Daniel Bell and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Abstract

One of the most distinctive intellectual groups that emerged as a force during the Cold War has been variously described as anti-communist liberal, and more recently as neo-conservative. Daniel Bell, a leading figure in this group, has defined this generation in terms of a particular ideological journey that began in the 1930s when many of the writers and intellectuals in the group were ‘intense, horatory, naive, simplistic and passionate but, after the Moscow trials and the Soviet-Nazi pact, disenchanted and reflective’.¹ Many of the leading anti-communist liberals of the post-war period were former socialists who had rebelled against the authoritarian Stalinism of left politics. Daniel Bell sees this group as a seminal force in American life in the post-war period: ‘from them and their experiences we have inherited the key terms which dominate discourse today: irony, paradox, ambiguity and complexity’.² Bell suggests that this post-war intellectual culture of ‘ambiguity and complexity’ marks an improvement on the crude sectarian extremism of the 1930s. In fact he suggests in the famous title of his book The End of Ideology that fixed ideological positions are both redundant and inhibit accurate analysis. Some former socialists and communists such as Max Eastman and John Dos Passos moved to the extreme right, but a more characteristic position was that of the anti-communist liberal adopted by such cultural critics as Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling.