Daniel Bell

Sociologist, born in New York City, New York, USA. A radical journalist in the late 1930s, he became a moderate liberal spokesman of distinctive intellectual power and breadth. He was labour editor of Fortune (1948–58), and spent most of his academic career at Columbia University (1952–69) and Harvard (1969–90). Of his many books, The End of Ideology (1960) and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) attracted the widest attention. He co-founded and edited The Public Interest (1965–73).

Daniel Bell (born 10 May 1919 in New York) is a sociologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University. He is also known for his contributions as an editor to The Public Interest Magazine, Fortune and The New Leader. Bell was among the original New York Intellectuals, a group of anti-Stalinist left-wing writers. His most influential books are The End of Ideology (1960), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). The End of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism appeared on the Times Literary Supplement’s list of the 100 most important books of the second half of the twentieth century. The End of Ideology has been influential in what was called endism. At the time, Bell was attacked by politically critics, left-wing and otherwise. They claimed that Bell had replaced a sense of reality with theoretical elegance, arguing that he privileged 'endism' more than he did historical accuracy. It was disproven by the return of radical discontenment in politics, marked by the 1960s and 1970s youth agitations in the West and the rise of extremist politics in the Third World.

In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society Bell outlined a new kind of society - the post-industrial society. Bell also argued that the post-industrial society would replace the industrial society as the dominant system. There are three components to a post-industrial society, according to Bell:

a shift from manufacturing to services the centrality of the new science-based industries the rise of new technical elites and the advent of a new principle of stratification

Since the publication of his book, many of the predictions have turned true.