Daniel Bell – American Menshevik

Abstract

Long before he became one of the leading voices in American sociology and letters, Daniel Bell had a tough early life. He experienced poverty and socialism early, in a life taking on the big themes of the 20th century: communism, capitalism, Marxism, Americanism, modernism. In this he was the beneficiary as well as the critic of modern Americanism, or American modernism. In this essay I focus on a relatively overlooked Bell classic, Marxian Socialism in the United States (1996 [1952]). Here Bell works in an essentially Weberian optic, but one which takes Marx and Marxism very seriously. This is a major contribution to history of ideas and to labour studies, but also to cultural sociology. Some closing remarks connect Bell’s legacy and these frames to the much more influential, if also unread, collection The End of Ideology (1960).