The Crisis Of Evolutionary Socialism: Daniel Bell And The Rise Of Modernist Sociology.

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to penetrate the historical moment of mid-century American intellectual deradicalization by examining the early career of sociologist Daniel Bell. In Bell's case deradicalization was intellectually conditioned by the shift of Western social theory from a sociology founded on a theory of evolutionary progress to a sociology approximating the modernist sensibility with an ironic, paradoxical approach to social analysis and a view of the moral individual alienated from organized public life. For Bell and others, radical modernist estrangement assumed the impossibility of radical political achievements and thus paved the way for the lapse of socialist convictions and an anxious reconciliation with American capitalism. The dissertation falls into two parts, the first concerning basic concepts in sociological and socialist theory, the second concerning the intellectual biography of Daniel Bell from 1932 to 1952, relating his social-democratic politics to the emergent sociological perspective that underlay his later theory of the end of ideology. Resources consulted include unpublished correspondence and manuscripts. Chapter 1 traces the evolutionist theory of society characterizing the work of classical sociologist Herbert Spencer and social-democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Chapter 2 examines twentieth-century sociology (particularly Max Weber's work) as it broached the problems posed by the apparent reversal or obstruction of progress. Chapter 3 concerns American radical intellectuals in the late 1930s: here the promise of revolutionary Marxism, as a means of overcoming the dilemmas of sociological thought, foundered on the discovery of totalitarianism. Chapter 4 considers Daniel Bell's intellectual beginnings amidst this ideological crisis. Bell's experience of World War II (Chapter 5) reinforced the sense that assured progress toward socialism had ended; thereafter, he adopted a radical critique of stolid bureaucratic order (Chapter 6). Chapter 7 culminates in a textual analysis of Bell's first book, Marxian Socialism in the United States, a story of the tragic demise of socialism in a bureaucratized order that seemed simultaneously to promise and to prevent the realization of a rational society--and an expression of the unhappy self-consciousness of social democracy at an impasse, trapped by its commitment to pursue socialist ends through the instrumentalities of the capitalist welfare state.