DANIEL BELL AND THE AGONY OF MODERN LIBERALISM.
Item
-
Title
-
DANIEL BELL AND THE AGONY OF MODERN LIBERALISM.
-
Identifier
-
AAI8023672
-
identifier
-
8023672
-
Creator
-
LIEBOWITZ, NATHAN EMMANUEL.
-
Contributor
-
Joseph Bensman
-
Date
-
1980
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Sociology, Theory and Methods
-
Abstract
-
Basically a history of ideas type of dissertation this dissertation seeks to determine whether Daniel Bell's construction of his theory of the post-industrial society is ideologically grounded. It seeks to determine both the degree to which that theory can be understood to rationalize Welfare State liberalism and the degree to which Bell can be viewed as an ideologist or an intellectual.;The dissertation makes use of value analysis to resolve these problems. This methodology is used in order to discern the underlying values and assumptions that guide Bell's writings on the post-industrial society.;Considerable attention is given to the end of ideology theme developed by Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset in the late 1950s. An extensive review of the literature on this theme is undertaken. It is undertaken with the idea that such a review is made necessary by the fact that the charge that Bell's theory of the post-industrial society represents an ideological defense of Welfare State liberalism presupposes the absorption of the values of the end of ideology into the theory of the post-industrial society. The persistence of certain values is found in Bell's elaboration of the end of ideology theme. Perplexed by the statement at the end of Bell's "The End of Ideology in The West: An Epilogue" that the end of ideology need not mean the end of utopia, the dissertation proceeds to treat the "Epilogue" as an epilogue to Bell's career as a journalist and a right-wing socialist. It seeks to determine both the meaning that Bell associates with the term utopia and the intellectual context in which he developed this notion of the end of ideology.;In examining Bell's career shifts in the meaning of ideology are discerned. Discerned also is an underlying tension, one that the dissertation traces to Bell's efforts to reconcile the pessimism of Reinhold Niebuhr regarding the capacity of man to construct a rational democratic society with the optimism of John Dewey that such a society can be achieved through reason and science. The dissertation proceeds to define Bell's writings on the post-industrial society in terms of this tension while at the same time that it applies Bell's insights on the limits of industrial sociology in the 1940s to his own work in the 1970s. It concludes that Bell is like the nineteenth century British social critic Mathew Arnold in that both seek to define a balance between the Hebraic and the Hellenistic worldviews.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Sociology
