustrate it, with two problems.

  The loss of insulating space. If one looks at American history, what strikes one immediately is the tremendous amount of violence, particularly labor violence, that took place over a period of sixty-five years (from 1877, beginning with the railroad strikes, and ending with the outbreak of war at the end of 1941). From any rough set of indicators one chooses—the number of times troops were called out, the number of riots, the number of individuals killed, the amount of sabotage, the number of man-days of work lost, the amounts of money spent by corporations in fighting trade unions—it is highly likely that America suffered more violence than any country in Europe. Yet the United States did escape the political holocausts that wracked European society, and some basic accommodation (formalized in the labor representation on the War Production Board and institutionalized later in the union security clauses established by the War Labor Board) was reached.

  One can identify many factors which account for this difference between American and European society, but surely an important one, particularly before World War I, was what one can call the factor of “insulating space.” One of the distinguishing features of political violence in Europe is that most of it took place close to or at a political center. (What would have happened in France, for example, if the Constituent Assembly had met at Dijon rather than at Versailles, twenty miles from Paris and subject to the pressures of the Paris crowds? Clearly all such if questions are unanswerable, but their formulation allows one to see the possibility of alternative variables.) In the United States, that early violence took place largely at the “perimeters” of the society (in isolated coal-mining communities, in the Chicago and Rocky Mountain areas), and the shock effects had small radial range.

  The introduction of modern mass communication allows us, in many cases forces us, to respond directly and immediately to social issues. To take the first instance of its kind in the 1960s: There is little question that the presence of the television cameras in Selma, Alabama, showing the use of crude violence (snarling police dogs, electrified cattle prods) against the black marchers, aroused an immediate national response which was reflected in the presence of thousands of persons who poured into Selma the following week from all over the country. Without television, it is likely that the shock effect, even if transmitted through news photos and newsreels, would have been dissipated (and that before the rise of the mass media this incident would have never had a national impact).

  One can see this by a crude comparison of two incidents. In the winter of 1893-1894, growing economic distress and mass unemployment brought about the formation of scattered groups of jobless men into “armies” that declared for a “march on Washington” to demand relief. The best known of these was Coxey’s Army, led by the populist “general” Jacob S. Coxey. Although detachments of the armies started out from various parts of the country, and Coxey led his contingent from Massillon, Ohio, only 400 persons reached the national capital, and the “armies” were easily dispersed.27

  In the summer of 19
63, black civil-rights leaders called for a March on Washington to bring pressure upon the Administration for the passage of a civil-rights bill, and by plane, bus, rail, and car 250,000 persons descended on the capital in an extraordinary demonstration of political purpose. Differences of issue apart, it is clear that the one incident is a product of a regional society, the other of a mass society.

  One may applaud the fact that the nature of the mass media increases the likelihood of a spectacular rise in “participatory democracy,” but these instances are also more likely to arise out of emotional issues (drawing therefore from the extremes), so that the loss of insulating space may itself permit the setting off of chain reactions which may be disruptive of civil politics and reasoned debate.

  Communications overload. Whatever else may be said about the twentieth century, it has produced the greatest bombardment of aural and visual materials that man has ever experienced in his history. To the linotype, camera, typewriter, telephone, and telegraph, the twentieth century has added radio (and radio telephone), teletype, television, microwaves, communication satellites, computers, xerography, and the like. Transistors and miniaturization not only facilitate an incredible packaging of communication senders, receivers, and recorders in the confines of a space ship, they also allow automobile telephony, walkie-talkies, portable radio and television sets, and finally, on the agenda, person-to-person communication by “wrist-watch” radio anywhere in the country (and soon the world?). Radar and loran have taken over most of the air-sea guidance of transport, and an incredibly deployed watching system like SAGE (already obsolete) permitted a national command-control system, using realtime computers, to patrol the continental defense from the distant-early-warning lines.

  George Miller, the Harvard psychologist, once demonstrated in a marvelous article, “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two,” the finite limits in the number of different “bits” (or signals) that a human channel could encompass at one time.28 Yet the problem is not the single instant, but the total number of sensations that an individual is subject to. Some random sampling of the communication media illustrates, in a cursory way, the growth of the networks of interaction. In 1899, there were one million telephones in the United States, or 13.3 per 1000 population; in 1970, there were 120 million telephones, or 583 per 1000 population. (Over 380 million local calls are made daily.) In 1899, 6,576,000 pieces of mail were moved in the United States; in 1970, 84,882,000,000 pieces of mail were sent (more than 60 percent of them first-class). In 1924, 1,250,000 families had radio sets, and 530 stations were on the air; by 1970, more than 99 percent of families had radio sets and 6,983 stations (AM and FM) were on the air. In 1949, 940,000 families had television sets and 17 stations were sending pictures; by 1970, more than 95 percent of all families had television sets and 666 television stations were broadcasting regularly.29

  The extension of the range of communication has brought the entire world to the instant attention of any listener. Consider only the multiple geography lessons that each of us has had to learn in the last twenty-five years, from a knowledge of the strategic value of the Chagos archipelago as an equatorial staging area halfway between Aden and Singapore, to the distinction between the Congo Republic (Leopoldville), formerly Belgian, and the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), formerly French, and then the changing of the Congo Republic to Zaire, and its capital to Kinshasa. And consider, too, the number of different political figures and the bewildering number of political parties that we have to learn about to keep abreast of the news.

  For the society and the political process there are enormous problems which arise from this communications overload. At a time when, in our psychological values, we place a greater emphasis on in-dividuation, where is the possibility of privacy, a “psycho-social moratorium” (the term used by Erik Erikson to describe the need of sensitive adolescents to escape the pressures of schools, career choice, and the like), the finding of open spaces (consider the desecration of Lake Tahoe), and a relief from the stresses created by these incessant “messages” out of the blue?

  And for the political process, consider only one image: the problems, terrifying in number, which automatically flow today to Washington as a political center, and the multifarious issues which the President therefore has to confront, and often decide upon, in “real time.” Can such a system continue without breakdown?

  Numbers alone, of course, are not the problem. But thinking about them leads us to our next topic.

  DIFFUSION AND CHANGE OF SCALE

  While we hear much of the acceleration of social change today, the idea, as I argued in Chapter 3, is a difficult one to define.30 For sociological analysis it is preferable to speak of diffusion, which can be measured—the diffusion of products, ideas, styles, values.

  The point about diffusion is the critical one for any consideration of social change—and for prediction about the future. For it is not the spectacular innovations (crucial though they may be as turning points) which are the important elements in changing the social map of a country, but the diffusion of products—and privileges—and the rate of such diffusion in a country. For diffusion is not automatic. In the case of products, it rests upon certain entrepreneurial talents and the ability to break through the cake of custom or the barriers of entrenched interests. In the case of privileges, it rests upon the ability of disadvantaged groups to mobilize political pressures. And both of these are operative only within the framework of the value system of a society.

  One of the reasons why the predictions of Tocqueville, made more than 130 years ago, are still so cogent is that he had hit upon the great “master key” to American society—the desire for equality.31 In effect, what has been the property or privilege of the few can be demanded, legitimately, by the many. For example, the enormous change in the character of higher education is due not to any sweeping technological innovation (though there is a greater need for more professionally and technically trained manpower) but to the extension of higher education from the few to the many. In 1935, for example, 12.2 percent of the 18-21 age group attended college, while in 1970, more than 40 percent of the 18-21 age group was enrolled in college.

  Out of the same impulses, there is a constant set of rising expectations about what the society can produce. It has been estimated, for example, that about 20 percent of our people live in poverty. But this is a definition of poverty by 1964 standards. If we applied, say, 1947 standards, only about 15 percent of the people, perhaps, would be considered poor today.32 It is the nature of the American experience to “upgrade” constantly the notion of what constitutes a decent minimum, and correspondingly of poverty. As Herman Miller, the assistant to the director of the Census, points out in his book Rich Man, Poor Man,33 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics a “modest but adequate living standard” in New York City in 1947 (as distinct from poverty) required a family income (in 1961 dollars) of $4,000 a year. This criterion rose in 1961 to $5,200, a 28 percent increase. At this rate, by 1975, the new “decent minimum” for a family will be (in 1961 dollars) $7,000. As Mr. Miller concludes: Our standards will be lifted a little higher, our belts will be opened another notch, and there will still be a large block of families living under new and higher substandard conditions.

  It is this aspect of social change which gives rise to a curious discrepancy of social perception. The national output will double, or individuals will find that their own incomes have doubled over a period of time, yet there will be compliants that people are not living twice as well as before. The entry or more and more disadvantaged persons into the society, as claimants for goods and privileges, clearly changes the nature of privileges and services themselves.34 In seeking for clues to social change, therefore, the important task is to be able to identify which aspects of privilege or advantage today will be demanded by the many tomorrow. (More travel, travel to more distant places, winter vacations, summer houses?) And it is the diffusion of these privileges, in terms of increasing number, that pr
ovides the clue to the kinds of social and political demands of the coming years.

  But changes in number also mean a change in scale. If relationships were linear, there would be no problem; but increased size changes the nature of organizations, results in multiple hierarchies, introduces new problems of coordination, and poses new questions of order and planning. The question of the size and scope of the social unit—the appropriate size of governmental units, the optimal size of organizations, the decentralization of function, and the creation of a “human scale” in a mass society—is the most crucial sociological problem that arises out of a consideration of the two conceptual frameworks that have been sketched out above: the influence of number, density, and interaction, and the consequences of diffusion and change of scale.

  THE APPROPRIATE SIZE AND SCOPE OF THE SOCIAL UNIT

  The United States today, as I have observed, is for the first time genuinely a “national society.” Many of the domestic problems we confront do not arise out of such hoary formulations as “capitalism” and “socialism,” but from the fact that a multiplicity of problems— education, transportation, welfare, urban renewal, air and water pollution, medical care and the like—no longer are manageable on the state and local level but are now passed on to the national society for solution.

  This development, in its own way, dramatizes more than any other single question the problem of the appropriate size of the social unit, in the political as well as the sociological sense. This question can be looked at along four dimensions: the adequacy of the political structure; the question of centralization and decentralization; the distinction as to what is “public” and what is “private”; and the optimal size of bureaucratic structures, private and public. The first two questions are discussed in this section, the other two in the one following.