ABSTRACT
It is not altogether surprising that Bell’s earliest sociological interest should lie in the area of work and its central relationship between capital and labour. Although he had abandoned communism and, along with it, his project for a Marxist analysis of the American state, the early part of his intellectual development was concerned intrinsically with such issues. Indeed, his subsequent ten-year stint as a journalist with that seemingly capitalist organ, Fortune magazine, was as Labor Editor.
