The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

by Daniel Bell

With a new afterword by the author, this classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism—and the culture it creates—harbors the seeds of its own downfall by creating a need among successful people for personal gratification—a need that corrodes the work ethic that led to their success in the first place. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world order, this provocative manifesto is more relevant than ever.

Genres: Economics, Sociology, Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Society

363 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"O, ye generation of swine!" That might be Daniel Bell's epitaph for the culture, economics and society of late capitalism. Before plunging into this breathtaking dive into the dysfunctions of capitalism it might be best to quote Bell on himself: "I am a socialist in economics in as much as I believe the essentials of life---food, water, shelter, education, etc.---should not be left to the market. I am a liberal in politics since I believe the crucial questions of politics should never be solved by any one formula. I am a conservative in culture, for I believe the aim of education is to pass on the best that has already been taught in a particular society." Bell is a kind of Hegelian by mistake or bad design. Unlike Marx, he thinks the cultural, not economic, contradictions will doom the system. "The Protestant work ethic with its emphasis on frugality, savings and postponement of pleasure is totally at odds with a capitalist-consumer society based on instant gratification, politicians who promise pleasure not sacrifice, and a culture of an eternal present, without history or future to contemplate." The obvious retort to Bell, who first published this book in the mid-Seventies and revised it for the Clinton Nineties is "Then why doesn't this system collapse?" Bell seems to believe we are in a long wave of inertia (no argument here) in which the contradictions he bellows about are coming through...slowly. From the perspective of 2022, and governments in crisis from Britain to the USA, it's hard to argue otherwise but also hard to prove. Perhaps the proles just haven't gotten the news of collapse yet. I once had a professor colleague who told me, "Poor Daniel Bell. Always making the right argument at the wrong moment." A nice summary of this troubling book.

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book combines sociology, psychology, and a little bit of theoretical economics into a fascinating treatise for the creation of a Public Household, a new model for societal/economic cooperation based somewhat on John Rawls' idea of the maximin, people signing on for enough of a guaranteed minimum in lifestyle that they are willing to forego the dream of the maximum consumptive lifestyle. I read the book because I had recently read reviews that lambasted the book because it implied an unraveling of the U.S. economic system before the end of the 20th century (the book was published in the mid-'70s) that didn't occur. Of course, one could argue that the unraveling did not take place because of a technological paradigm shift or two.

At the time of his writing, we hadn't even seen the personal computer revolution, much less the concept of a World Wide Web available to everyone (I even knew a homeless guy in Atlanta who had an email account and checked it daily in the public library.). But I didn't find the value in this book in his projections for a naive social contract for his Public Household--even though that was his point in writing the book. What I found valuable was the first half of the book and his insightful division of society into three functions: the techno-economic function, the political function, and the cultural function. The first is necessary in order for an industrial economy to function; the second reflects the coercion necessary to keep that economy functioning smoothly and for justice to be enforced; and the third helps answer those proverbial questions of why we do what we do and why we ought to do what we do.

Of course, Bell has some amazing gibes at modernism and post-modernism. He rightly notes that the Western world no longer has a unifying culture. We have cultures. I think his definition of culture is worth noting: “Culture, for a society, a group, or a person, is a continual process of sustaining an identity through the coherence gained by a consistent aesthetic point of view, a moral conception of self, and a style of life which exhibits those conceptions in the objects that adorn one’s home and oneself and in the taste which expresses those points of view. Culture is thus the realm of sensibility, of emotion and moral tempter, and of the intelligence, which seeks to order these feelings.” (p. 36)

I also liked his synopsis of the circumstance of modern humanity: “The deepest nature of modern man, the secret of his soul as revealed by the modern metaphysic, is that he seeks to reach out beyond himself; knowing that negativity—death—is finite, he refuses to accept it. Behind the chiliasm of modern man is the megalomania of self-infinitization. In consequence, the modern hubris is the refusal to accept limits, the insistence on continually reaching out; and the modern world proposes a destiny that is always beyond: beyond morality, beyond tragedy, beyond culture.” (pp. 49-50)

Most damning of the multiple cultures we have in the post-modern world, he wrote: “The extension of vulgarity has threatened to overwhelm the serious culture; the growth of highly vocal sub-cultures has offered modes of self-absorption to significant segments of the society (vide, the youth culture of recent years).” (p. 86)

However, as much as I relished his critique of what passes for current "culture," I was disappointed with his attempt to replace it with some agreement that we will agree to cooperate on a liberal social agenda using the market mechanisms of capitalism combined with some greater social awareness and compassion. I'm just too jaded to think humankind is likely to get over pure self-interest in terms of an entire society.

In fact, Bell's summary of the Temperance/Prohibition movement should serve as a warning against even his own vision for compassionate capitalism: “In familiar pattern, morality turned into moralizing, and righteousness became self-righteousness. The affirmation and confidence of nineteenth-century life had soured into a constricted and crabbed fear of the future.” (p. 64)

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seemed a bit of a mess when I slogged through it in 2013. Its argument has become trite, but the evidence coming in since its publication more than supports its central thesis: viz., the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the Protestant ethic that ushered in modern capitalism. My problem when reading this book was that the argument that capitalism is based on the “moral foundations” of “the Protestant work ethic” was already anachronistic by the time of my reading. Was capitalism really based on the Protestant work ethic?

Ayn Rand didn’t seem to think so. Neither did Milton Friedman. Certainly my jolly private equity boss could not give two hoots about the greater good. He wants to raise rents across the board, and according to him, like a farking mafia don, “it’s not good, or bad. It’s just business.” In fact, by the end of the 1980s, the whole Protestant work ethic paradigm for the origins of capitalism seemed to have been so entirely overwhelmed by libertarianism in practice that no one could even understand, or take the time to even listen, to such a ridiculous idea. But maybe it wasn’t ridiculous.

Any maybe, just maybe, the thing that aging conservatives like my father were trying, but utterly failing, to articulate, was that along with mainline Christianity, the idea of acting for the greater good, has been thrown out, like the bathwater with the baby.

[Andrew]

So Daniel Bell gets some things right -- the hippies were by and large self-righteous children who cared far more about individual pleasure than building a new society, that radical individualism can get very, very cozy with late-stage capitalism, and that capitalism undermines the work ethic it benefited from. But let's face it, a lot of the time Bell demands a "unifying culture," and lambasts modern society, he just comes off as a left-wing Allan Bloom. He's a fine writer, but so, so many of his arguments are largely ungrounded and rather silly in hindsight.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less scintillating than I had hoped. It feels extremely dated in many places (it was published in 1976 when both the modernism of the 50s and the turmoil of the 60s were still fresh), so the 20th anniversary postscript in my edition was welcome. In the 1996 postscript Bell helpfully summarizes the entire book (which was good because my mind wandered a lot) and brings us up to date on the socio-econo-cultural developments of the interim.

[Pariskarol · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not an easy read, and I had to work hard to really grasp his point, which wasn't so much that capitalism is a bad thing, per se, but that modernism is a disastrous mismatch to Western capitalism. And some 20 years later, he added an afterword to say postmodernism even more so.

Capitalism, to be successful, requires a kind of Calvinistic work ethic on the part of those being exploited. And with modernism questioning forms and postmodernism questioning values, the people of Western culture were becoming less apt to sacrifice themselves.

The book wasn't really what I expected to read, but it was interesting. It's very eccentric in the types of detours the author takes in his reasoning.

[Sanjay Varma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first hundred pages and then rapidly lost interest. I may not have fully understood the author’s point but i’ll try to give a summary.

The author sketches out a premise that capitalism’s defining trait is rapid change. The starting point has been, for a period of hundreds of years, rapid technological change, that has the secondary effect of spurring social, cultural and psychological changes. By the 1970’s technological changes had slowed to a crawl. Not only that, but the social and cultural changes had also slowed! The author cites examples of painting innovation such as abstract expressionism from the 50's, and contrasts with the 60's. He cites social innovations from the 50's like the creation of suburban/commuter/TV-oriented communities, and concludes the the 60's lacked comparable social innovation!

He concludes that the 60's lacked in social and cultural innovation! But since capitalism is inherently dependent on rapid change, rapid progress shifted to psychological change, but this change was imaginary, i.e. it was untethered from substantive technological, social, and culture change.

To state this in a different way, it is our sense of self that keeps changing rapidly. But the author asserts that such change is unhealthy and portends the cataclysmic end of capitalism.

I don't know if I summarized it correctly. That's what I took away. I love this idea, but i got bored reading this book.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bell begins by arguing that capitalism derived from Christian values, what he terms the "Protestant ethic" and the "Puritan temper." Others have since shown it is really from medieval Christianity, but in any case, what is important is that capitalism grew out of a Christian ethic.

Out of capitalism have grown a bevy of ideas that undermine the values of the Christian ethic from which capitalism derived. I'm not sure it is so simple as that, but it is clear that capitalism has become something abhorrent to what the early Christian thinkers had in mind when they thought of free markets. The restraint modeled by the early Christians is gone and is replaced by libertinism.

This is an interesting book, but a very difficult read--full of philosophy and some wacky economics. But a pretty good book.

[Jan Goericke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book looking at capitalism from the sociological perspective and thus covering culture which apparently was not included in Marx' writings. Make sure to read all the foot notes and comments as they contain some very valuable information and references. The afterword written in 1996 makes the book even more timely. The writing itself is accessible and entertaining making it an enjoyable read. Some points of the author may not aged well, but are nevertheless important in historical context. Recommended.

[Bernard English · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the preface Bell writes that his argument is based on "the three realms--the economy, the polity, and the culture" and that they are "ruled by contrary axial principles: for the economy, efficiency; for the polity, equality; and for the culture, self-realization. He spends more time on culture than the economy or the polity. And that's fine because I think it's the strongest part of the book.
The contradiction is simple to state: "The character structure inherited from the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on self-discipline, delayed gratification, and restraint, is still relevant to the demands of the techno-economic structure, but it clashes sharply with the culture, where such bourgeois values have been completely rejected--in part, paradoxically, because of the working of the capitalist system itself.

Although his analysis of politics and economics is good, readers have probably seen similar stuff elsewhere. He provides a nifty list of factors related to social instability, though these are certainly not unheard of factors:
(1) The existence of an "insoluble" problem. (2) The existence of a parliamentary impasse. (3) The growth of private violence. (4) The disjunctions of sectors (gaps in economic development among sectors). (5) Multi-racial or multi-tribal conflicts. (6) The alienation of the intelligentsia. (7) Humiliation in war.

I suppose what makes the book so readable and valuable is that he addresses all three realms, the economy, the polity, and the culture in one book.

[Patrick Trepanier · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title says it all. The author presents one of the most important books calling out the moral failings of capitalism in America (as well as other advanced economies in the world).

Given all of the turmoil of late stage capitalism (what I call hyper-capitalism), Bell's book is more important than ever. There are advantages to capitalism in terms of building a productive society and pulling people into the middle class, but there must be restraints to capitalism so it doesn't overrun the society and destroy communities, families and individuals with its never-ending thirst for profit and productivity gains.

[Nir Haramati · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting depiction of central aspects of the 60s: Culture, Arts, Politics, and Economy.

[Andrés · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing Foreword, Preface and Introduction. Those sections deserve some re-readings. However, the actual content is boring, unorganized, uninteresting and says little new things to a 2020’s reader.

[Tianxiao Zhang · Rating 4 out of 5]

作者很多洞见。值得重读的好书。

[Michael Coblenz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas, but a very tough slog. Very dated.

[Matthias · Rating 3 out of 5]

The essays in this volume are of mixed quality. The contents of the cultural half of the book, which are a complaint about how the bourgeoisie have ruined high culture by severing present generations from past ones and the latter's endowment of eternal aesthetic principles should be familiar to those who have read Weaver or Lasch, though his theoretical grounding for making these complaints (midcentury Weber-influenced structural functionalism) is at least a little superior to Weaver's platonism and Lasch's psychoanalysis. "Towards the Great Instauration" is an interesting, and by the standards of the rest of the cultural essays, charitable, attempt to think through the consequences of this framework a little more schematically. "The Public Household" takes as its premise that no one has examined questions of how public budgets should be allocated in a pluralistic society, which seems to be in the case of someone as learned as Bell to be willfully obtuse; and this ignorance is employed to justify stating banalities (for instance, that we might have to make tradeoffs between various goals as a matter of course; or that socialist governments must manage many of the same tradeoffs as capitalist states or markets) as if they were interesting revelations. The book goes from one star to two for "Unstable America," which seems as if written for the present day, and from two to three for Bell's prose, which is pleasant and lucid. (Lest "pleasant and lucid" sound like damnation by faint praise, I should say that it's a standard that most published authors, and certainly myself, would benefit from rising to; and that most nonfiction prose should not aspire to anything more.)

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" is a book by American sociologist Daniel Bell, first published in 1976. The book is a critical analysis of the relationship between capitalism and culture, and argues that the cultural values and norms of contemporary society are in conflict with the economic imperatives of capitalism.

Bell suggests that capitalism has created a consumer culture that emphasizes instant gratification and materialism, and that this has led to a loss of traditional values and a weakening of social bonds. He argues that this cultural shift has created a paradox within capitalist societies, in which the pursuit of profit and material success is in tension with the pursuit of a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Bell also critiques the idea of progress, suggesting that it is based on a flawed understanding of human nature and the nature of social change. He argues that the pursuit of economic growth and technological advancement has led to a disregard for the ethical and cultural dimensions of human life.

Overall, "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" is an important contribution to the study of sociology and cultural theory. The book has been widely read by scholars and policymakers, and has contributed to ongoing debates about the relationship between capitalism, culture, and social change.

GPT

[Pete Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great work of 20th century politico-cultural-economic analysis. Puts forth a few great points, two of which are: (1) The qualities that made capitalism work on the productive side -- prudence, hard work, vocation, etc. -- might be being undone by what it's now doing on the consumption side -- hedonism, endless growth, private interestedness; and (2) If we take public responsibility for providing for needs, we have to reaffirm the distinction between needs and wants, which is hard when consumer capitalism is telling us more of our wants are needs. A little jarbled and hodge-podge at places, but so many great nuggets. Also, not too dated for something that came out in the late 1970's.

[Fred Kohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was quite concerned when I read the introduction that this book would be quite dated- not so! It is quite sweeping in its scope as the author discusses art, music, religion, and politics before getting to his grand argument centering on economics in the closing section of the book. Only occasionally did I feel that the book bogged down, and that was probably due more to my ignorance of the cultural conditions of the 50s and 60s that the author discussed at great length in the early part of the book. Even in those sections I learned a great deal.

[Joel Blunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a good book. Bell begins by going over how modern capitalism, necessarily requires and creates a hedonistic culture, and how that hedonism eventually leads to the undermining of that "puritan ethic" required for a strong society. He also talks about how modernism cleaves society, destroys the center, and creates many sub-cultures. Ends with an essay that twists Aristotelian thought to argue for a public "oikos" However, confusedly, he seems to realize that such an ideal is impossibly against human nature. Regardless, definitely a GREAT read.

[Leonardo]

Lo que Daniel Bell llamó «las contradicciones culturales del capitalismo » está en el origen del actual malestar ideológico: el progreso del capitalismo, que necesita una ideología consumista, se ve gradualmente socavado por la misma actitud (la ética protestante) que hizo posible el capitalismo; el capitalismo actual funciona cada vez más como la «institucionalización de la envidia».

Viviendo en el Final de los Tiempos Pág.11

[joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

haven't made my way completely through this one, but it is a nice milestone on the road to understanding our hedonistic, postmodern, confusing society past insights of the sociologists of the 1950s (white collar, organization man, lonely crowd etc.)

[Jan Bos · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose this book from the Times Literary Supplement 100 most influential books of second half of 20th century in order to read something different. And different it was. I had to skip some sections as I am too unfamiliar with especially the cultural theories, but it was still interesting to read the big picture the author paints of the development of capitalism and our current culture.

[Panos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Socrates or Nietzsche(?); rationalism, skepticism or nihilism?
You like it or not, It doesn't matter. This is one of the most important books of the century. And yes: " a touchstone of cultural judgment".

[Richard]

(Mentioned, I think, in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. The new edition with the author's afterword sounds better, but the SFPL only has the original edition.)

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful text that covers the contradictions of capitalism and American culture. It is a must read for those who are sociology majors and/or those interested in understanding the struggles that go on today betwixt modernism and postmodernism.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A heavy read from 1976 with an afterword written in 1996. It's amazing how much Bell saw in 1976 exists today and in many ways how things have gotten worse. Provides great teaching on how the market is as responsible for public fissures as anything in the political or cultural world.

[Matthew Matheson]

Argueing the World: (documentary)
Daniel Bell-2
Nathan Glazer
Irving Howe
Irving Kristol

[D.A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dated, self-blind; this is nearly a caricature of mid-20th century liberalism. Moynihan, constrained by exigent circumstance, must have scoffed.

[Melisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Book.