The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting.

BELL, Daniel.

$3,000.00

Item Number: 118638

New York: Basic Books, 1973.

First edition of this insightful work which speaks about the coming of the service economy and the importance of knowledge for creating stratification in the new society. Octavo, original half cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “For Irving and Bea- with affection, as always, Dan May 30, 1973.” The recipients were Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, who were close friends of Bell’s. Kristol was a journalist who was dubbed the “godfather of neoconservatism.” Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian who was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. Bell and Kristol were close friends, who jointly founded The Public Interest in 1965. It was a leading neoconservative journal on political economy and culture, aimed at a readership of journalists, scholars and policy makers. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Jacqueline Schuman.

In 1973, Daniel Bell’s historical work predicted a vastly different society developing—one that will rely on the "economics of information" rather than the "economics of goods." Bell argued that the new society would not displace the older one but rather overlie some of the previous layers just as the industrial society did not completely eradicate the agrarian sectors of our society. The post-industrial society’s dimensions would include the spread of a knowledge class, the change from goods to services and the role of women. All of these would be dependent on the expansion of services in the economic sector and an increasing dependence on science as the means of innovating and organizing technological change. Bell prophetically stated in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society that we should expect " new premises and new powers, new constraints and new questions—with the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history."