In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Harvard maverick sociologist Daniel Bell popularized a new lens to grasp, translate and decipher the West’s post-industrial dysfunctions, a three-way slicing of society into ‘realms’ or ‘spheres’: the techno-economic, the cultural, and the political. This triad may be dismissed as a ready-made mold for the eclectic sensibilities of someone who once described himself as “socialist in economics, liberal in politics, and conservative in culture.” But Bell’s analytical tryptic, if well used, can also make sense of his epoch’s upsets and upheavals, and may even prove useful in diagnosing our own. The turmoil of post-1973 America stemmed, in Bell’s view, from an arithmetic inadequacy between the spheres. On the one hand, the country’s libertine counterculture and its leftward-lurching politics had been fomenting a kind of self-gratifying consumerism among the populace. On the other hand, those same hedonistic desires were, by the mid-1970s, proving too expensive to satisfy for the oil-shocked welfare state of the late Great Society. Much like a patient prescribed incompatible drugs or a lab experiment producing a reactive hazard, American social chemistry was being pulled in contradictory directions. The result was a radioactive mix of polarization, discontent, and strife.
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