DANIEL BELL: R.I.P.

Daniel Bell died this year. I have followed his writings with interest all my academic life. He began to teach sociology at Columbia in 1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith. He then taught at Harvard until his retirement in 1990. I won’t give you chapter and verse of his distinguished career which you can easily access on the Internet. I began studying sociology in 1963. I taught it from 1974 until my retirement in 2005. I won’t give you chapter and verse of my quite undistinguished career since I have been a generalist and taught many subjects. I was not the precocious student, nor the specialist academic and prolific writer that made Bell the famous professional in the social sciences.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 8 August 2011.

You were born the very year
those Tablets1 were unveiled
in New York……I always liked
your writings on ideology and
post-industrialism in your two
books listed as among the 100
most important books: 1950 to
2000.2 There is, as you say, an
ambiguity, irony, complexity, &
paradox woven into our very real
world politics,3 you who were, a
socialist in economics, a liberal in
politics, a conservative in culture.
Thanks Daniel Bolotsky! I’ll write
more about you on another day.

1 Daniel Bolotsky(10/5/’19-25/1/’11 had his name changed to Daniel Bell in 1932; The Tablets of the Divine Plan, Abdul-Baha, 1919.
2 The End of Ideology(1960) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) were so listed by the Times Literary Supplement.
3 Russell K. Nieli, “R.I.P. Daniel Bell,” The Socjournal: The New Journal of Sociology and Media, 15 February 2011.

Ron Price
8 August 2011

Daniel Bell died this year. I have followed his writings with interest all my academic life. He began to teach sociology at Columbia in 1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith. He then taught at Harvard until his retirement in 1990. I won’t give you chapter and verse of his distinguished career which you can easily access on the Internet. I began studying sociology in 1963. I taught it from 1974 until my retirement in 2005. I won’t give you chapter and verse of my quite undistinguished career since I have been a generalist and taught many subjects. I was not the precocious student, nor the specialist academic and prolific writer that made Bell the famous professional in the social sciences.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 8 August 2011.

You were born the very year
those Tablets1 were unveiled
in New York……I always liked
your writings on ideology and
post-industrialism in your two
books listed as among the 100
most important books: 1950 to
2000.2 There is, as you say, an
ambiguity, irony, complexity, &
paradox woven into our very real
world politics,3 you who were, a
socialist in economics, a liberal in
politics, a conservative in culture.
Thanks Daniel Bolotsky! I’ll write
more about you on another day.

1 Daniel Bolotsky(10/5/’19-25/1/’11 had his name changed to Daniel Bell in 1932; The Tablets of the Divine Plan, Abdul-Baha, 1919.
2 The End of Ideology(1960) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) were so listed by the Times Literary Supplement.
3 Russell K. Nieli, “R.I.P. Daniel Bell,” The Socjournal: The New Journal of Sociology and Media, 15 February 2011.

Ron Price
8 August 2011

to Daniel Bolotsky
rip

You'd be surprised by the energy and time some people have had to accomplish quite a bit.

I must be a new spirit or something as I've spent most of this lifetime trying to get control over my mind.