By James Petras
The recent death of one of the United States’ most prominent sociologists, Harvard Professor Daniel Bell, and the effusive eulogies that have accompanied his obituaries highlight the importance of ideological utility over scientific rigor. Typical of the mass media’s hagiographic write-ups is the obituary in the Financial Times (2/12-13/1, p. 5), which claimed that “Few men are given the gift of seeing into the future, but Daniel Bell … was one of them … with uncanny accuracy”. Further on, the ‘puff’ piece pronounced that, “Few thinkers in the second half of the 20th century managed to catch the social and cultural shifts of the times with such range and in such detail as he did”. No doubt there are some important reasons why Bell warrants such effusive praise, but it certainly is not because of his understanding of the political, economic, ideological developments which transpired in the United States during his intellectual life.