ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s Kadushin (1974) conducted a major research exercise to seek to establish the membership of the American intellectual elite. Using a sampling methodology that was only somewhat flawed he defined (public) intellectuals as people who contributed to a set of widely circulating magazines and journals but who were not themselves full-time journalists. He then surveyed this group, following a reputational methodology, to try to discover who was most influential among them, who constituted the elite. By counting votes he came up with a list of 70 names. He divided these 70 into three ranks according to ‘natural breaks’ in the distribution: the top ten, the next ten, and the rest. By dint of alphabetization, Daniel Bell’s name can be found first among the top ten (1974: 30-1).[1] He sits alongside such other key public figures as Noam Chomsky, John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Edmund Wilson. There is no other sociologist in the top ten, although Hannah Arendt and David Riesman are in the top twenty and Edgar
Z. Friedenberg, George Lichtheim, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Robert K. Merton, Robert Nisbet and Franz Schurmann can be found lower down alongside W. H. Auden, Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Moore. The list includes neither of the leading theoretical sociologists, Alfred Schütz and Talcott Parsons, nor does it include either the leading empirical sociologists, Otis Dudley Duncan, Erring Goffman and Paul F. Lazarsfeld or the philosophers of social science, Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel. Put simply, Kadushin’s research confirms the fair estimate that Daniel Bell is probably the most famous sociologist of the postwar generation[2] and, for that reason alone, a series on ‘key sociologists’ would be incomplete without a volume describing his work.[3]
Bell did not, however, become a famous sociologist by being a popularizer, like his nemesis, Alvin Toffler, that purveyor of what Bell calls ‘future schlock’. Rather, his influence derives from his capacity to take big ideas, that may or may not be of his own origination, and to have the courage and tenacity to run with them. While they may not be universally acceptable, all of them are pieces of good sociology because they have centred wideranging and long-standing academic debates. He is responsible for three big ideas that any professional sociologist will recognise: the end of ideology, the post-industrial society and the cultural contradictions of capitalism.
