Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Andersson, Jenny

Titel

Planning the American Future: Daniel Bell, Future Research, and the Commission on the Year 2000

Ist Teil von

• Journal of the history of ideas, 2021-10, Vol.82 (4), p.661-682

Ort / Verlag

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]the history of the Commission underscores once again the fundamental incapacity of so called Cold War liberalism to understand the critique of the very idea of the liberal form that to Cold War liberals was and remains a self-evident ideal. Several of the Commission's intellectuals made the journey to neoconservatism, including Bell, who changed his views on social change profoundly from 1964 to 1975.5 Bell's first address to the Commission in 1964 contained elements from The End of Ideology (1960), while conclusions from Commission debates were reflected in the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, first published in essay form in 1972.6 Bell's 1973 book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, contained a new emphasis on the return of social struggle in post-industrial society. Notions of social technology and social engineering in American social thought were consistent with the idea that social science was capable and morally bound to shape the future.10 As Dorothy Ross has shown, American social science from the late nineteenth century on was committed to the constant reshaping of the liberal "form" by steering social change toward an idealized notion of American democracy.11 In the 1950s and 1960s, developments in social science seemed to provide not merely theoretical approaches to this problem, but actual technological applications. [...]historic assumptions of the logic of social development seemed to no longer hold.