The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  While the classes may be represented, horizontally, by statuses (headed by the four estates), the society is organized, vertically, by situses, which are the actual loci of occupational activities and interests. I use this unfamiliar sociological word situses to emphasize the fact that in day-to-day activities the actual play and conflict of interests exist between the organizations to which men belong, rather than between the more diffuse class or status identities. In a capitalist society, the property owner or businessman, as a class, is located exclusively in the business firm or corporation, so that status and situs are joined. In the post-industrial society, however, the four estates are distributed among many different situses. Scientists can work for economic enterprises, government, universities, social complexes, or the military (though the bulk of the “pure” scientists are to be found in the university). And the same distributions hold for the technologists and the managers. Because of this “cross-cutting,” the likelihood of a pure “estate” consciousness for political purposes tends to diminish.

  Finally, if the major historical turn in the last quarter-century has been the subordination of the economic function to societal goals, the political order necessarily becomes the control system of the society. But who runs it, and for whose (or what) ends? In one respect, what the change may mean is that traditional social conflicts have simply shifted from one arena to another, so that what the traditional classes fought out in the economic realm, where men sought comparative advantage in place, privilege and domination, is now transferred to the political realm, and as that arena widens, the special foci and ethnic groups (the poor and the blacks) now seek to gain through politics the privileges and advantages they could not obtain in the economic order. This is what has been taking place in recent years, and it will continue. The second, and structurally more pervasive, shift is that in the post-industrial society the situses rather than the statuses would be the major political-interest units in the society. To some extent this is evident in the familiar phenomenon of pressure groups. But in the post-industrial society it is more likely that the situses will achieve greater corporate cohesiveness vis-à-vis one another and become the major claimants for public support and the major constituencies in the determination of public policy.9 And yet the very forces which have re-emphasized the primacy of the political order in a technical world make it imperative to define some coherent goals for the society as a whole and, in the process, to articulate a public philosophy which is more than the sum of what particular situses or social groups may want. In the efforts to forge some such coherence one may find the seeds of the cohesiveness of the professional class in the post-industrial society.

  A new social system, contrary to Marx, does not always arise necessarily within the shell of an old one but sometimes outside of it. The framework of feudal society was made up of noblemen, lords, soldiers, and priests whose wealth was based on land. The bourgeois society that took hold in the thirteenth century was made up of artisans, merchants, and free professionals whose property lay in their skills or their willingness to take risks, and whose mundane values were far removed from the fading theatrics of the chivalric style of life. It arose, however, outside the feudal landed structure, in the free communes, or towns, that were no longer seignorial dependencies. And these self-ruling small communes became the cornerstones of the future European mercantile and industrial society.10

  So, too, the process today. The roots of post-industrial society lie in the inexorable influence of science on productive methods, particularly in the transformation of the electrical and chemical industries at the beginning of the twentieth century. But as Robert Heilbroner has observed: “Science, as we know it, began well before capitalism existed and did not experience its full growth until well after capitalism was solidly entrenched.” And science, as a quasi-autonomous force, would extend beyond capitalism. By this token, one can say that the scientific estate—its ethos and its organization—is the monad that contains within itself the imago of the future society.11

  2. The Future of Science

  THE ETHOS OF SCIENCE

  Though the idea of science goes back to Greek times, the organization of scientific work begins largely in the seventeenth century with the rise of academies, or scientific societies, funded by wealthy patrons and developing outside the universities, to foster scientific experiments. The institutionalization of scientific work, however, develops only with the formalization of national academies, as in France in the late eighteenth century, and the absorption of science into the university, beginning in Germany in the nineteenth century, and the creation of scientific laboratories in the universities which became centers of world-wide scientific communities in their fields.12

  Despite the fact that it often functioned within state systems—in Germany and in France the universities and academies were state institutions and professors were civil servants—the overriding fact about science was its autonomy as a self-directed community: in the decisions about what research would be undertaken, in the debates about what knowledge was valid, in the recognition of achievement and the granting of status and esteem. This very autonomy is the heart of the ethos—and organization—of science.

  And yet, while the moral strength of science lies in the ethos of a self-regulating commune, the growth of this estate since World War II, the birth-years of the post-industrial society, has transformed science in such extraordinary fashion as to create a radical disjunction between the traditional image, both in ethos and organization, and the reality of its structure and role as “Big Science.” It is this disjunction which raises the question whether the paradox of the rise of capitalism (noted in footnote 10) may not be repeated in the intertwining of science and government, and whether the traditional ethos and image of science may not have a different function in the post-industrial society.

  The community of science is a unique institution in human civilization.13 It has no ideology, in that it has no postulated set of formal beliefs, but it has an ethos which implicitly prescribes rules of conduct. It is not a political movement that one joins by subscription, for membership is by election, yet one must make a commitment in order to belong. It is not a church where the element of faith rests on belief and is rooted in mystery, yet faith, passion, and mystery are present, but they are directed by the search for certified knowledge whose function it is to test and discard old beliefs. Like almost every human institution, it has its hierarchies and prestige rankings, but this ordering is based uniquely on achievement and confirmation by peers rather than on inheritance, age grading, brute force, or contrived manipulation. In totality, it is a social contract but in a way never foretold by Hobbes or Rousseau, for while there is a voluntary submission to a community and a moral unity results, the sovereignty is not coercive and the conscience remains individual and protestant. As an imago, it comes closest to the ideal of the Greek polis, a republic of free men and women united by a common quest for truth.

  Science, almost like a religious order, defines the stages along life’s way. “One enters civil society by mere birth, and one becomes a citizen by mere coming of age. Not so in the Republic of Science, wherein membership must be diligently sought and is selectively granted.” Thus Bertrand de Jouvenel has described the beginning of the process. One lives within a great tradition shaped out of the errors and advances of the past. The first forcing ground is the university. In a lower school a student may have learned the received doctrine, the scientific verities, the “dead letter” of science. A university seeks to make the student realize its uncertainties and its eternally provisional nature.

  To be a scientist is to serve an apprenticeship. As in art, there are few primitives or self-taught; one achieves competence by serving under a master. “In the great schools of research,” Polanyi writes, “are fostered the most vital premises of scientific discovery. A master’s daily labors will reveal these to the intelligent student and impart to him also some of the master’s personal intuitions by which
his work is guided. ... This is why so often great scientists follow great masters as apprentices. Rutherford’s work bore the clear imprint of his apprenticeship under J. J. Thomson. And no less than four Nobel laureates are found in turn among the personal pupils of Rutherford. ...”

  If there is apprenticeship, there is also fellowship. One has only to read a book like Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Beyond to get the sense that, in the 1920s, nuclear physics had all the excitement of an avant-garde movement. The young physicists flocked to Göttingen, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Cambridge to study with the masters and participate in the exciting reconstruction of the physical universe. They had a self-conscious feeling of belonging to a special order, and their relationships were intimate and personal. One is struck by the cooperative, yet competitive, ambience in which men working on the frontiers of physics, such as Bohr, Dirac, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, and others, sought each other out to exchange ideas and talk physics, and masters like Bohr quickly sensed the quality of younger men and invited them to work with him, or went with them on long, extended walks and talks, in order to test and clarify their ideas.14

  The heart of science lies in the definition of inquiry. It is an effort to solve a question which is not “given” but is problematic. The inception of an inquiry rests upon the guess that an unknown yet underlying pattern links together apparently diverse phenomena, and the scientific method narrows the models to a few alternatives which permit of testing. A theory is not a mechanical algorithm which runs down every possible permutation and combination, but an insight which is subject to verification. If a man fails to pursue this testing with great rigor, he may still possibly have hit upon a truth, but he will have fallen from the standards of scientific inquiry.

  For this knowledge to be accredited, it must run the gauntlet of criticism. There are the initial “referees” whose judgment permits publication in the scientific journals. There are the seniors whose words command respect. In the scientific estate, as in other institutions, there are the elders, grouped often in an academy or some other formal body of official recognition, who are the unofficial governors of the scientific community. “By their advice [as Polanyi puts it] they can either delay or accelerate the growth of a new line of research. ... By the award of prizes and of other distinctions, they can invest a promising pioneer almost overnight with a position of authority and independence. ... Within a decade or so a new school of thought can be established by the selection of appropriate candidates for Chairs which have fallen vacant during that period. The same end can be advanced even more effectively by setting up new Chairs.”

  Along with this process goes an ethos which is based on the norm of free inquiry. It is accepted as a commitment not because it is technically and procedurally efficient in promoting scientific work, which it is, but because it is deemed morally right and good. This ethos, as codified by Robert K. Merton, has four elements: universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.

  Universalism demands that careers be open to anyone with talent. It rejects claims dependent upon the personal or social attributes of the individual, such as race, nationality, birth, or class. Communalism implies that knowledge is a social product, drawn from the common heritage of the past and given freely to the inheritors of the future. In science, an eponymous acclaim (such as Boyle’s law of gases) is a commemorative device, not a property right. One can patent an invention and derive a profit, but not the theory which has guided the invention.15 Scientific theory is in the public domain, and to this extent full and open communication is a necessary condition for the advance of knowledge.

  Disinterestedness is not a matter of individual motivation (scientists are as jealous of their own claims to fame as other persons—if not more so, since fame is their major reward) but of normative imperatives. The virtual absence of fraud in the annals of science, an exceptional record when compared with other spheres of activity, is due less to the personal qualities of the scientists than to the nature of scientific inquiry itself. “The demand for disinterestedness [writes Merton] has a firm basis in the public and testable character of science and this circumstance, it may be supposed, has contributed to the integrity of the men of science.”

  Organized skepticism emphasizes its detached scrutiny, its “willing suspension of belief,” its dissolution of the wall between the sacred and profane. Scientific knowledge is not ideology (though it may be distorted for such purposes) but a public explanation subject to renewed tests of verification. Einsteinian physics, according to Soviet ideologists (circa 1930), may have been bourgeois idealism, but it is Soviet ideology and not Einsteinian physics that crumbled. If science makes an absolute claim for autonomy and freedom, it does so by emphasizing the non-partisanship of its results.

  Science is a special kind of social arrangement designed to achieve, in John Ziman’s phrase, “a consensus of rational opinion.” So, ideally, does a polity. Yet the processes differ. In science, “truth” is achieved through controversy and criticism, in which a single answer has to be forthcoming. In the polity, a consensus is achieved through bargaining and trade-offs, and the answers are a compromise.

  Because no committee of outsiders can forecast the future progress of science, other than the routine extensions of existing paradigms, it can only be directed by the men of science themselves. Thus the community of science is a group of dedicated individuals, recognized by each other, working within a self-governing commune, responsible less to society as a whole than to its own ideals.

  The process and ethos add up to a “calling.” It is a calling because, as Max Weber put it, “Science ... presupposes that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is ‘worth being known,’ “ even though that very statement cannot be proven by scientific means and must be related, by each in his own way, to the ultimate values that each holds. But the dedication to science has a hallowed quality, and because this partakes of the “sacred” we can say that the ethos of science describes a “charismatic community.”

  The controlling term in this description is a community of science. And that very term highlights the distinctive sociological disjunction which has emerged in the last quarter of a century. A community, in the sociological term, is a Gemeinschaft, a primary group bound by intimate ties regulating itself through the force of tradition and opinion. But as against the Gemeinschaft, in the familiar sociological dichotomy, is the Gesellschaft, the large, impersonal society of secondary associations regulated by bureaucratic rules and tied together by the sanctions of dismissal. Today, science is both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. There is the community of science, the recognition by peers of outstanding achievement, which partakes of the charismatic quality of the undertaking and maintains the norms of disinterested knowledge. There is also the “occupational society,” a large-scale economic enterprise whose norms are “useful returns” to the society or the enterprise (non-profit or profit-making) and which grows larger and larger and tends to dwarf the first.

  The features of the “occupational society” are clear. Internally, there are the common features of bureaucratization: size, differentiation, and specialization—the risks of what Hans Magnus Enzenberger has called “the industrialization of mind.” The enterprise is regulated—less in the universities, more in the research laboratories—by formal hierarchy and impersonal rules. One loses the sense of the whole in the allocation of minute tasks; one loses control of the process of work. What we have is the common prescription of alienation in the workplace itself.

  Externally there is the dependence on government for financial support (“Without doubt,” writes Derek Price, “the abnormal thing in this age of Big Science is money”) and the demand that science be subordinated to “national needs,” be these weapons research, promotion of technology, the cleanup of the environment, and the like. Instead of self-direction there arises “science policy,” which inevitably becomes another name for the “planning” of science, a plan
ning which becomes inevitable with economic questions such as the degree of support for science as a proportion of GNP, the relative allocations among fields, the statement of priorities in research, and so on. A community can demand autonomy, but any large-scale bureaucratic structure becomes subject to public scrutiny or to governmental controls or, like any regulated or funded enterprise, it seeks on its own to influence political decisions for its self-interest and becomes a claimant in the political system.

  Along a different dimension, this transition in social structure poses a set of crucial questions for the norms and ethos of science. The community of science has been one of the most remarkable instances of the institutionalization of vitalized charisma. Charisma, as we know, is one of the major modes for legitimating change and innovation, especially revolutionary change. Charismatic authority, lodged usually though not necessarily in compelling figures, becomes the moral sanction for the breakup of established and traditional systems. In religion and politics one finds, historically, that the period after the eruption of charisma is usually followed by routinization, in which the original charismatic impulse (Christianity, communism) itself becomes established and resists change. This is not so in science. In the community of science the accepted norm is that of permanent revolution through codified rules. It is the fate of scientific knowledge to submit to constant testing, and while individuals, understandably, may resist the overthrow of a particular theory or paradigm, the community as a whole must accept the wheel of revolutionary fate.16 This “charismatic community” has been an operative reality in the history of science, guarding the chalice of revolution and acting as a set of guardians to bestow legitimacy on new paradigms and recognition and reward to individuals.17