The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  During 1969, in preparation for the 1970 centenary of Lenin’s birth, the Soviet press devoted considerable space to this material from Lenin’s archive on the first few months of the new Soviet government. In an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda for January 11, 1969, V. Chikin takes off from a “unique Lenin album,” which is being completed by scholars from the central party archives, on Lenin’s efforts to work out “just principles and a judicious system of government management,” and the author draws on some “rough notes and instructions, newspaper articles and detailed reports” to make the following observation:

  Ilyich [Lenin] sets himself the special goal of teaching practicality to the Bolshevik leaders who had not yet broken out of the sweet captivity of revolutionary romanticism. He notes to himself: “Practicality and efficiency as a slogan.” And knocking the “romantics” right out, he advances a completely unexpected formula for socialism: “To scoop up with both hands the best from abroad: Soviet power + the Prussian railway system plus American technique and the organization of trusts + American education, etc., etc. + + = Σ = socialism.” True, to judge from the evidence of eyewitnesses, the first efforts to “Americanize” the office work in the CPC [Council of Peoples Commissars] had no success. (I am indebted to Paul Zinner for the citation and to Colette Shulman for the translation.)

  A technocratic mind-view, one might say, is not only a doctrine but also a temperament. Just as one can observe the awesome obsessiveness in Taylor, so one sees the compulsive orderliness in Lenin. A recently published memoir by Nikolay Valentinov, who spent several months with Lenin in Geneva in 1904, provides a vivid picture of his personality:

  In his “normal” condition, Lenin tended towards an orderly life, free from all excesses. He wanted it to be regular, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work, and leisure. He did not smoke or drink, and looked after his health doing physical exercises every day. He was order and neatness incarnate. Every morning, before he settled down to read the newspapers, write, and work, Lenin, duster in hand, would put his desk and his books in order. He sewed any loose buttons on his coat or trousers himself, without bothering Krupskaya (his wife). If he found a stain on his suit, he immediately tried to remove it with petrol. He kept his bicycle as clean as a surgical instrument. In this “normal” condition Lenin would have appeared to any observer as the most sober, balanced, and well-disciplined of men, without passions, repelled by slovenliness, and in particular by Bohemian ways. “I have already got used to the way of life in Cracow: it is limited, quiet and sleepy,” he wrote to his relatives in 1913. “No matter how god-forsaken this town may be, I like it better here than in Paris.”

  Lenin’s didactic utilitarian yardstick is also revealed in a comment of another Russian revolutionist, Vorovsky, to Valentinov:

  ... Lenin knows none of Goethe’s works except Faust. He divides literature into two parts: what he needs, and what he doesn’t need.... He has managed to find time to read all the volumes of Znanie (Knowledge) [a popular literary miscellany] while he has consciously ignored Dostoyevsky: “I haven’t got time for this rubbish!!” After reading Memoirs from the House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment, he felt no desire to read The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. “I know the subject of both of those malodorous works.... I looked through [The Possessed] and threw it away. I don’t read such literature—what good is it to me?” Nikolay Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 147 and 49-50.

  15 Thus, the American defense effort was organized not along the traditional lines of army, navy, and air force, but in nine basic programs: Strategic Retaliatory Forces, Continental Air and Missile Defense Forces, General Purpose Forces, Airlift and Sealift Forces, Reserve and National Guard Forces, Research and Development, down into “program elements” (there are now 800 such elements in the Defense Budget) which are intended to accomplish common missions. The original rationale is laid down in a book by Charles Hitch and Roland McKean, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, Mass., i960). A more extended application of the concept is contained in the Rand volume, edited by David Novick, Program Budgeting—Program Analysis and the Federal Budget (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

  16 Charles Reich, “The New Property,” The Public Interest, no. 3 (Spring 1966), P.57.

  17 In the terminology of Weber, rationality is of two kinds, Wertrationalität and Zweckrationalität. Wertrationalität is the rationality of “reason” whose ends are to be considered by themselves as valid, independent of means. Zweckrationalität is the rationality of function.

  1 In a speech in 1856, he used a geological metaphor: “The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents—small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they announced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.” And yet it is also good Marxism—a view he developed in later years—that no social system ever disappears until all its potential for development has been realized, a view Marx argued against the Utopians, leftists, and political adventurers who thought that “will” alone could create a social revolution.

  The speech of 1856 was given at the anniversary of the Chartist organ, the People’s Paper, and is reprinted in Karl Marx: Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1935); the quotation is on p. 427. The letter to Dr. Kugelmann is cited in the editor’s notes in The Correspondence of Marx and Engels (New York, 1936), pp. 225-226.

  2 In his memoirs Gesichter und Zeiten, published two years before his death in 1935, the German count and noted publisher Harry Kessler, who was born in 1868, looked back to the eighties and recalled a widespread feeling that

  something very great, the old cosmopolitan, yet still mainly agricultural and feudal Europe, the world of beautiful ladies, gallant kings, dynastic arrangements, the Europe of the eighteenth century and the Holy Alliance, had become old and sick, and was declining to its death; and something new, young, strong, as yet unimaginable, would make its appearance. (Cited by Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker [January 15, 1972].)

  3 Emile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (Glencoe, III., 1958), pp. 10–11. These lectures, unpublished during Durkheim’s lifetime, were first published in Turkey, by the Faculty of Law of Istanbul, and the Presses Universitaire de France in 1950. These lectures were first given in 1890 and 1900 at Bordeaux and repeated at the Sorbonne in 1904 and 1912. The passage cited above appears in slightly reduced form in Durkheim’s preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor, which appeared in 1902 under the title “Quelque Remarques sur les Groupements Professionels.” See The Division of Labor, trans. George Simpson (New York, 1933), p. 3. In the quotation above, I have in the last two lines used the wording from the preface to The Division of Labor, since it strengthens Durkheim’s essential meaning.

  4 R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York, 1920), p. 8. See especially chap. 6, “The Functional Society,” and chap. 10, “The Position of the Brain Worker.”

  5 For a classic discussion of the subject, see A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, The professions (Oxford, 1933; reprint edition, London, 1964), especially part 4, “Professionalism and the Society of the Future.” For a summation of the concept, see the article “Professions,” by Talcott Parsons, in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), vol. 12. For some recent discussions on what can be professionalized, see Harold Wilensky, “ Professionalization of Everyone,” in the American Journal of Sociology, vol. 70, no. 2 (September 1964), and Professions and Professionalization, ed. J. A. Jackson (Cambridge, Eng., 1970).

  6 One might say that business is called to account by its customers through the market, whereas a professional is called to account by his peers through the professional group. Property is associated with wealth, which can be passed on through legal title directly; a profession is defined by skill which can be passed on only indirectly through cultural advanta
ge that the children of professionals may gain.

  7 The suggestion of four estates is derived, of course, from Don K. Price’s fruitful book The Scientific Estate (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). Price defines four functions in government—the scientific, professional, administrative, and political—and converts each function, as an ideal type, into an estate. My differences with Price are twofold: I think the estates can be represented more accurately as social groups, rather than functions; more importantly, I do not consider the political function coeval logically with the others, for I see the political as the control system of the entire societal structure. Terminologically, I have substituted the word “technological” (for the applied skills) where Price uses “professional,” since I would reserve “professional” for the larger meaning of the entire class, and I have added a cultural estate, where Price has none. Nonetheless, my indebtedness to Price is great.

  8 One might note that the more extreme forms of the “new consciousness” such as Theodore Rozsak’s The Making of a Counter-Culture and Charles Reich’s The Greening of America manifest a distinct hostility not only to scientism, but to science as well.

  9 The limitation of this analysis is that while the post-industrial society, in its societal structure, increasingly becomes a functional society, the political order is not organized in functional terms. Thus the continuing existence of the traditional geographical districts and the dispersal of persons in this fashion means that the political issues at any one time are much more diffuse than the interests of the particular statuses or situses. It would also indicate that the situses would, like the pressure groups, operate primarily through the lobbying of the legislative and executive branches, rather than work directly through the electoral process. Reality complicates immeasurably any ideal-type schemas.

  10 Paradoxically, the growth of that society came about only after the self-contained economic life of the commune—its roots—was broken by the rise of larger-scale industry which, in branching out, could buy its raw materials in one town and sell in another, and which made its way, against both the older feudal society and the regulative restrictions of the commune, in alliance with the monarchical centralization of the newly emerging national state.

  11 This is, indeed, Heilbroner’s suggestion. See Robert Heilbroner, The Limits of American Capitalism (New York, 1966), p. 115. He states:

  ... like the first manifestations of the market in the medieval era, science and its technology emerge as a great underground river whose tortuous course has finally reached the surface during the age of capitalism, but which springs from far different sources. But that is not where the resemblance ends. As with the emergent market forces, the river of scientific change, having now surfaced, must cut its own channel through the existing social landscape—a channel that will, as in the case of the money orientation in medieval life, profoundly alter the nature of the existing terrain. Indeed, if we ask what force in our day might in time be strong enough to undercut the bastions of privilege and function of capitalism and to create its own institutions and social structures in their place, the answer must surely be the one force that dominates our age—the power of science and of scientific technology (ibid., pp. 116-117).

  I believe that while the initial proposition may be correct, Mr. Heilbroner neglects the transformation of science itself when it becomes “Big Science,” and becomes intertwined with the government in dealing with the social and political issues of the day. It is this transformation—as my ensuing discussion argues—that makes problematic the Utopian component of the post-industrial society.

  12 For a short but lucid discussion of the early organization of science, see A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800 (London, 1954), chap. 7, “The Organization of Scientific Inquiry.” On the institutionalization of science in the last two centuries, see Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971). As Professor Ben-David describes the new role of the universities:

  ... the laboratories of some German universities became the centers and sometimes virtually the seats of world-wide scientific communities in their respective fields starting about the middle of the nineteenth century. Liebig at Giessen, and Johannes Müller at Berlin were perhaps the first instances of a master and a considerable number of advanced research students working together over a period of time in a specialty until they obtained, by sheer concentration of effort, an edge over everyone else in the world. Toward the end of the century the laboratories of some of the professors became so famous that the ablest students from all over the world went there for varying periods of time. The list of students who worked in such places often included practically all the important scientists of the next generation....

  These unplanned and unexpected developments were an even more decisive step in the organization of science than the early nineteenth century reform. Research started to become a regular career, and scientists in a number of fields started to develop into much more closely knit networks than ever before. Their nuclei were now university laboratories training large numbers of advanced students, thus establishing between them personal relationships, highly effective means of personal communication, and the beginnings of deliberately concentrated and coordinated research efforts in a selected problem area (ibid., pp. 124-125).

  13 In this sketch of the traditional imago—and rationale—of science, I have relied principally upon Michael Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty (London, 1951), part 1; Max Weber’s “Science as a Vacation,” in From Max Weber, ed. Gerth and Mills (New York, 1946); and Robert K. Merton’s Social Theory and Social Structure (revised edition, Glencoe, III., 1957), chaps. 15 and 16.

  This imago is an ideal type and, like any such construct, is sometimes contradicted in practice. For a skeptical note, see Robert A. Rothman, “A Dissenting View on the Scientific Ethos.” British Journal of Sociology, vol. xxiii, no. 1 (March 1972).

  14 In this respect, science is like many an intellectual or artistic community where painters or writers seek each other out and, when they are united by a common interest, will reinforce each other’s work. One can take an analogous movement such as abstract painting in the 1950s when such artists as Hoffman, Pollock, de Kooning, Still, and Motherwell extended the qualities of “painterliness”—i.e. the effects of the texture of paint as a dimension of the painting itself—to the formal limits of painting, and thus, in a sense, exhausted a paradigm. And yet while they all talked with each other (though Still was a recluse), they were not engaged in a cooperative enterprise to master a problem or complete a phase in an intellectual tradition. For science is the testing of coordinate knowledge within a coherent paradigm. However individual the explorations, the results dovetail to provide a comprehensive description, if not explanatory answer, of a theoretical question.

  15 Thus I. I. Rabi, with his work on molecular beams, and Charles Townes, with his theory of radiation emission, did the theoretical work which led directly to the principle of the laser. Though industrial corporations may reap profits, the reward of Rabi and Townes is scholarly recognition; they both won Nobel Prizes.

  16 As Max Weber wrote, in “Science as a Vocation”:

  In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work.... Every scientific “fulfilment” raises new “questions”; it asks to be “surpassed” and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works can last as “gratifications” because of their artistic quality, or they remain important as a means of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically—let that be repeated—for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum ... (p. 138).

  17 l owe the suggestion and the phrase to Joseph Ben-David, though I suspect he might not approve of my own idiosyncratic
usage; see his essay, “The Profession of Science and Its Powers,” Minerva (London, July 1972).

  The operative character of the community of science as a recognition and reward mechanism has been demonstrated in a number of research studies by Robert K. Merton and his associates. See Harriet Zuckerman and Robert K. Merton, “Patterns of Evaluation in Science: Institutionalisation, Structure and Functions of the Referee System,” Minerva (London), vol. IX, no. 1 (January 1971); Stephen Cole and Jonathan R. Cole, “Scientific Output and Recognition: A Study in the Operation of the Reward System in Science,” American Sociological Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (June 1967); Harriet Zuckerman, “Stratification in American Science,” in Edward O. Laumann, ed., Social Stratification: Research and Theory for the 1970s, (Indianapolis, 1970). A collection of Merton’s papers, The Sociology of Science—Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. Norman Storer, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1973.

  18 As Jean-Jacques Solomon has observed: “In these days ... if there is a conflict between science and government, such a conflict does not take place under the old banner of truth, but under that of productivity. This claim for the quickest output possible is the modern, industrialized version of the threats which dogma’s authority has exercised in the past. Conceived in this instrumental manner, science is only one among other tools that a society uses for achieving certain goals, and decision-making here cannot be dissociated from the decision-making process in other fields such as economics or defense.” “Science Policy in Perspective,’ Studium Generale, no. 24 (1971), p.1,028.

  19 The final scene of the book—and the movie which starred Raymond Massey as the chief scientist—shows the older generation of scientists, now tremulous, watch with awe and pride as the next generation takes the next great stride of science—to the moon!