The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting By Daniel Bell Basic Books, 528 pp., $12.50 Daniel Bell’s new book is like a forest; it contains innumerable trees, bushes, and heavy grass. However, the average reader will have great difficulty in finding the forest in the welter of the shrubbery. Although the jacket blurb for the book tells us that Professor Bell “demonstrates … an important new principle, ‘the codification of theoretical knowledge,’ which now shapes innovation in science, technology, and social policy,” neither this nor his appropriate emphasis on social, political, and economic forecasting will fall with a thud on the modern consciousness.
Professor Bell does say wise things about the particular topics he discusses. He is certainly one of a small number of intellectuals who noticed very early that the post-World War II world was different in significant ways from the world that preceded it. However, Professor Bell is embattled on so many fronts in this book that his vision of the future, as distinguished from our knowledge of the past, lacks that type of crystalline clarity that enhances a significant understanding of this difference.
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