Bio: (1919-2011) American sociologist. Daniel Bell became famous for his book End of Ideology (1960), in which he advocated the idea that society is going throw a process of the waning of ideology - in a modern industrialized capitalist society, old, antagonistic, and extreme ideologies are declining, and technocratic solutions to social and political issues, and new parochial ideologies, are becoming increasingly important.

Later, in the book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), he writes about the arrival of post-industrial society, in which society will cease to be organized on class principles. Post-industrial society is a social formation in which private property, class interest, and class conflict have lost their centrality and priority. The new society is organized around the axis of theoretical knowledge, education, science, and government institutions. Traditional businessmen are being replaced by scientists, economists, and engineers. The source of innovation and the creation of practical policy are universities, and not, as before, business. Society is divided into three spheres: economy, political community, and culture. The political community regulates the distribution of power and various interests in society; culture, as an area of ​​self-realization, establishes meaning through expressive rituals and art; economics refers to the social structure. Society as a whole is not organized around one dominant element or integrated into a single system, because there is always a mismatch between different spheres and areas.

In books, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) Bell argues that the hedonistic culture of capitalism, in the most developed countries, is not in line with the dominance of rationality required by the economic system. There is a growing divergence and alienation of the economy, as an area of ​​social structure, on the one hand, and culture, on the other. The Postmodern culture celebrates the hedonistic world of mass consumption, fashion, photography, and travel, the consumerist culture is built around play, entertainment, and show. In postmodern culture, the bourgeois value system based on Protestant ethics and Puritan self-control are being rejected. Post-industrial society is not a decentralized society, because there is a new social structure that is growing. Theorists in science, economics, and information dominate empiricists and create a class of knowledge. At the heart of post-industrial society is a professional class that embodies the norms of social responsibility and ethics of community service. Profit does not play the main motive in this class, so this class will succeed in imposing itself on society with its professional values.

However, the techno-economic structure does not determine developments in the fields of politics and culture. Each of these three areas of society is governed by different and sometimes opposing principles. The economy is ruled by the principle of efficiency, politics by the principle of equality, while culture is marked by the principle of self-knowledge. Bell lists five basic cultural contradictions of capitalism: 1) the differences between economic growth and the needs of the population; 2) differences in the existence and realization of social values; 3) differences in quantity and quality of life; 4) differences in inflation and monetary stability; 5) the contradiction between plans for progress and realistically achieved social development. He emphasizes that modern capitalism contains the deepest opposition in its very logic of functioning, because it requires a puritanical ethic of work, while, at the same time, it depends on the hedonistic ethic of consumption.

Main works

Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952);

The New American Right (1955); 

Work and Its Discontents (1956);

End of Ideology (1960);

The Reforming of General Education (1966);

The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973);

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976);

Communitarianism and its Critics (1993).