Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other Daniel Bell (May 10, 1919 – January 25, 2011)[1] was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism.

He received a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1938, and completed graduate work at Columbia University during the 1938–1939 academic year.

[2][8][9] He received a PhD in sociology from Columbia in 1961 after he was permitted to submit The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (a 1960 essay collection), instead of a conventional doctoral dissertation.

[14] Bell served on the board of advisors for the Antioch Review, and published some of his most acclaimed essays in the magazine: "Crime as an American Way of Life" (1953), "Socialism: The Dream and the Reality" (1952), "Japanese Notebook" (1958), "Ethics and Evil: Frameworks for Twenty-First Century Culture" (2005), and "The Reconstruction of Liberal Education: A Foundational Syllabus" (2011).

Besides Bell, only Isaiah Berlin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt had two books so listed.

With the rise of affluent welfare states and institutionalized bargaining between different groups, Bell maintains, revolutionary movements that aim to overthrow liberal democracy will no longer be able to attract the working classes.

That dovetails with the ongoing requirement for the state to maintain the kind of strong economic environment conducive to continual growth.

For Bell, the competing, contradictory demands place excessive strain on the state that was manifest in the economic turbulence, fiscal pressure, and political upheaval characteristic of the 1970s.

[24] Written at a time of significant shifts in U.S. politics, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism offers reasons for the crisis of post-war liberalism.