The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  The relationship of technical and political decisions in the next decades will become, in consequence, one of the most crucial problems of public policy. The politician, and the political public, will have to become increasingly versed in the technical character of policy, aware of the ramified impact of decisions as systems become extended. As Robert Solow has pointed out: The views of Adam Smith may have been popularly digestible; an econometric study of alternative public-investment programs is not. And the technical intelligentsia must learn to question the often unanalyzed assumptions about efficiency and rationality which underlie their techniques.

  In the end, however, the technocratic mind-view necessarily falls before politics. The hopes of rationality—or, one should say, of a particular kind of rationality—necessarily fade. There may still be, in the language of Max Weber, a Zweckrationalität, a rationality of means that are intertwined with ends and become adjusted to each other. But this is possible only when the ends are strictly defined and the means, then, can be calculated in terms of the end.17

  Politics, in the sense that we understand it, is always prior to the rational, and often the upsetting of the rational. The “rational,” as we have come to know it, is the routinized, settled, administrative and orderly procedure by rules. Much of life in a complex society necessarily has this character. In going by plane or train to Washington one does not haggle with the airline company or railroad over the fare, as one might with a taxi driver in the Levant. But politics is haggling, or else it is force. In Washington one haggles over the priorities of the society, the distribution of money, the burden of taxation, and the like. The idea that there is a “social decision” which can satisfy everyone has been annihilated by Kenneth Arrow, who in his “impossibility theorem” has demonstrated that no social decision can amalgamate the diverse preferences of a group in the way a single individual can amalgamate his own. Thus, theoretical economics, in its denial of a communal welfare function, which would be similar to the ordering principles of individual utility, undermines the application of rationality to public decisions. In a practical sense, this is something every politician knows in his bones. What is left is not rationality as the objective scaling of social utilities but bargaining between persons.

  As for politics, what is evident, everywhere, is a society-side uprising against bureaucracy and a desire for participation, a theme summed up in the statement, already a catch-phrase, that “people ought to be able to affect the decisions that control their lives.’ To a considerable extent, the participation revolution is one of the forms of reaction against the “professionalization” of society and the emergent technocratic decision-making of a post-industrial society. What began years ago in the factory through the trade unions has now spread to the neighborhood—because of the politicalization of decision-making in social affairs—and into the universities; in the next decades it will spread into other complex organizations as well. The older bureaucratic models of hierarchically organized centralized organizations functioning through an intensive division of labor clearly will be replaced by new forms of organization.

  Yet “participatory democracy” is not the panacea that its adherents make it out to be, no more so than efforts of fifty years ago at creating plebiscetarian political mechanisms such as the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. With all the furor about “participatory democracy,” it is curious that few of its proponents have sought to think through, on the most elementary level, the meaning of the phrases. If individuals are to affect the decisions that change their lives, then under those rules segregationists in the South would have the right to exclude blacks from the schools. Similarly, is a neighborhood group to be allowed to veto a city plan which takes into account the needs of a wider and more inclusive social unit? But at that point one would have to say that the South is not an independent entity but part of a larger polity, and must comply with the moral norms of the more inclusive society, and so does the neighborhood. In short, participatory democracy is one more way of posing the classical issues of political philosophy, namely, Who should make, and at what levels of government, what kinds of decisions, for how large a social unit?

  The conception of a rational organization of society stands confounded. Rationality, as a means—as a set of techniques for efficient allocation of resources—has been twisted beyond the recognition of its forebears; rationality, as an end, finds itself confronted by the cantankerousness of politics, the politics of interest and the politics of passion. Faced with this double failure, the adherents of rationality—in particular the planners and designers—are now in the difficult position of having to rethink their premises and to understand their limits. And yet, the recognition of those limits is itself the beginning of wisdom.

  In the end is the beginning, as T. S. Eliot wrote, and we return to the question that is the root of all political philosophy: What is the good life that one wants to lead? The politics of the future—for those who operate within the society, at least—will not be quarrels between functional economic-interest groups for distributive shares of the national product, but the concerns of communal society, particularly the inclusion of disadvantaged groups. They will turn on the issues of instilling a responsible social ethos in our leaders, the demand for more amenities, for greater beauty and a better quality of life in the arrangement of our cities, a more differentiated and intellectual educational system, and an improvement in the character of our culture. We may be divided on how to achieve these aims, and how to apportion the costs. But such questions, deriving from a conception of public virtue, bring us back to the classical questions of the polis. And this is as it should be.

  CODA

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  An Agenda for the Future

  1. How Social Systems Change

  SOCIAL systems take a long time to expire. In the 1850s Marx thought that the “historical revolutionary process” was already undermining bourgeois society and bringing Europe to the verge of socialism. He feared that the final upheaval would come before he had completed his grand demonstration in Capital, and he wrote to his friend Dr. Kugelmann at the end of 1857, “I am working like mad all through the nights at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes.”1 But it was a still older social order that was dying at the time, and even then that order had another half-century of life ahead.2 In our foreshortening of social time we forget that a powerful monarchical system lasted until 1918 in Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary (which included large parts of central Europe) and Italy, while in England a small upper class, whose members knew each other intimately, still governed the society. A Communist Revolution may have arisen out of the ashes of World War I, but that conflagration did not so much kill capitalism as finally destroy the political remnants of feudalism.

  Ninety years after the death of Marx, capitalism was still dominant in the Western world while, paradoxically, communist movements had come to power almost entirely in agrarian and pre-industrial societies, where “socialist planning” was largely an alternative route to industrialization, rather than the succession to capitalism. To predict, thus, the close demise of capitalism is a risky business and, barring the breakdown of the political shell of that system because of war, the social forms of managerial capitalism—the corporate business enterprise, private decision on investment, the differential privileges based on control of property—are likely to remain for a long time.

  And yet the functional basis of the system is changing, and the lineaments of a new society are visible. The historical change is taking place along two axes. One is the relation of the economic function to the other major functions of society. Marx, in his view of capitalist society, had focused on class division as the source of tension—the exploitation of the workers within the economic system—and predicted a political upheaval and a new social order as the succession of classes. But from the perspective of industrial society, Emile Durkheim saw the lack of restraint on the e
conomic function itself as the source of anomie and the disruption of social life. As Durkheim first wrote in 1890:

  ... It is not possible for a social function to exist without moral discipline. Otherwise nothing remains but individual appetites, and since these are by nature boundless and insatiable, if there is nothing to control them they will not be able to control themselves.

  And it is precisely due to this fact that the crisis has arisen from which the European societies are now suffering. For two centuries economic life has taken on an expansion it never knew before. From being a secondary function, despised and left to inferior classes, it passed on to one of first rank. We see the military, governmental and religious functions falling back more and more in face of it. The scientific functions alone are in a position to dispute its ground, and even science has hardly any prestige in the eyes of the present day, except in so far as it may serve what is materially useful, that is to say, serve for the most part the business occupations. That is why it can be said, with some justice that society is, or tends to be industrial.3

  The major problem for modern society, thus, was not class conflict, which was a subsidiary aspect of unrestricted competition in regard to wages, but the unregulated character of the economic function itself—even when aided by the state.

  The decisive social change taking place in our time—because of the interdependence of men and the aggregative character of economic actions, the rise of externalities and social costs, and the need to control the effects of technical change—is the subordination of the economic function to the political order. The forms this will take will vary, and will emerge from the specific history of the different political societies—central state control, public corporations, decentralized enterprises and central policy directives, mixed public and private enterprises, and the like. Some will be democratic, some not. But the central fact is clear: The autonomy of the economic order (and the power of the men who run it) is coming to an end, and new and varied, but different, control systems are emerging. In sum, the control of society is no longer primarily economic but political.

  The second major historical change is the sundering of social function (or place in society, primarily occupational) from property. In Western society, and particularly under capitalism, function in society could be turned into property (land, machinery, stocks, franchises), which was conserved as wealth and transferred to one’s heirs, to create a continuity of rights—privileges formalized as a social system. In the new society which is now emerging, individual private property is losing its social purpose (i.e. to protect one’s labor in the Lockean sense, to control or direct production, to be a reward for risk) and function stands alone.

  The autonomy of function, or technical competence, was the root of the technocratic vision of Saint-Simon. It was the basis for the moral view of the eminent English economic historian and socialist R. H. Tawney. In his influential tract, The Acquisitive Society, Tawney argued that ownership of property had lost its moral claim for reward and therefore was less the criterion of esteem or place than function, which he defined “as an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose.”4

  What Tawney defined is Professionalism, and if this vision is correct, the heart of the post-industrial society is a class that is primarily a professional class. As with any status group, the boundaries of definition are fluid and often indistinct, yet certain core elements are obvious.5 A profession is a learned (i.e. scholarly) activity, and thus involves formal training, but within a board intellectual context. To be within the profession means to be certified, formally or informally, by one舙s peers or by some established body within the profession. And a profession embodies a norm of social responsiveness. This does not mean that professionals are more charitable or high-minded than their fellows, but that expectations about their conduct derive from an ethic of service which, as a norm, is prior to an ethic of self-interest.6 For all these reasons, the idea of a profession implies an idea of competence and authority, technical and moral, and that the professional will assume an hieratic place in the society.

  In Chapter 6 I discussed the transformations of class and power in industrial society. Form those foundations, one can speculate about the future. If one turns, then, to the societal structure of the post-industrial society considered along these two historical axes, two conclusions are evident. First, the major class of the emerging new society is primarily a professional class, based on knowledge rather than property. But second, the control system of the society is lodged not in a successor-occupational class but in the political order, and the question of who manages the political order is an open one. (See “Schema: The Societal Structure of the Post-Industrial Society,” p. 375.)

  In terms of status (esteem and recognition, and possibly income), the knowledge class may be the highest class in the new society, but in the nature of that structure there is no intrinsic reason for this class, on the basis of some coherent or corporate identity, to become a new economic interest class, or a new political class which would bid for power. The reasons for this are evident from an inspection of the Schema.

  Schema: The Societal Structure

  of the Post-Industrial Society (U.S. Model)

  I. Statuses: Axis of Stratification—Based on Knowledge

  (Horizontal Structures)

  A. The professional class: the four estates

  1. Scientific

  2. Technological (applied skills: engineering, economics, medicine)

  3. Administrative

  4. Cultural (artistic and religious)

  B. Technicians and semi-professional

  C. Clerical and sales

  D. Craftsmen and semi-skilled (blue-collar)

  II. Situses: Locations of Occupational Activities

  (Vertical Structures)

  A. Economic enterprises and business firms

  B. Government (bureaucratic: judicial and administrative)

  C. Universities and research institutions

  D. Social complexes (hospitals, social-service centers, etc.)

  E. The military

  III. Control System: The Political Order

  A. The directorate

  1. Office of the President

  2. Legislative leaders

  3. Bureaucratic chiefs

  4. Military chiefs

  B. The polities: constituencies and claimants

  1. Parties

  2. Elites (scientific, academic, business, military)

  3. Mobilized groups

  a) Functional groups (business, professional, labor)

  b) Ethnic groups

  c) Special-focus groups

  (1) Functional (mayors of cities, poor, etc.)

  (2) Expressive (youth, women, homosexual, etc.)

  The professional class as I define it is made up of four estates: the scientific, the technological, the administrative, and the cultural.7 While the estates, as a whole, are bound by a common ethos, there is no intrinsic interest that binds one to the other, except for a common defense of the idea of learning; in fact there are large disjunctions between them. The scientific estate is concerned with the pursuit of basic knowledge and seeks, legitimately, to defend the conditions of such pursuit, untrammeled by political or extraneous influence. The technologists, whether engineers, economists, or physicians, base their work on a codified body of knowledge, but in the application of that knowledge to social or economic purposes they are constrained by the policies of the different situses they are obedient to. The administrative estate is concerned with the management of organizations and is bound by the self-interest of the organization itself (its perpetuation and aggrandizement) as well as the implementation of social purposes, and may come into conflict with one or another of the estates. The cultural estate—artistic and religious—is involved with the expressive symbolism (plastic or ideational) of forms and meanings, but to the extent that it is more intensively concerned with meanings, it may find itself increasingly hostile to the te
chnological and administrative estates. As I noted in the introduction, the axial principle of modern culture, in its concern with the self, is antinomian and anti-institutional, and thus hostile to the functional rationality which tends to dominate the application of knowledge by the technological and administrative estates. Thus in the post-industrial society one finds increasingly a disjunction between social structure and culture which inevitably affects the cohesiveness if not the corporate consciousness of the four estates.8