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The culture crunch: Daniel Bells The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism


Andrew Gilbert
La Trobe University, Australia

Thesis Eleven 00(0) 113 The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0725513613500383 the.sagepub.com

Abstract Daniel Bells The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism lies at the intersection of the three mile Durkheim main theoretical currents of sociological thought, those of Karl Marx, E and Max Weber. His three realms methodology moves away from deterministic accounts that subordinate the political and cultural to the economic realm. By granting each realm an autonomy and principles of their own, Bell locates the contradictions of capitalism in the friction between them. With constant innovation, individual expressiveness and libertarian social values becoming forces in-and-of-themselves, prevailing social structures and the roles within them are left looking increasingly incoherent, illegitimate and meaningless. Likewise, the shift from Protestant asceticism to modernist hedonism creates a sharp tension between the demand for a disciplined and responsible workforce and the demand for economic growth through unrestrained and instantly gratifying consumerism. The result is a complex of crisis scenarios which were manifest with the end of the post-war boom. However, as other commentators have pointed out, Bells prophetic theses often seem to fail under the light of subsequent history. Keywords anomie, Daniel Bell, capitalism, crisis, debt, legitimation, modernism, post-modernism

Introduction
As midnight approached on the night of 16 January 1920 at the First Congregational Church of Washington, DC, ecstatic eyes were fixed on the clock. It had been an evening

Corresponding author: Andrew Gilbert, Department of Sociology, La Trobe University, School of Social Sciences, Lvl 4 SS Building, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Melbourne, 3083, Australia. Email: asgilbert@students.latrobe.edu.au

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of celebration and ceremony, the passing of history into a new and better time. As the clock struck 12, the large and influential crowd of politicians, lobbyists, activists and clergy erupted into a cheer. At one minute past midnight William Jennings Bryan was on the stage, his face streaming with tears, intoxicated by nothing but his own moral righteousness. They are dead, that sought the young childs life, he triumphantly proclaimed to an audience bursting into applause (Hibben 2004: 365). Twelve months earlier, and after decades of struggle, the 18th amendment of the United States Constitution had been passed, prohibiting the sale, manufacture and transportation of intoxicating liquor. After a year of preparation, this was the moment that prohibition would take effect. America was to be a dry nation. To the people gathered together that evening, this was seen to be a decisive victory over human vice, over the forces of darkness, over the devil. Alcoholism had long been considered central to all that was holding the nation back from a life of moral rectitude and righteousness. A scapegoat for almost every conceivable dissatisfaction, now the serpent was slain, a new era could begin. The women and children would be safe from their fathers. The worker would labour harder than ever. To Daniel Bell, writing some 55 years later, this was the shot that opened the final battle of a cultural war being waged between two ideal types of American character: the puritanical and self-disciplined small town Protestant against the hedonistic and impulsive consumer of the big city (Bell 1976: 64). For Bell, it was a war the consumers would decisively win. Prohibition would prove to be a pyrrhic victory for Americas moralistic minority, a last ditch effort to circumvent changes that had already occurred. These changes would prove decisive for the future of American society, and their repercussions were still working themselves out in the mid-1970s, when Bell was documenting and analysing them in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. The popular conception of the 1970s is of a cynical and pessimistic decade. If this is the case, Cultural Contradictions is definitely of its moment. Daniel Bell seems to fit all the ideal types of the troubled intellectual of the 1970s: the finger-wagging conservative, the dispirited socialist, the hard-nosed political realist. Yet, at the same time, in each case Bell breaks the mould. His prophetic visions of the future of capitalism, in many ways, rub against the grain of those of his contemporaries. Bells thought is never really at home in one particular ideological or political current. He transverses multiple positions with a counterintuitive heterodoxy that, as Fred Block (2011: 53) has put it, annoyed almost everyone. And this is what makes his work so interesting, as we again struggle through times of crisis. While recently Bell may have been somewhat forgotten by the intellectual mainstream, it is worth considering what we can learn from him, and what useful tools for thinking he can still give us. Cultural Contradictions stands in a long tradition of sociological prophecy that stretches right back to sociologys very foundations. After all, it is only natural that a discipline founded to make sense of the jarring shocks of the transition into modernity would cast an eye into the future, reading the tea leaves of the present in an attempt to augur tomorrow. Building on this, Daniel Bells work stands as arguably the most prophetic sociological analysis of post-war America. From The End of Ideology to The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, his two other most influential books, Bell forecasts a world beyond the classical conflicts that marked the turbulent first half of the 20th century. The strong ideological

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programs of the West are now a thing of the past the new age will be an age of pragmatism, of a balancing act between competing interest groups. Likewise, the retreat of manual labour as the central occupational role of America opens up to a form of new society where information is currency and the chance of the marketplace is increasingly replaced by a state focused on planning and organization. The technicians and scientists, in collaboration with the expanding modern state, are now the standard-bearers of advanced capitalism, not the scrupulous capitalist entrepreneur of the 19th century (Bell 1962: 1973). The tone of Cultural Contradictions, however, is distinctly more pessimistic than his previous works. It was borne out of a time of a growing sense of crisis in the mid-1970s. The oil shock of 1973, growing stagflation and economic downturn all meant that the Keynesian approach to macroeconomics which had dominated the West since the Depression era was increasingly coming under question. Two big questions arose out of this situation: what went wrong, and how can we fix it? Cultural Contradictions attempts to answer both of those questions.

Three realms
Bells overarching argument here is that the answers to these questions cannot be gleaned from an examination of the economy alone, such as in the Marxist or classical Liberal narratives. As Beilharz (2006: 93) notes, Marxism always remained a central tenet of Bells thought; only not as a doctrine to follow so much as something to be thought against. And it is from a critique of historical materialism that Bell moves to an elaboration of the theoretical approach of Cultural Contradictions. How can we explain modern society then? Bell is firstly insistent that we must begin by separating it out into three distinct realms: the techno-economic, the political and the cultural (Bell 1976: xi). While all three realms are certainly interrelated and interdependent, they remain irreducible to each other. Each moves according to its own logic and principles. His previous thesis on post-industrialism, for example, centres predominantly on transformations within the economic and technical realm. Cultural Contradictions moves outwards. In this work, it is through contrasting the different directions and antagonistic developments of the economic, political and cultural realms that Bell discovers the contradictions of advanced capitalism. Bell characterizes the three realms of modern society in the following way: Firstly, the economy is governed by the principle of maximized efficiency or functional rationality as Bell describes it. This principle is the outcome of the imperatives to reduce costs, increase returns and expand indefinitely. In achieving these ends, the economic realm gives rise to structures of bureaucracy and hierarchy, which better facilitate increasing specialization and organization. The polity, on the other hand, must mediate between coercion and justice. It possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, yet at the same time it must maintain public consent and be responsive to established conceptions of justice. It must manage the diverse and occasionally antagonistic desires and interests of its populace in a non-preferential way. In this way it is guided primarily by the principle of equality, which is reflected in the representative and participatory structures at the centre of politics. Finally, the cultural realm consists of the symbols of expression, the modes of consciousness and the ritualistic patterns through

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which individuals make sense of their world. Traditionally, this realm was almost synonymous with religion and, hence, reflected in its institutions. However, one of Bells key arguments is that this is no longer the case, and traditional religious sensibilities have been replaced by a modern drive toward self-gratification (Bell 1976: 1113). The story starts with culture. Bell argues that, in the late 20th century, culture has well and truly replaced the economic as the motor of modernity (Bell 1976: 334). The vanguard of this change was the movements of modern art: modernism. There has long been a tension present in modernity between the structural demands of a rationalized, accumulative capitalist economy and movements in the cultural sphere that search for more expressive, less rationalized and calculable sources of value. This tension reaches back to early romanticism and even earlier. In those periods, critiques of modernity mostly remained peripheral to the mainstream. However, what characterized 20thcentury culture was the growing hegemony of an anti-rationalist critical cultural impulse. This clashed with the previously dominant culture of asceticism and discipline which had once served to legitimate the dominant trends in the economic sphere. In effect, this is an extension of Max Webers Protestant ethic thesis. However, when Weber was writing, rationalization was still in the driving seat, threatening an ominous future of stultifying bureaucracy and bleak disenchantment. It is a somewhat dystopic vision which, Bell argues, never really panned out (Bell 1976: 53). What Weber did not see so clearly were the cultural battles that would rage throughout the early decades of the 20th century, battles in which Webers ideas would play no small part. The outcome would be the ascendance of new cultural sensibilities that rejected capitalist functional rationality and replaced it with the immediate, existential self as the locus of judgement (Bell 1976: 36). The Protestant ethic may have enthroned the technical and economic sphere as the initial dominant force of modernity, but the reaction against it would represent a swing back to culture as the pilot of consciousness.

Culture and modernism


This reaction was initially an aesthetic one, present in the more expressive forms of art which disseminated during the 19th century. Bell considers art to be conducive to these sorts of moods, as the work of art creates a space where hopes and fantasies of the unfulfilled self can be realized without having to confront the limitations imposed by exposure to concrete reality (Bell 1976: 11011). Indeed, these art forms were initially encountered as insular and esoteric and met with derision by the public of more practically minded bourgeois consumers. It is something Georg Luka cs railed against over 100 years ago when he complained that:
The fundamental lie of aesthetic culture or (in some of its serious representatives) its tragic paradox is that it has proscribed all real spiritual activity, and equated all manifestations of life with an affectionate surrender to transient moments. And precisely because everything comes from within, nothing really comes from without. (Luka cs 1995: 149)

For Luka cs, aesthetic culture was what became of a reaction to the alienation of bourgeois society. This society sought all value in the calculation and measurement of

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the object, at the expense of the subject, and was thus unable to generate meaningful culture. The alternative however, entailed an increasingly expressive and impressionistic retreat into a totalization of the self. The aesthete turns away from the outside world and focuses solely on the transient moods of the immediate subject as the foundation of value. In doing so, however, they just become another one of modernitys specialists, isolated in their concerns to an excavation of their own fleeting sensations and emotions. In this sense, the aesthete is not a coherent subject at all, because they have blocked out any objectivity through which subjectivity can be dialectically realized. Aesthetic culture can thus co-exist in an easy parallel with the iron cage as both are equally onedimensional and isolated to their own concerns (Luka cs 1995: 147). According to Bell, this situation did not last. In the decades following the First World War, this milieu of avant-garde cultural critics and artists would gradually transform from being discontented outsiders into being the primary authors of mainstream culture. The result was that by the 1950s the concept of an avant-garde had little meaning. Iconoclasm had become the normal, even cliche d, mode of cultural expression, leaving nothing sacred enough to meaningfully profane. Nobody defended Protestant morality anymore, which made the continued attacks on it even more tedious for Bell. Likewise, the modernists insular criticisms of the alienating experience of modern society became directed outwards, as artists tried to escape their roles as specialists and break down the divide between artistic producer and consumer (Bell 1976: 96). What was previously shocking to bourgeois sensibility had become normalized, and the dominant mode of culture became both self-expressive and dismissive of tradition and hierarchy. This trend spilled out of the cultural realm and into economics. What began as the modernist revolution in aesthetics became a revolution in life-style, as advertisers and manufacturers took up the trend toward self-fulfilment now ubiquitous in art and transformed it into a business model, which celebrated hedonistic mass consumption and individual possession. Entering into debt, previously a source of deep shame for the parsimonious middle classes, became legitimized as a means to fulfilment, indicated by the growing popularity of the instalment plan and credit card (Bell 1976: 6970). Dovetailing with transformations in technology and social organization, these changes in behaviour and perception were central to the emergence of a Fordist economic model of growth through mass consumption throughout the 20th century. The narrative, then, is one of transition. It moves from a small-town Protestant America of closely knit communities, strong religious sentiments, self-restraint, frugality and moralism to an urbanized America of cultural diversity, mass consumption, mass communication, mass transportation, and liberal values. For Bell, this is initially complementary to the structural transformation from rural agricultural capitalism, to mass industrialism and, finally, from the post-war era onward, into a post-industrial society of state-centred economic organization and a knowledge economy. Likewise, it complements political developments: universal suffrage, state-directed Keynesian macroeconomics, class compromise, social liberalism, and the emergence of a welfare state that can mitigate the failures of capitalism are all of a piece with a culture that is sceptical of arbitrary authority and validates mass consumption for the middle and working classes.

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Diagnoses
Bells charge, however, is that, in the long run, these cultural changes have become contradictory to the imperatives of the polity and economy. The consequences are manifold and Bell prophesizes a complex of different crisis scenarios emerging as the 20th century draws to a close. Perhaps the most fundamental contradiction regards the sustainability of production itself. Bells concern is that, by abandoning the virtues of restraint and discipline endemic to the Protestant ethic, modernism has undermined the key motivation for continued participation in society. Religious rewards for vocational work no longer hold any traction, and it is unclear what can replace them. A cultural orientation that promises gratification, luxury and permissiveness lacks the motive forming power to legitimate the necessity of work. The economy still requires a disciplined and reliable workforce, yet the cultural sphere is socializing individuals who explicitly reject this. Hence, there is a contradiction opening between the functional rationality demanded by economic realm and a growing anti-rational turn in the cultural realm toward immediate self-gratification (Bell 1976: 84). Another contradiction within culture is the growing sense of anomie pervading advanced capitalism. Bells analysis interestingly blends Durkheimian prognoses with a Weberian narrative of cultural development. As Marvin Olsen has shown (1965: 37), there are two ways in which Durkheim used the concept of anomie in his work, and both appear in Bell. The first involves the cultural tasks of integration and meaning within an increasingly complex social order. The function of culture, in the Durkheimian sense, has always been to offer an integrative world-view which could provide a regulative framework that articulates and cognizes the social structure. But the tendencies toward specialization and differentiation put a strain on the individuals ability to symbolically represent social reality and their position within it (Bell 1976: 95). Overspecialization undermines the possibility of a coherent, shared culture. Instead we are left with a diffusion of different sub-cultures. Durkheim tends to assume that a culture based on organic solidarity is the product of an increasingly complex social order, with anomic breakdowns being temporary ruptures caused by abnormal circumstances (Durkheim 1964: 353). Contrarily, for Bell, in advanced modernity a common collective conscience is no longer possible. He traces the patterns of work through three historical phases (Bell 1976: 1467): (1) a pre-industrial game against nature where labour was extractive and subject to the contingencies of the natural world; (2) the industrial era, where the game was played against a world of technical and economic objects of humanitys own making, leading to the diagnoses of alienation, reification and disenchantment which pervaded the theses of classical sociology; (3) the post-industrial era, where an economy of knowledge and service means the game is now played against each other. Occupational roles no longer appear within a clear division of labour, like string puppets hanging from a hypostatized objective socio-economic structure. Instead, subjects are left negotiating only with other subjects. It is the Enlightenment ideal of a society of recognition, autonomy and unadulterated intersubjectivity realized.

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Here Bell is both sceptical and conservative. Without any sense of an object to struggle against, we are more in need of a strong, grounding moral compass than ever. This should be the job of culture. But it is precisely this moment that culture is most unable to live up to its task, having discredited religion, tradition and reason and replaced them with an exaltation of the hedonistic and irrational. Without a strong culture, we remain adrift in a meaningless sense of anomie. And this is where the two concepts of anomie intersect. The second concept of anomie involves a sense of meaninglessness and fluctuation that define, for Bell, the post-modernist mood (Bell 1976: 51). If modernism critically undermined religion and morality when it replaced them with aesthetic values, postmodernism pushes even further, beyond the constraints imposed by art. Bell considers this a dangerous cultural trend. It provides the psychological spearhead for an onslaught on the values and patterns of ordinary behaviour, in the name of liberation, eroticism, freedom of impulse, and the like (Bell 1976: 52). Bell sees culture as a necessary balancing act between the dichotomies of restraint and release, the sacred and the profane. A society that is too restrained, too focused on the sacred, is unsustainably stifling and totalitarian. But now we encounter the opposite problem. The way in which these dichotomies are symbolized and codified has always been religion (Bell 1976: 1667). Over the last century, however, religion has been in retreat. Secularization has eroded the sense of community that religion once engendered. And in the realm of culture, a process of profanation has made transgression a virtue. A culture like this can live for a time, feeding itself destructively on the capital of the past, but soon there are no longer any boundaries left to break. The result is a disorientating anomic limitlessness. Durkheim foresaw something of this when he wrote: [O]ne does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or which is the same thing when his goal is infinity (Durkheim 2006: 208). However, what Durkheim, and other functionalist accounts did not foresee is a society totally emptied of the sacred, with no clear path back. They always assumed gravitation back to equilibrium. Bell is in partial agreement here. He clings to Durkheimian concepts because he does not want to accept the permanence of Webers secular disenchantment, suggesting a swing back to religious sentiments as the existential answers provided by reason alone are found wanting. Yet he acknowledges that any future religious revival must take place as individual choices and will not manifest itself as a unitary social order (Bell 1976: 169). For now the problem remains, though, of a culture weighted away from regulation and incorporation and focused solely on release. This sense of cultural deficit permeates his diagnoses of the 1960s as a dysfunctional decade of glorified violence, apocalyptic moods and childish primitivism. He is particularly venomous in his portrayal of counterculture, which he dismisses as anti-rational and self-obsessive: All that there was, was the pathetic celebration of the self a self that had been emptied of content and which masqueraded as being vital through the playacting of Revolution (Bell 1976: 144). Counter-culture was no real culture at all, and by the 1970s it had exhausted itself. For Bell, modernism was finished as a creative force. It had nothing new to say. It destroyed culture, leaving nothing to work with except superficial shock, spectacle and sensation. Its formerly anti-bourgeois, revolutionary postures became colonized by commerce. Radicalism gave way to a cynical and rabid individualism (Bell 1976: 145).

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The contradictions become even sharper when we consider the political realm. The journey of politics from the Second World War to the moment Bell was writing was one of a growing welfare state, the promise of full employment, expanding civil rights and investment in education and technological research. Bell describes this as the expansion of the public household. Traditionally, the private household was a unit insulated from market forces, where every family members physical needs must be met before the desires of others are fulfilled. The relation was more than economic, it was emotional. This is contrasted with the capitalist economy, where the imperative is accumulation and competition and individuals are treated as commodities within it (Bell 1976: 22023). Bell argues that the modern state has developed into a public household that initially sought to meet the needs of its citizens as a way of ameliorating the deficiencies and exploitation of the market, particularly in the wake of the Great Depression. However, subsequent developments have seen the rise of a culture of entitlement, where the expectation is that the public household is there to satisfy every want, not just act as a safety net of needs fulfilment (Bell 1976: 23940). The problem here is that there is a political price for failing to satisfy these desires. Political actors must therefore balance the panoply of demands arising from a diverse and complex post-ideological society with the states budgetary limitations, while at the same time providing a hospitable environment for private enterprise. For Bell, these contradictions go a long way in explaining crises of inflation, recession and fiscal pressure that characterized the 1970s.

Prescription?
Here, in a very similar vein to Ju rgen Habermass Legitimation Crisis, the problem has been traced to the way popular values can legitimize the activity of the state, and the possibility of crisis if the cultural realm produces dysfunctional values. Habermas looks forward to a rational culture, based on a communicative ethic grounded in the ideal speech situation (Habermas 1975: 110). This stands as the dialectical centre of an Enlightenment project of emancipation, as both the means and ends to liberation. For Bell, however, emancipation is not the answer. If anything, it should perhaps be viewed as the problem. Bell is concerned with bringing restraint and a sense of the sacred back into culture. His suggestion is religion (Bell 1976: 1667). Technology and reason have expanded humanitys capacity to dominate nature, and this progress Bell views positively, but there are existential questions that arise out of the finitude and contingency of human life, which rationality can never solve once and for all. This is what culture must speak to, and it is Bells contention that only religion is sufficiently ambiguous and hermeneutic enough to meaningfully sustain this. However, he is quick to dismiss contemporary evangelical revivals as little more than reformulations of a self-oriented, hedonistic culture in religious form. What he instead points to is a public philosophy. This is a consciousness that returns a sense of civitas a unity of shared rights and responsibilities to the centre of cultural life. Bell retains a political liberalism with its emphasis on the rights of the individual, yet seeks to temper its excesses through a strengthened sense of public virtue (Bell 1976: 255), although it is never really spelled out how a return to religion fits with this or where it would come from. He is also sceptical about unrestrained capitalism. While he hopes for no socialist

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utopia, he sees a greater level of economic equality and the mutual recognition it entails as integral to his project. The public philosophy must be able to contain excessive economic appetites but remain pragmatic and adaptable in its distribution of goods (Bell 1976: 259, 277). In the end, it looks vaguely like the Habermasian idealized public sphere, where an engaged public actively debate the direction of both state policy and cultural values (Bell 1976: 278), only it is couched in much more conservative language. What is lacking is a clear understanding of how this can be achieved in a post-ideological and post-industrial society, and what it may look like. As Howard Brick remarks, Bells call for a public philosophy has no embodiment in the society around him; he is thus left looking strategically impotent (Brick 1986: 210). Bell would have probably accepted this later charge. By his own confession, he never set out to lay down doctrine (see Beilharz 2006: 96).

Commentary
So what can we make of Bells prophetic text nearly four decades later? As Malcolm Waters has noted, Cultural Contradictions represented a landmark in sociology. It anticipated many developments which would take place in the discipline over the following decades, particularly in its close examination of post-modernism and its sense of a more subjectively fashioned, reflexive, post-industrial society (Waters 1996: 1701). Likewise, Block nods to Bells prescience in anticipating a middle class permanent tax revolt, fuelled by resentment of a perceived underclass of under-serving welfare dependants, that would propel neo-liberal and monetarist governments to power across the western world (Block 2011: 55). These governments would come to feed on an individualistic and self-directed culture in an attack on sentiments of equality and collectivism. This still continues today, as evidenced by such phenomena as the Tea Party movement. Block argues that it is the failure to heed warnings like those of Bell, and transcend unbridled market liberalism, which eventually led to the financial crisis of the late 2000s (Block 2011: 61). However, Waters suggests that Bells emphasis on the necessity of symbolic and cultural motivations to work, and of the centrality of religious discipline in this, occludes an alternative interpretation that sees a motivational force in material gratification (Waters 1996: 144). In this narrative, hedonistic culture creates wants that the eager consumer must perform labour to fulfil. Hence: the fit between the instrumental worker, the yuppie entrepreneur, the rapacious consumer and a spectacular, de-hierarchized artistic arena is indissoluble (Waters 1996: 145). Jefferson Pooley is essentially making the same criticism when he points to the way a hedonistic lifestyle has colonized the corporate office environment, now replete with pool tables and dress-down Fridays (Pooley 2007: 409). At the same time, Pooley points to statistics that show people currently work longer hours than they ever have. And it is not due to some inner direction to complete Gods work in the world, but out of a driving sense of competitiveness and ambition. Indeed, these arguments can be pushed even further, in the direction of neo-Marxism. Herbert Marcuses interpretation in One Dimensional Man is that gratifying consumerism

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and hedonistic leisure actually pacifies and constrains the individual, helping them reconcile themselves with a totalitarian society of social domination (Marcuse 1964: 8390). An endless procession of fleeting and immediate satisfactions helps distract the consumer from both a deep inner unhappiness and a comprehension of the social costs their imperialist civilization is extolling on the foreign Other. Updating Marcuse, Colin Cremin argues that leisure is becoming ever more illusory in advanced capitalist society as the sites of hedonistic play increasingly become colonized by the job market, and turn into theatres of competition over employment, promotions and social capital. This coincides with an increasing structural instability, forcing workers into a state of constant anxiety about economic security. Leisure itself ceases to be fun as the worker seeks to utilize that time calculatedly and competitively, seeing it more as a series of extra-curricular activities which become impressive additions to their resume, or as a time to facilitate the kinds of social networking necessary to stay ahead in the job market. Moreover, hedonism becomes a role where the aspiring individual demonstrates their ability to enjoy life as a signifier of their immanent success and employability (Cremin 2011: 40). According to Cremin, when recreation becomes interwoven with the routines and demands of work, it ceases to be truly recreational at all. This bears some relation to Pooleys point, although Cremin also inverts it by arguing that work is expanding outward into pleasure, and that pleasure is now tainted because of it. Any frivolity inside the workplace, for Cremin, is just a means to divert attention away from the enduring fact of capitalist domination (Cremin 2011: 11922). It is worth pointing out, however, that for many employed in service economy, labour proceeds with a similar monotony to that of an assembly line. The idea of a closing gap between pastimes and occupations is likely specific to an elite minority situated at the higher levels of the economic hierarchy. Similarly, this points to a limitation in Bells work, as any notion of a post-industrial escape from alienation would surely seem entirely foreign to someone employed in a contemporary call centre or data entry firm. Bell would likely dismiss neo-Marxist accounts like those of Marcuse and Cremin as nothing more than symptomatic of the very pathological limitlessness he had diagnosed, as would he point to their frameworks, and the way they let the demands of the economic sphere determine their analysis of culture, as a deficient and erroneous way to understand the interaction of the economic, political and cultural realms. But Bells tripartite methodology has come under sharp criticism too. Harry Redner, while certainly not suggesting a turn to Marx, argues that Bells disjunctive view of economy and culture grants these two realms too much independence. For Redner, the contradiction between modernism and capitalism plays out almost as if they occurred in different societies, rather than seeing them both as the product of bourgeois society (Redner 2013: 1901). In one sense, this is true. Looking back to Luka cs, the development of modernism did indeed involve an aesthetic isolation from bourgeois society. In another sense, though, this is perhaps somewhat unfair. The escape of modernism into everyday life was co-determinate with economic transformation, and Bell does stress the enabling effect of consumer goods and available credit on the hedonistic turn. The point is not that they originated in different places; rather it is that there are unintended consequences to both consumerism and modernism, and that these have meant that the different realms are now taking

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society in contradictory directions. The spectre of debt, however, leads into other considerations with which we can relate Bells work to our own times. As we have seen, in Bells narrative household debt only encourages gratifying consumerism. It delays the repayment for satisfactions and serves to obscure the financial limitations of the consumer (Bell 1976: 6970). He does not consider how it may have the opposite effect. Blindness to the coercive aspects of the contemporary economy both in the workplace and the home leads to overstatements on the role of culture and undermines Bells predictive power. For example, David Harvey has argued that debt has a disciplining and conservatizing effect on the workforce, which can be considered an effective means of defusing social discontent and stabilizing the market (Harvey 1974: 244). A mortgage gives someone a stake in the system, and imposes the imperative to repay it. It is interesting to think about the connection between a growing demographic of debt-encumbered homeowners and the growing resentment toward entitlement and tax expenditure that Bell mentions. Moreover, in the years following Cultural Contradictions, any prospect of a revived civitas was well and truly buried by a revitalization of classical liberal economics and a delegitimization of the Keynesian expanded public household. While the consequences of this have been uneven, there has been a demonstrable rise in household debt to compensate for stagnating wages and retreating state entitlements. This rising debt, combined with financial deregulation, fuelled a real estate asset bubble that imploded in 2007, sharply accelerating an already growing trend of private home foreclosures and leaving the world financial industry on the verge of total collapse. The state naturally stepped in, but it did not pander to popular interests (Graeber 2011: 381). To the chagrin of much of the public, while their homes continued to be foreclosed and the occupants found themselves thrown out onto the street, the state worked hard to shore up the biggest investment firms with a series of bailouts that created a tab totalling over $12 trillion (New York Times, 24 July 2011). This sort of activity seems to fly in the face of crisis narratives which see legitimation as the central problem for a political sphere assailed by contradictory interests. Public opinion is generally dismissed, and oppositional movements, like Occupy Wall Street, have either been ignored or violently repressed by the state. If anything, it just points us back to Marx, as it demonstrates the dominant influence of big capital over politics, at everyone elses (quite literal) expense. Likewise, in the hands of austeritys champions, Bells vocabulary of entitlement and hedonism turns into his intentions into its opposite: justification for a sacrifice of public needs for the needs of continual and untrammelled accumulation by the financial elite. Debt is again a source of shame, but only when held by a socially supportive state. Perhaps this just suggests that, in the light of recent events, Bells call for civitas is more relevant even if more distant than ever.

Conclusion
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism is undoubtedly the product of a specific moment. When it was published in 1976, the global economy had entered into deeply turbulent waters, and after nearly 40 years Keynesian hegemony over social policy and macroeconomics was coming apart at the seams. Nothing had yet developed to

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definitively replace it. It was therefore a time of crisis in the most literal sense. Bells purpose was to diagnose and to intervene, to beat a path to stability and enduring liberty. If Bells dire warnings of an irresponsible culture kicking the legs out from beneath itself have not proven to be prescient, it is down to prejudices shared by cultural conservatism generally. It is a cycle that repeats itself over successive generations, where their anxiety about change focuses them too exclusively on what has been lost and leaves little room for what is becoming. As Corey Robin has perceptively remarked: Conservatives from Edmund Burke to Robert Bork have conflated the transformation of values with the end of value (Robin 2013: 31). Thus, like the orthodox Marxist who clings to a classical conception of politics wholly determined by the economic world under it and dismissive of any structural adaptation beyond this, the conservatives remain fixated on the necessity of the fading culture and morality of their fathers, unable to recognize those of their daughters and sons. This is one mould Daniel Bell does not break. References
Beilharz P (2006) Ends and rebirths: An interview with Daniel Bell. Thesis Eleven 85: 93103. Bell D (1962) The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press. Bell D (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books. Bell D (1976) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Block F (2011) Daniel Bells prophecy. Breakthrough Journal 1: 5361. Brick H (1986) Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cremin C (2011) Capitalisms New Clothes: Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis. London: Pluto Press. (1964) The Division of Labor in Society, trans. Simpson G. New York: The Free Durkheim E Press. (2006) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London: Routledge. Durkheim E Graeber D (2011) Debt: The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House. Habermas J (1975) Legitimation Crisis. trans. McCarthy T. Boston: Beacon Press. Harvey D (1974) Class-monopoly rent, finance capital and the urban revolution. Regional Studies 8(3/4): 239255. Hibben P (1929) The Peerless Leader, William Jennings Bryan. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. cs Reader, ed. Kadarkay A. Oxford: Blackwell, Luka cs G (1995) Aesthetic culture. In: The Luka 146159. Marcuse H (1964) One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. New York Times (2011) Adding up the governments total bailout tab, 24 July. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/04/business/20090205-bailout-totals-graphic.html Olsen ME (1965) Durkheims two concepts of anomie. The Sociological Quarterly 6(1): 3744. Pooley J (2007) Straight by day, swingers by night: Re-reading Daniel Bell on capitalism and its culture. The Review of Communication 7(4): 401410. Redner H (2013) Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture and the Individual in the Age of Globalization. New Brunswick: Transaction.

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Robin C (2013) Nietzsches marginal children: On Friedrich Hayek. The Nation, 27 May, pp. 2736. Waters M (1996) Daniel Bell. London: Routledge.

Author biography Andrew Gilbert is a PhD candidate in Sociology at La Trobe University. His research focus is on a comparison of crisis narratives in 20th-century social theory.

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