Daniel Bell
MODERNISM AND CAPITALISM
That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that
no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to
end. His own method was to glance rapidly through the pages, read
only the parts that interested him, and skip all the rest. This is one way
of knowing a book, and for a clever reader it may suffice. But these
days, many persons do not read a book but read of it, and usually from
reviewers. Given the constraints of the media and the nature of the
culture, this knowledge at one remove contains a peril. For one thing,
even when a book has a complex argument, most reviewers, busy
people they, sprint through a book seeking to catch a few lines to
encapsulate the argument and to find a tag which can locate the author
into the comfortable niches of the marketable vocabularies of conversa–
tion. Since the dominant bias in American culture is a liberal one, an
argument that cuts across that liberalism makes some reviewers un–
comfortable. And those whose work decries those aspects of contempo–
rary culture which make cheap claims to "liberation," often find
themselves labeled as "neo-conservative."
In its own terms, such a designation is meaningless, for it assumes
that social views can be aligned along a single dimension. (What is
ironic, in fact, is that those who decry the "one-dimensional" society,
often hold such a one-dimensional view of politics.) In the larger
historical context, the phrase makes no sense because the kind of
cultural criticism I make-and I think of similar criticisms by Peter
Berger and Philip Rieff-transcends the received categories of liberal–
ism, and seeks to treat the dilemmas of contemporary society within a
very different framework.
Since an author's point of view is relevant to the understanding of
his intentions, I think it not amiss to say that I am a socialist in
economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. Many
people might find this statement puzzling, assuming that if a person is
