Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Special Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Like the term "post-Cold War era", the phrase "postindustrial society", coined by Daniel Bell over twenty-five years ago, was for many years more notable for defining an age in terms of what it was not rather than what it was. Back in 1973, when the first edition of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was published, people had a sense that the industrial world in which they had grown up was undergoing profound change, that giant factories, manufacturing and labor unions were becoming passŽ, and that the class antagonism that such an economy produced was no longer the defining issue in politics. Bell's book was enormously influential in helping people understand that these changes were not small ones at the margin; rather, they represented the shifting of an entire economic paradigm.
Today we can define this new era in positive rather than negative terms: we speak of living in an "information society" rather than an industrial one. Indeed, futurist Alvin Toffler holds that this transition is as consequential as the shift from agriculture to industry. It is a mark of Daniel Bell's great insight about the age that was just passing, and his prescience about the one to come, that we can now fill in many of the details that he sketched out. It is therefore quite appropriate that Basic Books has brought out a third edition of Bell's famous book, together with a long new preface by the author that picks up where the second edition left off in 1976. Re-reading the book in 1999 makes one realize just how right Bell was in his social forecasting.
