by Daniel Bell
In the area of social mobility—thanks to the work of Otis Dudley Duncan and Peter Blau, who recently published a study of The American Occupational Structure based on the very first national sample of intergenerational mobility ever drawn in the United States—we can say with some certitude that, despite various apprehensions, the American class structure has not become rigid, and that the occupational achievements of sons are not in any significant degree (only 16 percent of the variation of occupational scores) explained by the socio-economic position of their fathers. Thus a considerable degree of equality of opportunity does exist in the United States—but largely for whites. From the Duncan data it is also possible to measure the “mobility gap” between black and white, and to estimate the role of discrimination in maintaining that gap.
In short, Toward a Social Report—and the word “toward” was chosen deliberately—is not a prototypical social report; nor is it an assessment of the society. It indicates what data are already available to start on such an assessment; it makes the necessary start on the creation of social indicators that may allow us, in the future, to make relevant comparisons of changes over time.
THE PERSPECTIVE OF TIME
Americans, more than other people (as a national style, not on individual comparison), are an impatient lot. A problem emerges and people want answers—quickly. There are, in fact, two simplistic notions in the American temper: that all problems are soluble, and that the way to solve a problem is to pour men and money into it. (Do you want to go to the moon? Build a NASA. Do you want to raze the slums? Mount a huge housing program. The fact that the problems are not wholly congruent, that one case is a technical “game against nature,” and the other a “game between people who have discordant aims,” rarely enters into such considerations.)
The extraordinary fact, in relation to the huge range of social problems that confronts us, is the recency of the simple tools we have for dealing with them. The Council of Economic Advisers, as a research, analysis, and policy body for the nation, was created only twenty-five years ago, and not until a dozen years ago did it begin to function in the way it was intended. Just recently were the techniques of input-output analysis and that of linear programming developed so that only now are we able to lay out an adequate tableau çconomique and plot the varying combinations of resources and requirements in accordance with different values assumptions. And only with these techniques is a model of economic planning actually possible. We still lack any adequate forecasting models of the economy, either for short-run or long-run purposes. Efforts, as at Brook-ings, to test econometric models for quarterly economic forecasts have only just begun; efforts, such as those of James Tobin and Robert Solow, to set up a mathematical model for longer-range forecasting have been abandoned as too difficult.
In the areas of social planning we are woefully behind. The economic data collected and disseminated by the federal government, and the economic models based on them, are highly relevant to economic policy. Unfortunately they are less applicable to the new problems of social change. National economic and census statistics, aggregated as they are, tell us little about pockets of poverty, depressed communities, sick industries, or disadvantaged social groups. The national data, averaged out, provide few clues to, or relevant information about, regional or local problems. In respect to the integration crises and anti-poverty programs of the 1960s, the federal government found itself lacking the necessary information for making effective policy decisions in response to these new social problems. The need for this kind of data is urgent. The socio-economic crisis in the 1930s led the government to establish national income and product accounts and thus facilitated macro-economic analysis and economic models on an aggregate national basis. In effect, the government’s decision of several decades ago about the type of data to be collected, made on the basis of its own need for information, shaped in considerable measure the direction of economic theory and practice. The new type of social data collection, which is so urgently needed now, undoubtedly will influence the development of social science for the next generation.
But, in the end, the problems of the communal and post-industrial society are not technical, but political, for even though in the nature of the new complexities a large kind of new social engineering is involved, the essential questions are those of values. Only when men can decide what they want, can one move to the questions of how to do the jobs. The central question of the post-industrial society, therefore, is the relation of the technocratic decision to politics, and that is the theme of the next chapter.
CHAPTER
6
* * *
“Who Will Ruler?”
Politicians and
Technocrats in the
Post–Industrial
Society
THE rational is real and the real is rational” is a famous phrase of Hegel’s. By this he did not mean that the existent was real. As a post-Kantian philosopher, he accepted the proposition that the empirical reality was a flux, and that knowledge is gained only through the application of the a priori categories necessary to organize it. Thus, the “real” is the underlying structure of concepts that makes sense of the confusing froth of the present. For Hegel, the “real” was the unfolding of rationality as the self-conscious reflective activity of mind that gave men increasing power over nature, history, and self.
In a fundamental sense, the theme of rationality is also the major underpinning of sociological theory. For Durkheim, as he argued in his Division of Labor, the tendency of civilization is to become more rational, and this was a product of the greater degree of interdependence in the world and the syncretism of culture or secularization, which broke down parochial forms. In the writings of Max Weber, the concept of the rational moves to the very center of sociology. In his last lectures, given in the winter of 1919-1920, Weber points out that modern life is made up of “rational accounting, rational technology, rational law, and with these a rationalistic economic ethic, the rational spirit and the rationalization of the conduct of life.1 Indeed, as Talcott Parsons points out, “the conception of a law of increasing rationality as a fundamental generalization about systems of action ... is the most fundamental generalization that emerges from Weber’s work.” And, drawing a curious parallel— or is it a prophecy?—Parsons concludes: “Rationality occupies a logical position in respect to action systems analogous to that of entropy in physical systems.” 2
These conceptions of rationality are rooted in nineteenth-century ideas of man’s relation to nature and society, and they are extensions, in one sense, of the conceptions of progress that had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Whatever their philosophical overtones, the concepts of rationality received a practical embodiment in industry—and in war. The development of every advanced industrial society, and the emergence of the post-industrial society, depends on the extension of a particular dimension of rationality. But it is precisely that definition of rationality that is being called into question today, and what I seek to do here is to trace the vicissitudes of that conception—the technocratic—as it relates to politics.3
The Paradigm
More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the wildly brilliant, almost monomaniacal technocrat, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Lecomte de Saint-Simon (“the last gentleman and the first socialist” of France), popularized the word industrialism to designate the emergent society, wherein wealth would be created by production and machinery rather than seized through plunder and war. The revolution that ended feudal society—the French Revolution—could have ushered in the industrial society, said Saint-Simon, but it did not do so because it had been captured by metaphysicians, lawyers, and sophists—men with a predilection for abstract slogans. What was needed, Saint-Simon added, was a breed of “new men”—engineers, builders, planners—who would provide the necessary leadership. And since such leaders require some concrete inspiration, Saint-Simon, shortly before his death, commissioned Rouget de l’Isle, the composer of �
�The Marseillaise,” to write a new “Industrial Marseillaise.” This “Chant des Industriels,” as it was called, had its première in 1821 before Saint-Simon and his friend Ternaux, the textile manufacturer, at the opening of a new textile factory in Saint-Ouen.4
We may leave the story of Saint-Simon and his followers to the curiosa of the history of ideas, but since Saint-Simon was, in a sense, the father of technocracy, we may, in his spirit, sum up now the features of post-industrial society and its technocratic foundation.
We are now in the first stages of a post-industrial society. We have become the first nation in the history of the world in which more than half of the employed population is not involved in the production of food, clothing, houses, automobiles, and other tangible goods.
The character of work has been transformed as well. In a paper read to the Cambridge Reform Club in 1873, Alfred Marshall, the great neoclassical economist, posed a question that was implicit in the title of his paper “The Future of the Working Classes.” “The question,” he said, “is not whether all men will ultimately be equal— that they certainly will not be—but whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, till, by occupation at least, every man is a gentleman.” And he answered his question: “I hold that it may, and that it will.”
Marshall’s criterion for a gentleman—in the broad, rather than the traditional genteel, sense—meant that heavy, excessive, and soul-destroying labor would vanish, and the worker would then begin to value education and leisure. Apart from any qualitative assessment of contemporary culture, it is clear that Marshall’s question is well on the way to being answered. The manual and unskilled worker class is shrinking in the society, while at the other end of the continuum the class of knowledge workers is becoming predominant.
In identifying a new and emerging social system, it is not only in the portents and social trends, such as the move away from manufacturing or the rise of new social relationships, that one seeks to understand fundamental social change. Rather it is in the defining characteristic of a new system. In the post-industrial society, what is crucial is not just a shift from property or political criteria to knowledge as the base of new power, but a change in the character of knowledge itself. What has now become decisive for society is the new centrality of theoretical knowledge, the primacy of theory over empiricism, and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that can be translated into many different and varied circumstances. Every society now lives by innovation and growth, and it is theoretical knowledge that has become the matrix of innovation. With the growing sophistication of simulation procedures through the use of computers—simulations of economic systems, of social behavior, of decision problems—we have the possibility, for the first time, of large-scale “controlled experiments ’ in the social sciences. These, in turn, will allow us to plot alternative futures in different courses, thus greatly increasing the extent to which we can choose and control matters that affect our lives. And, just as the business firm was the key institution of the past hundred years because of its role in organizing production for the mass creation of products, the university —or some other form of a knowledge institute—will become the central institution of the next hundred years because of its role as the new source of innovation and knowledge.
If the dominant figures of the past hundred years have been the entrepreneur, the businessman, and the industrial executive, the “new men” are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists, and the engineers of the new intellectual technology. This is not to say that the majority of persons will be scientists, engineers, technicians, or intellectuals. The majority of individuals in contemporary society are not businessmen, yet one can say that this has been a “business civilization.” The basic values of society have been focused on business institutions, the largest rewards have been found in business, and the strongest power has been held by the business community, although today that power is to some extent shared within the factory by the trade union, and regulated within the society by the political order. In the most general ways, however, the major decisions affecting the day-to-day life of the citizen—the kinds of work available, the location of plants, investment decisions on new products, the distribution of tax burdens, occupational mobility—have been made by business, and more recently by government, which gives major priority to the welfare of business.
In the post-industrial society, production and business decisions will be subordinated to, or will derive from, other forces in society; the crucial decisions regarding the growth of the economy and its balance will come from government, but they will be based on the government’s sponsorship of research and development, of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis; the making of decisions, because of the intricately linked nature of their consequences, will have an increasingly technical character. The husbanding of talent and the spread of educational and intellectual institutions will become a prime concern of the society; not only the best talents but eventually the entire complex of prestige and status will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities.
The Time Machine
It was once exceedingly rare to be able to observe the formation of institutions de novo. Social change was crescive and slow-moving. Adaptations were piecemeal and contradictory, the process of diffusion halting, the spread of rationalization difficult and cumbersome. Thirty-five years ago in his reflections on history, Paul Valéry, the quintessential Frenchman of letters, remarked:
There is nothing easier than to point out the absence from history books, of major phenomena which were imperceptible owing to the slowness of their evolution. They escape the historian’s notice because no document expressly mentions them....
An event which takes shape over a century will not be found in any document or collection of memoirs....
Such was the discovery of electricity and the conquest of the World by its applications. Events of this nature, unparalleled in human history, appear in it—only as something less noticeable than some more spectacular happening, some happening, above all, more in conformity with what traditional history usually reports. Electricity in Napoleon’s day had about the same importance as, in the days of Tiberius, could have been ascribed to Christianity. It is gradually becoming apparent that the general innervation of the world by electricity is more fraught with consequences, more capable of modifying life in the near future, than all of the so-called “political” events which have happened from Ampère’s day to the present time.5
Today, not only are we aware of trying to identify processes of change, even when they cannot be dated, but there has been a speeding up of the “time-machine,” so that the intervals between the initial forces of change and their application have been radically reduced.
Perhaps the most important social change of our time is a process of direct and deliberate contrivance. Men now seek to anticipate change, measure the course of its direction and its impact, control it, and even shape it for predetermined ends. “The transformation of society” is no longer an abstract phrase but a process in which governments are actively engaged on a highly conscious basis. The industrialization of Japan by the old Samurai class was an action aimed at transforming an agrarian economy from the top, and it succeeded remarkably because of the disciplined nature of social relationships that had existed in post-Meiji restoration society. The extraordinary upheavals in the Soviet Union, more ruthless and more concentrated in time than the changes in any other society in history, were carried out on the basis of specific plans, in which the movements of the population, as well as industrial targets, were plotted on social charts. The breakdown of the old colonial system has brought about, since the end of World War II, the creation of almost fifty new countries, many of them committed abstractly to the idea of “socialism,” in which the creation of new industrial and urban economies is the fundamental agenda of the new elites. And in the older Western societies we have seen the emergence of planning in more differentiated forms, w
hether it be target plans, indicative planning, induced investment, or simply economic growth and full employment.
The Birth-Years
It is foolhardy to give dates to social processes (when, and by what criteria, can one say that capitalism eclipsed feudalism, at least in the economic sphere?), but our self-consciousness about time, which is itself an aspect of modernity, urges us to seek some symbolic points that mark the emergence of a new social understanding. Alfred Whitehead once remarked that the nineteenth century was dead by the 1880s, and the 1870s was its last lush decade. One could also say that the period from 1880 to 1945 was the period in which the old Western ideologies exploded, culminating in the dreadful travails of fascism and communism as they rode the new Leviathan.
The period since the end of World War II has produced a new consciousness about time and social change. One might well say that 1045 to 1950 were the “birth-years,” symbolically, of the post-industrial society.
