The Winding Passage

by Daniel Bell

This collection brings together Daniel Bell's best work in essay form. It deals with a variety of technology and culture, religion and personal identity, intellectuals and their societies, and the uses and abuses of doctrines of social class. The Winding Passage demonstrates the author's continuing concern with the salient issues of our times, while its inspiration draws upon an older, humanistic sociological tradition. In a central essay on intellectuals, Bell examines the term new class and calls it a muddle. Though the idea of class has been relevant to Western industrial society for the past two hundred years, the concept is less useful for examining Communist states, the Third World, and even the emerging postindustrial sectors of the West. Bell seeks to establish the idea of situs , the competitive conflict of functional groups for shares in the state budgetary process. A more personal note is struck in the final section of the book. In reflecting on the nature of intellectual life, the special role of the Jewish intellectual, and the tension between the claims of the parochial and the universal, Bell uses as a general framework antinomianism , the claims of individual conscience against authority, law, and established institutions. And in a final statement, "The Return of the Sacred," Bell explores the enlightenment belief in the dissolution of religion and attempts to show why it was wrong. This is a must book for those concerned with the sociology of knowledge, intellectual history, and social stratification. Speaking of The Winding Passage , Seymour Martin Lipset called the book "sociological analysis at its best" Irving Howe noted that "Bell is always worth listening to. He is a true intellectual." And Irving Louis Horowitz, in his review of the book, calls it "the sifted excellence of a civilized and urbane intellectual.

Genres: Sociology, World History, American History, Essays, Cultural

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He has been described as "one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era". Bell once described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."
Bell began his professional life as a journalist, being managing editor of The New Leader magazine (1941–1945), labor editor of Fortune (1948–1958), and later, co-editor (with his college friend Irving Kristol) of The Public Interest magazine (1965–1973). In the late 1940s, Bell was an Instructor in the Social Sciences in the College of the University of Chicago. During the 1950s, it was close to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Subsequently, he taught sociology, first at Columbia (1959–1969) and then at Harvard until his retirement in 1990. Bell also was the visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in 1987. 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.
His most influential books are, The End of Ideology (1960), The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976),[19] and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Two of his books, the End of Ideology and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, were listed by the Times Literary Supplement as among the 100 most important books in the second half of the twentieth century.