ABSTRACT
If Bell’s early radicalism and later journalism had inspired an interest in the problems of labour and capital it had also stimulated an interest in political sociology. Without engaging in ad hominem judgements, we can here begin to see Bell’s intellectual reconciliation of his prodigal past. His long encounter with socialism had left him with a profound impression of its incapacity to make a significant impact on American political life. In 194950 he embarked on a history of American socialist politics that addressed the question: ‘Why did the socialist movement, as an organized political body, fail to adapt to the distinctive conditions of American life as did, say, the British Labour Party in England?’ (MS: vii). Here he introduces many of the themes that were subsequently to inform his more explicit political sociology: the failure of ideology in the face of pragmatics; the decline of class politics
and its displacement by status politics; the uniqueness of American political parties relative to their more ideologically suffused European counterparts; and the relative underdevelopment of the American state. Bell’s political analysis proceeds from the failure of Marxian socialism in the United States; to analyses of the emergence of McCarthyism in the 1950s; to an argument that suggests that the USA presents a general exception to the radical ideological currents that swept Europe; to an extension of this argument that suggests that ideology is no longer the central dynamic of politics in any Western society; and finally to a liberal conception of the state in which statusclaimants are criticised for their refusal to subordinate their interests to the pursuit of a common good.
