Dr. Daniel Bell was professor of sociology at Columbia University. He was also the labour editor of Fortune Magazine. After completing graduate school at the City College of New York and Columbia, he worked at the weekly The New Leader and the magazine Common Sense. Before moving to Fortune, he spent two years lecturing at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. He joined Columbia in 1962 before moving to Harvard in 1970, where he was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences a decade later. From 1965-1973, he was co-editor of The Public Interest magazine. He is the author of The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), The Radical Right (1964), and several other books. Bell was an important American public intellectual, offering analyses of capitalism and modern society and predicting the consequences of what we now call the postindustrial society. He served as a member of the President’s Commission on Technology in 1964–1965 and as a member of the President’s Commission on a National Agenda for the 1980s in 1979. He received a number of awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association, the Talcott Parsons Prize for the Social Sciences from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the French Government’s Tocqueville Award. He died in 2011.
Bell gave three lectures: The History of the Idea of Progress, The History of the Idea of Utopia, & The History of the Idea of Planning. In his first lecture, he explained that the contemporary world had become ‘future-oriented’ through the use of politics and business to develop rational estimates and anticipate needs. While the future cannot be fully predicted, it can increasingly be invented, especially because of the post-1945 commitment to economic growth, the spread of intellectual technology (like computers, which enable the extension of the social sciences to deal with planning problems of society), and the rapid emergence of science as a central activity of society that is expected to unlock the secrets of the universe. His lectures focused on the way humans have imagined the future, rather than on the ways they have sought to deal with it.
Listen to excerpts from Bell’s lectures below.
