The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  In one sense, as Herman Kahn has pointed out, military technology has supplanted the “mode of production,” in Marx’s use of the term, as a major determinant of social structure. Since the end of World War II there have been almost three total revolutions in military technology, with complete and across-the-board replacement of equipment, as older weapons systems were phased out without being used. Neither World War I nor World War II represented such complete breaks in continuity.

  The sources of these accelerated revolutions—changes in the character of atomic weapons, from manned bombers to missiles, from fixed missiles to roving missiles and from medium-range to inter-continental missiles—has been the concentration on research and development and concerted planning for new systems of weaponry. And the technology of “custom-crafted” missile construction, as against bombers, was a chief element in changing the “production-mix” of the aerospace industry labor force, so much so that the Budget Bureau Report on Defense Contracting (the David Bell Report of 1962) estimated that the ratio of engineers and scientists to production workers in the aerospace industry was roughly one-to-one.

  But it is not only in the engulfing of technology that a significant change has taken place, but in the modes of decision-making as well. The McNamara “revolution” of 1960-1965 transformed military logistics, and for this reason one can say that McNamara joins Saint-Simon and Frederick W. Taylor as a hierophant in the pantheon of technocracy.

  What McNamara did was to introduce a new way of assessing costs and choices in relation to strategy. In the days before the revolutions in military technology, an airplane might be designed by the air force and farmed out to a private contractor. It was common practice in the 1950s for the air force to pay the development costs of four or five planes and then choose one for quantity production. All of this was possible so long as the development costs (designs, tools, mockups) of a single prototype were about $100 million. By 1956 this cost had increased by a factor of five, and over the same period the estimated cost of a single missile had increased by a factor of fifty. By the time Robert McNamara became Secretary of Defense, costs had risen so enormously that some system of “value engineering”—computing the cost-effectiveness ratios of alternate weapons systems—had to be introduced.

  The McNamara “revolution” represented a rationalization of governmental structure. The key idea, of course, is not just cost-effectiveness, but to assess the value of the weapons system in different kinds of programs and objectives. In the system of program budgeting, the entire structure of line-item budgets, which had been traditionally organized, was overhauled to serve “functional” programs.15 The system that McNamara introduced was called the Program Planning Budget System (PPBS).

  In a technical sense, there can be little quarrel with an effort to regroup in some logical fashion the scattered efforts of government programs and put them down in some systematic form. In the fiscal 1965 budget, for example, funds for education were dispersed through more than forty agencies. The expenditures of the U. S. Office of Education constituted only one-fifth of the total federal education budget. A program-budgeting system can thus unify what constitutes the education program of the American government. The difficulty arises, however, when one goes one step further and tries to discover, within a narrow economic calculus of cost-effectiveness techniques, the social value of one program as against another. Expenditures for defense may constitute the first line on a federal budget because, in the language of utility theory, defense constitutes a “single-peaked preference curve” in which the society, by and large, is agreed on the importance—and priority—of these efforts. But what about the situations in which there is no such agreement—such as science policy, or social policy, or welfare policy? How does one decide? When men have different valuations, how does one choose? For this the technocratic view has no answer.

  Who Holds Power?

  Decisions are a matter of power, and the crucial questions in any society are: Who holds power? and how is power held? How power is held is a system concept; who holds power is a group concept. How one comes to power defines the base and route; who identifies the persons. Clearly, when there is a change in the nature of the system, new groups come to power. (In the tableau of pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial societies, the major differences can be shown schematically—see Table 6-1 on Stratification and Power.)

  In the post-industrial society, technical skill becomes the base of and education the mode of access to power; those (or the elite of the group) who come to the fore in this fashion are the scientists. But this does not mean that the scientists are monolithic and act as a corporate group. In actual political situations scientists may divide ideologically (as they have in the recent ABM debate), and different groups of scientists will align themselves with different segments of other elites. In the nature of politics, few groups are monolithic (“the” military, “the” scientists, “the” business class), and any group contending for power will seek allies from different groups. (Thus, in the Soviet Union, for example, where the interest groups are more clear-cut in functional terms—factory managers, central planners, army officers, party officials—and the power struggle more naked, any faction in the Politburo seeking power will make alliances across group lines. Yet once in power, the victors will have to make decisions between groups and affect the relative distribution of power of the functional units and shift the weights of the system.) In the change of the system in the post-industrial society, two propositions become evident:

  TABLE 6–1

  Stratification and Power

  1. As a stratum, scientists, or more widely the technical intelligentsia, now have to be taken into account in the political process, though they may not have been before.

  2. Science itself is ruled by an ethos which is different from the ethos of other major social groups (e.g. business, the military), and this ethos will predispose scientists to act in a different fashion, politically, from other groups.

  Forty-five years ago Thorstein Veblen, in his Engineers and the Price System, foresaw a new society based on technical organization and industrial management, a “soviet of technicians,” as he put it in the striking language he loved to use in order to scare and mystify the academic world. In making this prediction, Veblen shared the illusion of that earlier technocrat, Henri de Saint-Simon, that the complexity of the industrial system and the indispensability of the technician made military and political revolutions a thing of the past. “Revolutions in the eighteenth century,” Veblen wrote, “were military and political; and the Elder Statesmen who now believe themselves to be making history still believe that revolutions can be made and unmade by the same ways and means in the twentieth century. But any substantial or effectual overturn in the twentieth century will necessarily be an industrial overturn, and by the same token, any twentieth-century revolution can be combatted or neutralized only by industrial ways and means.”

  If a revolution were to come about in the United States—as a practiced skeptic Veblen 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 would it come from the trade-union “votaries of the dinner pail,” who, as a vested interest themselves, simply sought to keep prices up and labor supply down. It would occur, he said, along the lines “already laid down by the material conditions of its productive industry.” And, turning this Marxist prism to his own perceptions, Veblen continued: “These main lines of revolutionary strategy are lines of technical organization and industrial management; essentially lines of industrial engineering; such as will fit the organization to take care of the highly technical industrial system that constitutes the indispensable material foundation of any modern civilized community.”

  The heart of Veblen’s assessment of the revolutionary class is thus summed up in his identification of the “production engineers” as the indispensable “General Staff of the industrial system
.” “Without their immediate and unremitting guidance and correction the industrial system will not work. It is a mechanically organized structure of the technical processes designed, installed, and conducted by the production engineers. Without them and their constant attention to the industrial equipment, the mechanical appliances of industry will foot up to just so much junk.”

  This syndicalist idea that revolution in the twentieth century could only be an “industrial overturn” exemplifies the fallacy in so much of Veblen’s thought. For as we have learned, no matter how technical social processes may be, the crucial turning points in a society occur in a political form. It is not the technocrat who ultimately holds power, but the politician.

  The major changes that have reshaped American society over the past thirty years—the creation of a managed economy, a welfare society, and a mobilized polity—grew out of political responses: in the first instances to accommodate the demands of economically insecure and disadvantaged groups—the farmers, workers, blacks and the poor—for protection from the hazards of the market; and later because of the concentration of resources and political objectives following the mobilized postures of the cold war and the space race.

  All of this opens up a broader and more theoretical perspective about the changing nature of class and social position in contemporary society. Class, in the final sense, denotes not a specific group of persons but a system that has institutionalized the ground rules for acquiring, holding, and transferring differential power and its attendant privileges. In Western society, the dominant system has been property, guaranteed and safeguarded by the legal order, and transmitted through a system of marriage and family. But over the past twenty-five to fifty years, the property system has been breaking up. In American society today, there are three modes of power and social mobility, and this baffles students of society who seek to tease out the contradictory sources of class positions. There is the historic mode of property as the basis of wealth and power, with inheritance as the major route of access. There is technical skill as the basis of power and position, with education as the necessary route of access to skill. And finally there is political office as a base of power, with organization of a machine as the route of access.

  One can, in a simplified way, present these modes in a reduced model:

  The difficulty in the analysis of power in modern Western societies is that these three systems co-exist, overlap, and interpenetrate. While the family loses its importance as an economic unit, particularly with the decline of family-firms and the break-up of family capitalism, family background is still advantageous in providing impetus (financial, cultural and personal connections) for the family member. Ethnic groups, often blocked in the economic access to position, have resorted to the political route to gain privilege and wealth. And, increasingly, in the post-industrial society, technical skill becomes an overriding condition of competence for place and position. A son may succeed a father as head of a firm, but without the managerial skill to run the enterprise, the firm may lose out in competition with other, professionally managed corporations. To some extent, the owner of a firm and the politician may hire technicians and experts; yet, unless the owner or politician themselves know enough about the technical issues, their judgments may falter.

  The rise of the new elites based on skill derives from the simple fact that knowledge and planning—military planning, economic planning, social planning—have become the basic requisites for all organized action in a modern society. The members of this new technocratic elite, with their new techniques of decision-making (systems analysis, linear programming, and program budgeting), have now become essential to the formulation and analysis of decisions on which political judgments have to be made, if not to the wielding of power. It is in this broad sense that the spread of education, research, and administration has created a new constituency—the technical and professional intelligentsia.

  While these technologists are not bound by a sufficient common interest to make them a political class, they do have common characteristics. They are, first, the products of a new system in the recruitment for power (just as property and inheritance were the essence of the old system). The norms of the new intelligentsia—the norms of professionalism—are a departure from the hitherto prevailing norms of economic self-interest which have guided a business civilization. In the upper reaches of this new elite—that is, in the scientific community—men hold significantly different values, which could become the foundation of the new ethos for such a class.

  Actually, the institution of property itself is undergoing a fundamental revision, in a significant way. In Western society for the past several hundred years, property, as the protection of private rights to wealth, has been the economic basis of individualism. Traditionally the institution of property, as Charles Reich of the Yale Law School has put it, “guards the troubled boundary between individual man and the state.” In modern life property has changed in two distinctive ways. One of these is elementary: Individual property has become corporate, and property is no longer controlled by owners but by managers. In a more subtle and diffuse way, however, a new kind of property has emerged, and with it a different kind of legal relationship. To put it more baldly, property today consists not only of visible things (land, possessions, titles) but also of claims, grants, and contracts. The property relationship is not only between persons but between the individual and the government. As Reich points out, “The valuables dispensed by government take many forms, but they all share one characteristic. They are steadily taking the place of the traditional forms of wealth—forms which are held as private property. Social insurance substitutes for savings, a government contract replaces a businessman’s customers and goodwill.... Increasingly, Americans live on government largess—allocated by government on its own terms, and held by recipients subject to conditions which express ’the public interest.’ ”16

  While many forms of this “new property” represent direct grants (subsidies to farmers, corporations, and universities) or are contracts for services or goods (to industry and universities), the most pervasive form is claims held by individuals (social security, medical care, housing allowances) which derive from a new definition of social rights: claims on the community to ensure equality of treatment, claims legitimately due a person so that he will be able to share in the social heritage. And the most important claim of all is full access to education, within the limits of one’s talent and potential.

  The result of all this is to enlarge the arena of power, and at the same time to complicate the modes of decision-making. The domestic political process initiated by the New Deal was in effect a broadening of the “brokerage” system—the system of political deals between constituencies—although there are now many participants in the game. But there is also a new dimension in the political process, which has given the technocrats a new role. Matters of foreign policy have not been a reflex of internal political forces, but a judgment about the national interest, involving strategy decisions based on the calculation of an opponent’s strength and intentions. Once the fundamental policy decision was made to oppose the communist power, many technical decisions, based on military technology and strategic assessments, took on the highest importance in the shaping of subsequent policy. Even a reworking of the economic map of the United States followed as well, with Texas and California gaining great importance because of the electronics and aerospace industries. In these instances technology and strategy laid down the requirements, and only then could business and local political groups seek to modify, or take advantage of, these decisions so as to protect their own economic interests.

  In all this, the technical intelligentsia holds a double position. To the extent that it has interests in research, and positions in the universities, it becomes a new constituency—just as the military is a distinct new constituency, since this country has never before had a permanent military establishment seeking money and support for science, for research and develop
ment. Thus the intelligentsia be comes a claimant, like other groups, for public support (though its influence is felt in the bureaucratic and administrative labyrinth, rather than in the electoral system or mass pressure). At the same time, the technicians represent an indispensable administrative staff for the political office holder with his public following.

  The Cockpit of Politics

  Though the weights of the class system may shift, the nature of the political system, as the arena where interests are mediated, will not. In the next few decades, the political arena will become more decisive, if anything, for the two fundamental reasons I have indicated in previous chapters: We have become, for the first time, a national society, in which crucial decisions, affecting all parts of the society simultaneously (from foreign affairs to fiscal policy), are made by the government, rather than through the market; in addition, we have become a communal society, in which many more groups now seek to establish their social rights—their claims on society—through the political order.

  In the national society, more and more projects (whether the clean-up of pollution or the reorganization of the cities) must be undertaken through group or communal instruments. In a tightly interwoven society, more decisions have to be made through politics and through planning. Yet both mechanisms, paradoxically, increase social conflict. Planning provides a specific locus of decision, as against the more impersonal and dispersed role of the market, and thus becomes a visible point at which pressures can be applied. Communal instruments—the effort to create a social choice out of the discordance of individual personal preferences—necessarily sharpen value conflicts. Do we want compensatory education for blacks at the expense, say, of places for other students when the number of positions is limited? Do we want to keep a redwood forest or provide a lucrative industry to a local community? Will we accept the increased noise of jets in communities near the airports, or force the reduction of weight and payloads, with a consequent increased cost to the industry and the traveler? Should a new highway go through old sections of a community, or do we route it around the section with a higher cost to all? These issues, and thousands more, cannot be settled on the basis of technical criteria; necessarily they involve value and political choices.