Daniel Bell: Misunderstood in New Book about Him, ‘Defining the Age’

Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours, edited by Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia University Press, 322 pages, $35)

Daniel Bell (1919–2011) was one of the most influential sociologists and public intellectuals of the past 75 years, one of the great scholarly analysts in expository prose of the politics, economics, and culture of modernity since 1750, and one of the great witnesses of capitalism and communism in the 20th century. His book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) is one of the finest examples known to me of synthetic, integrative, historical, and social-scientific thinking of the last 50 years. Reviewing the U.K. edition of Bell’s volume of essays Sociological Journeys in 1981, the distinguished German politician and social scientist Ralf Dahrendorf, sometime director of the London School of Economics, said of Bell, “In his ability to understand complex socio-cultural processes, he is surely unrivalled in contemporary writing.” It was thus a good idea to hold a conference on his life and work in 2019 (the centennial of his birth) at Princeton, where four of the ten contributors teach, including Bell’s son, historian David Bell. There is much of value in the essays, whose subject richly deserves such close attention.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours, edited by Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia University Press, 322 pages, $35)

Daniel Bell (1919–2011) was one of the most influential sociologists and public intellectuals of the past 75 years, one of the great scholarly analysts in expository prose of the politics, economics, and culture of modernity since 1750, and one of the great witnesses of capitalism and communism in the 20th century. His book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) is one of the finest examples known to me of synthetic, integrative, historical, and social-scientific thinking of the last 50 years. Reviewing the U.K. edition of Bell’s volume of essays Sociological Journeys in 1981, the distinguished German politician and social scientist Ralf Dahrendorf, sometime director of the London School of Economics, said of Bell, “In his ability to understand complex socio-cultural processes, he is surely unrivalled in contemporary writing.” It was thus a good idea to hold a conference on his life and work in 2019 (the centennial of his birth) at Princeton, where four of the ten contributors teach, including Bell’s son, historian David Bell. There is much of value in the essays, whose subject richly deserves such close attention.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).