[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 77 (Wednesday, May 26, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6081-S6082]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO DANIEL BELL

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, David Ignatius has written a 
charming brief essay for The Washington Post on his former teacher 
Daniel Bell, ``the dean of American sociology.'' Professor Bell, who is 
now Scholar in Residence at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a colleague and neighbor of mine for 
many years and a friend for even longer. He has no equal, and as he 
turns 80 he is indeed, as Mr. Ignatius writes, ``a kind of national 
treasure--a strategic intellectual reserve.'' The nation is hugely in 
his debt. (A thought which I fear would horrify him!)
  I ask that the article by David Ignatius in The Washington Post of 
May 23, 1999 be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                [From The Washington Post, May 23, 1999]

                     Big Questions for Daniel Bell

                          (By David Ignatius)

       Cambridge--Having a conversation about ideas with Daniel 
     Bell is a little like getting to rally with John McEnroe. 
     Trying to keep up is hopeless, but it's exhilarating just to 
     be on the court with him.
       Bell, the dean of American sociology, turned 80 this month. 
     In an era when big ideas have largely gone out of fashion, he 
     continues to think bigger than anyone I know, of any age. 
     That makes him a kind of national treasure--a strategic 
     intellectual reserve.
       The questions that interest Bell today remain the great, 
     woolly ones that make most people throw up their hands: What 
     are the forces shaping modern life? What are the 
     relationships between economics, politics and culture? Where 
     is the human story heading?
       You can chart the intellectual history of the past 50 years 
     in part through Bell's attempts to answer these big 
     questions: ``The End of Ideology,'' published in 1960; ``The 
     Coming of Post-Industrial Society,'' published in 1973; ``The 
     Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,'' published in 1976.
       Next month, Basic Books will reissue Bell's prophetic study 
     of post-industrial society. This was in many ways the first 
     serious effort to describe the new technological society that 
     has emerged in the United States over the past quarter-
     century. Many of Bell's ideas are now commonplace--we are 
     surrounded by evidence that his analysis was correct--but at 
     the time, the transformation wasn't so obvious.
       To accompany the 1999 edition, Bell has written a new 
     30,000-word foreword. (``I don't know how to write short,'' 
     he says.) Bell writes that in the new information age, even 
     the boundaries of time and space no longer hold. Economic 
     activity is global and instantaneous; the traditional 
     infrastructure that gave rise to cities--roads, rivers and 
     harbors--is becoming irrelevant. We are connected with 
     everywhere. Yet with all diffusion of information, Bell 
     observes, true knowledge remains rare and precious.
       The problem that vexes Bell is one of scale. He argues that 
     societies tend to work smoothly when economic, social and 
     political activities fit well together. But there is an 
     obvious mismatch in today's global economy--where financial 
     life is centralized as never before but political life is 
     increasingly fragmented along ethnic and even tribal lines.
       ``The national state has become too small for the big 
     problems of life, and too big for the small problems,'' Bell 
     writes. ``We find that the older social structures are 
     cracking because political scales of sovereignty and 
     authority do not match the economic scales.''
       Bell is part of the Dream Team of American letters--the 
     group of Jewish intellectuals who grew up poor in New York in 
     the 1930s, learned their debating skills in the alcoves of 
     City College and went on to found the magazines and write he 
     books that

[[Page S6082]]

     shaped America's understanding of itself. Because of the 
     antisemitism of American universities at the time, most of 
     them couldn't get teaching jobs at first. But today, their 
     names are legendary: Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Nathan 
     Glazer, Norman Podhoretz and Bell.
       What's especially admirable about Bell is how little he's 
     changed over the years. Many of the New York intellectuals 
     began as radical socialists and ended up as neo-
     conservatives--a long journey, indeed. But Bell holds roughly 
     the same views he did when he was 15.
       ``I'm a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a 
     conservative in culture.'' he said. He thinks it's a mistake 
     to force these different areas of thought onto a single 
     template. That ways lies dogmatism.
       Another of Bell's virtues is that he doesn't go looking for 
     fights. He explains that as a matter of life history. His 
     father died in the influenza epidemic of 1920, when Bell was 
     just eight months old. His mother had to work in a garment 
     factory--leaving him in an orphanage part of the time. Bell 
     wanted to hold onto his friends, he says.
       Religion has been an anchor in Bell's life, too. Indeed, he 
     said he began to doubt the Marxist view of history when he 
     considered the durability of the world's great religions. He 
     concluded that there were certain fundamental, existential 
     questions--about the meaning of life and death--that were 
     universal and unchanging, for which the great religions had 
     provided enduring answers.
       The most endearing aspect of Bell's personality is his 
     sense of humor. Big thinkers are not always nimble and light-
     hearted, but Bell can't go five minutes without telling a 
     joke--usually some sort of Jewish folk tale. Ask why he left 
     an early job at Fortune to go teach at Columbia, and he 
     recalls telling his boss, Henry Luce, that there were four 
     reasons: ``June, July, August and September.''
       Recounting his family history, Bell remembers a 
     grandmother's remark when told at the end of World War I that 
     because of a border change, the family now lived in Poland, 
     rather than Russia. ``Thank God! I was getting so tired of 
     those Russian winters!''
       Bell was my teacher and friend nearly 30 years ago at 
     Harvard. In those days, he taught a seminar on the history of 
     avant-garde movements. One of the assignments was to think up 
     a name for a polemical avant-garde journal.
       So I ask Bell to take his own test. what name would he give 
     a journal if he was to start one today? He replies instantly: 
     ``THINK.''
       As much as anyone in American life, he can lay claim to 
     that one.

                          ____________________