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Sam Tanenhaus: Daniel Bell, Master Builder

[Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.]

With the death last month of Daniel Bell, America lost its last great 20th-century big thinker, though this is not necessarily the impression many now have of him. One reason is that Bell was most prolific during a period, 1950-80, bounded by the cold war, that has receded into the half-forgotten past. Another is that for most of his career, Bell was seen less as a singular figure than as one of a club of intellectuals whose pedigrees were so similar they seemed interchangeable — New York City-reared Jews trained in factional combat at City College and groomed as journalists in the pages of small-circulation magazines (The New Leader, Commentary, Partisan Review, Encounter, The Public Interest), with detours into the Luce empire (Bell was for a time the labor editor of Fortune) and university perches (in Bell’s case Columbia and Harvard).

The aura of collective identity gains credence from Peter Steinfels’s book “The Neoconservatives,” in which Bell is grouped with Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Nisbet, among others, as a member of “the powerful party of intellectuals” who banded together to challenge liberal orthodoxy in the 1970s. And in “Arguing the World,” Joseph Dorman’s documentary film, released in 1998, Bell, Kristol, Glazer and Irving Howe are depicted as grizzled city boys dispersed along the ideological spectrum but still spiritual brothers.

All this is accurate as far as it goes. But to submerge Bell’s career into a generational or ideological subculture is to obscure the breadth of his ambition, which verged on the Faustian in its quest for totalizing knowledge. Others might formulate more novel arguments, or present them with more élan. But no one read so much and so diligently recorded it all. Bell’s major books — “The End of Ideology,” “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” each with its cosmological title — contain whole libraries of thought, ancient and modern, on philosophy, sociology and psychology, economics and technology, history and law, with excursions into literary theory and computer science....
Read entire article at NYT Book Review