DANIEL BELL'S CONCEPT OF POSTINDUSTRIAL （丹尼尔·贝尔的后工业化的概念）.pdf

DANIEL BELL'S CONCEPT OF POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY:THEORY, MYTH, AND IDEOLOGYThe Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in SocialForecasting, by Daniel Bell. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Pp.xiii, 507. $16.00.The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by Daniel Bell. NewYork: Basic Books, 1976. Pp. xvi, 301. $14.95.One of the signs of weakness in contemporary American politicalscience is its susceptability to invasion from other disciplines.To say this is not to argue that any academic field should ignoredevelopments in other fields . and not be subject to cross fertilizationwith them, any more than any nation should seek to hermetically sealitself off from outside cultural influences. But just as national identityand ultimately national power can be threatened by cultural conquestfrom the outside, so can academic disciplines lose their bearings andintegrity by adopting paradigms from other fields which may not dojustice to the nature of their own data or help to answer the questionsthey seek to resolve.A case in point in contemporary political science is research andteaching in the area of the politics of "developing" nations. In thepost World War II period, discussion of comparative politics wasoverwhelmed by the belief, adopted from economics, that there weresuch things as "underdeveloped" (actually a euphemism for poor orbackward) countries with special characteristics as defined by thediscipline of economics. Faced with the problem of enlarging theirfocus from the nation states of Europe and North America in order todeal with a horde of "new nations," students of comparative politicsallowed themselves to assume that there must be common politicalcharacteristics of these "underdeveloped" nations which correlatedwith their economic characteristics and a new subfield was born of thisseduction. Moreover, in the circumstances it was also natural to fur-ther assume that—since economic criteria defined the new field ofstudy—in these nations economics was the dominant, independentvariable and politics the subordinate dependent factor. Needless to62 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWERsay, the fruits of this mesallaince have been sickly and deformed, andonly in the past few years have political scientists begun to integratethe study of these countries into paradigms of primarily politicalsignificance.'But if political science has been reasserting its integrity in resistingthe imposition of an often misleading economic paradigm on thestudy of the less developed—i.e., less industrialized—nations of theworld, it has been increasingly subject to a new invasion fromwithout. This time the new paradigm originates in sociology and seeksto reorient our study of the developed, advanced industrial nations.This new frame of reference coalesces around the concept of "post-industrial society," as developed by Harvard sociologist Daniel Belland a number of major and minor epigoni. 2 The very thinness andvagueness of the theoretical basis of "post-industrial" theorizingparadoxically adds to rather than detracts from its influence. Thus wefind books and papers which use the term "post-industrial" in theirtitles or refer to the term in their introductions, only to define or usethe term in various ways or not at all in the actual analysis of data orexposition of material.' Yet increasing numbers of political scientistsseem to act on the maxim that where there is so much smoke (or haze)there must be fire, and the term gains in currency.1. For an evaluation of the current state of the study of the politics of developingsocieties see Robert T. Holt and John E. Turner, "Crises and Sequences in CollectiveTheory Development," American Political Science Review LXIX (1975) Pp. 979-994.Pioneer attempts to assert the autonomy of political variables in that study includeRobert T. Holt and John E. Turner, The Political Basis of Economic Development.(Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1966) and Samuel Huntington, Political Order in ChangingSocieties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).2. One of the earliest contemporary usages is in Bertram Gross, "Space-Time andPost-Industrial Society," CAG Occasional Papers, Comparative AdministrationGroup, American Society for Public Administration, May 1966. This antedates Bell'susage but is not followed up by later systematic work on Gross' part.3. The term is used, without explanation or elucidation in, for example, WarrenMoxley. "Post—Industrial Politics: A Guide to 1976." Congressional Quarterly Week-ly Report, November 15, 1975, Pp. 2475-2478; Talcott Parsons, "Religion in Post-Industrial America: The Problem of Secularization," Social Research 41 (1974): Pp.193-225; Richard L. Simpson, "Beyond Rational Bureaucracy: Changing Values andSocial Implications in Post-Industrial Society," Social Forces 51 (1972): 1-6; StanleyRothman and S. Robert Lichter, "Power, Politics, and Personality in Post-IndustrialSociety," Journal of Politics, 40 (1978): Pp. 675-717; Erazim V. Kohak, "Being Youngin a Post-Industrial。