His analytical and moral witness against secular modern radicalism is overlooked in a new book on ‘his time and ours.’
His analytical and moral witness against secular modern radicalism, both left revolutionary and right aesthete-libertarian, is overlooked in a new book on ‘his time and ours.’
Defining the Age: Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours, edited by Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia University Press, 322 pages, $35)
D aniel 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.
The son of poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City, Bell advanced through free public educational institutions, Stuyvesant High School, and the City College of New York, enabling him to thrive at Columbia University and then to teach at the University of Chicago, at Columbia (1959–1969), and then at Harvard (1970–1990), as well as to pursue a parallel career for many years as an intellectual journalist. The Columbia and Chicago experiences exposed him to “Great Books” academic humanism, with enduring effect. He became one of the “New York intellectuals” portrayed in Joseph Dorman’s book and documentary film Arguing the World (2000), alongside his longtime friends Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer. More controversially, he was also a main subject of Peter Steinfels’s critical portrait The Neoconservatives (1979), and thus a chief figure in the “culture wars” among intellectuals that are still urgently part of our lives in the culture at large.
In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, published while Bell was in his early years at Harvard, he notoriously argued that he was a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish milieu, he never really rejected Judaism, though he passed on during the Depression and World War II years into the world of Yiddish radicalism, sectarian Jewish socialism, and progressive liberal utilitarianism. Yet unlike so many of his New York Jewish peers, he was never either a Marxist, a Trotskyist, a Leninist, or a Stalinist, and he was always proud of having worked and voted for the moderate, non-Marxist socialist Norman Thomas.
Yet Bell’s early intellectual years were lived very much in the urban and university Marxist and left-liberal milieu whose great figures were John Dewey and Sidney Hook. I think it a great deficiency of the present volume never to discuss this milieu and these figures and his growing disillusionment with them. It helps explain his fervent anti-communism and the developing intellectual-cultural range and insight that give particularity, depth, and ballast to his work, making it enduringly valuable. Bell’s father died very early in his life and he later said that the socialist anticommunists Sol Levitas and Sidney Hook (an editor and a philosopher) were substitute fathers to him. The brilliant Hook became the most eminent and vocal spokesman for Dewey’s scientistic naturalism from the 1930s to the 1960s, but the tragic press of world events — fascism, world Depression, Stalinism, Nazism, the Holocaust, another world war — made Bell recoil from the Marx-Dewey-Hook optimism of the secular modern belief in inevitable progress. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr: “There is . . . progress in human history; but it is the progress of all human potencies, both for good and evil.”
Instead of Dewey’s secular progressivism, it was the thinking, writing, judgment, and action of the Protestant theologian Niebuhr (1892–1971) that came to impress Bell increasingly. He told the young scholar Neil Jumonville in 1987 that in the early 1960s Hook “was dismayed by my turn back to Judaism and the evident sense that I had rejected his and Dewey’s naturalism in favor of a Niebuhrian neo-Augustinianism and an Old Testament view of human nature.”
It is this turn, with its large-scale philosophical and ethical consequences for his writing, that made Bell a great public intellectual and makes him an important resource for the potential renewal of American civilization. For what the Hebraic and Augustinian traditions — articulated with commanding force and brilliant applications by the great Niebuhr in his neo-orthodox, Judaeo-Christian worldview — gave to Bell was a firm ground on which to anatomize the tragic history of the world since 1914 and to analyze the dynamics of American, Western, and communist geopolitics and their components in economics, polity, and culture.
But political and social liberals (Dewey, Hook, and the university world generally) were not pleased with the austerity and sober realism of this neo-orthodox Judaeo-Christian realism, though Hook came to have great respect for Niebuhr. Nor were utopian gnostics of the cultural Left, increasingly voluble in universities (Harold Bloom, a long-term example, helping to dismantle the New Critical, culturally Christian, literary stronghold of Yale). At Columbia over many years Bell had developed close personal friendships with the historian Richard Hofstadter and the literary critics Lionel Trilling and his colleague and former student Steven Marcus, the latter two of whom were very much part of the Partisan Review–Commentary literary circle and also team-taught interdisciplinary upper-level undergraduate courses with him. After his move to Harvard in 1970, his son suggests in the essay in the present volume, Bell no longer had the sense of intellectual camaraderie of these friends and colleagues. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism was probably too conservative and too religious to make him many friends at Harvard.
For what Trilling, Marcus, and other New York cultural critics seem particularly to have helped Bell to see and powerfully to anatomize was not political history or economic dynamics — these were his fields and he saw them clearly himself — but a third dimension that had (and has) some degree of autonomy from the polity and the economy: the cultural-religious realm of belief and expressive symbolism, represented especially by the arts and the audiovisual worlds of entertainment and advertising. Trilling and Marcus in their cultural criticism discerned in the 1960s the recrudescence of a destructive aesthetic paganism (Marcus coined the term “pornotopia”) that had recurrently risen from its shallow and unquiet grave since Rousseau first resurrected it in the mid-18th century, and it was finally given rhetorical potency in the histrionic, hysterical immoralism of Nietzsche. There is a clear line of diabolist antinomianism displayed in France in Laclos, Sade, Charles Fourier (on whom Bell once planned to write a book), Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and André Gide, and then for much of the last hundred years in aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical writing, postmodern and proudly “deconstructive.” Bell came to fear and loathe this elaborate, reckless, and barbaric atavism, the very opposite of moral progress.
Both Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville had anatomized the ascendancy of “men of letters” and of “philosophical” literature in 18th-century France — the first “enlightened” modern nation — with the decline in authority of the Catholic Church and its doctrines and liturgy, and the effects of this ascendancy. During Bell’s life he met and communicated with one of their successors, the French Jewish sociologist-intellectual Raymond Aron (1905–1983), who wrote tellingly of “the nihilism of the aesthete” and also of Marxism as the “opium of the intellectuals.” Bell came increasingly to recover, rearticulate, and apply this critique (in our time extended by French intellectuals such as René Girard, Rémi Brague, and Jean-Marie Rouart in, e.g., his Ce Pays des Hommes sans Dieu, 2021).
Throughout the West, the decline of religion among intellectuals and the “enlightened” middle classes had over two hundred years gradually eroded the disciplined “Protestant ethic” (common to many Catholics and Jews too) that had generated the spectacular success of modern economic growth and prosperity in the first place. The old classical-Christian worldview was dissolved by self-expressive modernist assault — two-fanged, in that a scientistic, Marxist, utopian extremism (“scientific socialism”) was augmented by an antinomian, aesthetic, individualistic nihilism (the existential, nonmoral self as the only center of value; the self as a work of art; the transgressive criminal as hero; the delectable “flowers of evil”).
In passages of great power and insight in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell illuminated and applied the Judaeo-Christian tradition rejuvenated by Niebuhr. For example, after quoting and explicating a passage from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, he went on to say “religion always imposes moral norms on culture, . . . particularly the subordination of aesthetic impulses to moral conduct.” But with the decline of religious authority, secular libertines and radicals, aristocratic and bourgeois, increasingly demanded “the autonomy of the aesthetic,” the underlying belief “that experience, in and of itself, is of supreme value. Everything is to be explored, anything is to be permitted (at least to the imagination), including lust, murder, and other themes which have dominated the modernist sur-real.” We may see that in 2022 the result is our hedonistic, violent audiovisual pornotopia of advertising and entertainment, a true low point in the history of civilization.
All authority and justification are rooted “in the demands of the “I,” of the “imperial self,” Bell goes on to say. “Turning one’s back on the past, one . . . shreds the ties which compel continuity; one makes the new and the novel the source of interest, and the curiosity of the self the touchstone of judgment.” Modernism and postmodernism as cultural phenomena are rooted in transgression, moving “the center of authority from the sacred to the profane.” The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism is unrelenting in applying this critique of the post-moral, pagan culture of late modernity, and the book takes as its epigraph a great passage from T. S. Eliot’s The Rock about “knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.” Close to Bell stand Trilling, Marcus, and the Franco-American cultural historian Jacques Barzun, but behind him stands Niebuhr. Bell, the poor “Yiddish radical,” had become a recognizably theological moralist of world-historical range.
In the foreword to the 1978 edition of this book, Bell refers approvingly to similar efforts of cultural criticism by Peter Berger and Philip Rieff, and the three of them may by now be taken to have generated a body of social-cultural insight sufficiently detailed empirically and yet authoritative in premise, argument, and conclusion as to amount to a fundamental contribution to Western public philosophy. There is no mention of Berger or Rieff in Defining the Age.
In addition to Bell’s afterword to the 1996 edition of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, we have his volume of later essays entitled, in the United States, “The Winding Passage” (1981), which contains two of great value: his contribution to the Lionel Trilling memorial volume Art, Politics, and the Will (1977), and his 1977 Hobhouse Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics. In these essays Bell deepens and extends the range of his analysis with great precision and eloquence. In “Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self,” the essay for the Trilling volume, Bell attacks Nietzsche for “declaring war on the most profound tradition of Western culture,” the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition: “The writers of the Old Testament . . . had a horror of the aesthetic because of the implications of its claims. . . . For if the aesthetic alone is to justify life, not ethics, religion, or communal sharing, then morality is suspended and desire has no limit. Anything is possible, then, in this quest of the self to explore its relation to sensibility. Anything.” Contemporary culture is characterized by “the furious promotion of hedonism and pornotopia.” In the London lecture, “The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion,” he movingly recommends “the resurrection of memory” and praises “institutions that maintain moral awareness” as well as the conception of “the self as a moral agent, freely accepting one’s past (rather than just being shaped by it) and stepping back into tradition in order to maintain the continuity of moral meanings.”
“To maintain the continuity of moral meanings”: It is a poignant phrase, distilled from the tragic spectacle of what even the nontheological observer Sidney Hook called “the Second Fall of Man” since 1914. But of this tragic dimension, and Bell’s eloquent response to it, the contributors to the present volume of essays say almost nothing. The omission is particularly curious in that one of them, Zelizer of Princeton, has himself recently published a book on the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), whom Reinhold Niebuhr had helped to promote, calling him a “commanding and authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America.” (In authoritative scholarly works such as Natural Law in Judaism [1998], Heschel’s neo-orthodox student David Novak, a rabbi and distinguished Jewish moral philosopher, has pursued the same line of analysis as Bell and his friend Irving Kristol.)
Even more curious in the present volume is the otherwise valuable essay by Bell’s son, David, a historian of 18th-century France at Princeton. From reading it one would have no idea at all that his father’s powerful analysis of modern disorientation, immoralism, aesthetic paganism, and tragedy had anything to do with the French radical tradition which the younger Bell has surely studied, whereas a great deal of his father’s energy and intelligence went into critiquing it as the poisonous avant-garde of modern moral degradation. From Rousseau, Diderot, Holbach, Laclos, and Sade, through Jacobins, aesthetes, and Communists to Gide, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida, we have abundant examples of what Bell’s student Mark Lilla has called, in a book dedicated to Bell, The Reckless Mind (new edition, 2016).
Bell’s dogged, detailed critique of self-expressive modern aesthetic nihilism has been carried forward in the brilliant work of Philip Rieff (see my “The Aesthetics of Moloch,” National Review, July 17, 2006) and echoed by a long line of scholars, many of them French, and an excellent bibliography would not be hard to assemble. Among such works are Irving Babbitt’s classic Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), Jacques Barzun’s The Use and Abuse of Art (1974), Renee Winegarten’s Writers and Revolution (1974), the amazingly revealing and embarrassing Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (1995; original in French, 1991), by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and the indispensable Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996), by Bell’s admirer Roger Shattuck. Bell himself wrote a late essay entitled “The Fight for the Twentieth Century: Raymond Aron Versus Jean-Paul Sartre” (New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1990).
Bell told an interviewer in 1978 that a traditional Jew has “a fear of what happens” when the human person “is let loose.” When he or she “doesn’t have halacha, the law, he becomes chaia, an animal.”
But the fashionable antinomian, pornotopian bacillus has now penetrated so deeply and widely into contemporary American culture that it is the air we breathe and the smog we see everywhere. Writing of the lascivious, bombastic novelist Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings (1983), the Jewish American critic Leslie Fiedler referred to a double rape at the end of the novel as Mailer’s attempt to “imagine a single act that transgressed all the laws of Israel — against homosexuality, rape, incest, and necrophilia” (see my “The Big Empty and a Silver Voice,” National Review, April 7, 2008).
Of Daniel Bell’s noble, deepening, decades-long analytical and moral witness to modernity — against secular modern radicalism, left revolutionary or right aesthete-libertarian (or their combinations) — the otherwise intelligent contributors to Defining the Age, all vaguely or clearly on the left, comfortably seated in our elite institutions, from Princeton to Stanford, really have very little to say: An opportunity has been missed; the work of a great scribe has been expurgated.