丁学良：永远的心头之痛——悼丹尼尔•贝尔先生
[align=center]丁学良：永远的心头之痛——悼丹尼尔•贝尔先生[/align] 正当这本小书：《我读天下无字书》）编订完毕交付印刷之际，我刚刚从日本参加东京地区多所大学2011年联席研讨会返回香港。清早六点钟一打开电脑，就看到我的同届不同系的校友凯尔的电子邮件——他近来忙到难得一年发我两条电邮——，标题便是“Daniel Bell”贝尔教授的尊名。我立时萌生不祥之感，果其不然：“请接受我的安慰，老朋友，你的导师去世了。过去这些年里每次我见到他提起你的名字的时候，他都欣悦有加。他是一位真正的智力伟人。 凯尔 2011年1月27日下午7点21分 ”
我搜索了一下，英文报刊杂志和文化网站的报道已经有许多条，其中以《纽约时报》于贝尔先生逝世当天1月25日发布的评论性讣告最为言简意赅。该文在贝尔的众多著作里，着重提及在学术界和思想史上穿透力特别深刻的三部：《意识形态的终结》、《工业化后社会的来临》、《资本主义的文化矛盾》，以及他和Irving Kristol一道创刊、日后成为全美国对国内政策影响最大的刊物《公共利益》杂志。很多读者也许已经知道，新千禧年降临之后不久，《泰晤士时报》书评专版编辑部向广大读者和评论者征求意见，推荐第二次世界大战结束以来英文世界最重要的100本非小说类著作，结果贝尔的两本著作上榜——《意识形态的终结》和《资本主义文化的矛盾》。《高等教育记事》周刊请美国教育界提名20世纪关教育研究的最重要的50本著作，贝尔的《普式教育的改革》入选。《纽约时报》的评论讣告说：“在苏联东欧体系崩溃三十年之前，贝尔就剖明它的意识形态越来越失去政治驱动力，这为新型观念敞开了激励人心和行动的空间。在1970年代中期，贝尔瞻望到以制造业为基础的发达国家，即将迈入以服务业为主要的增长来源。他同时也指出西方资本主义愈益依赖于大众消费、贪得无厌、债务累积，消蚀着韦伯所看重的资本主义起步时期的一整套价值观。”
但贝尔老先生却从来无缘访问中国大陆，他说他只是在1960年代后期访问过香港，隔着铁丝网边界线用望远镜朝北边的广东省地盘扫描了几分钟，那个年头中国正在轰轰烈烈、打打砸砸的大闹文化大革命。老先生八、九年前就患有日渐严重的糖尿病，在电话中告诉我不得不坐轮椅了。他周围的老同事说他“大脑里有太多的知识学问，对他虚弱的双腿来讲是太过沉重的负担。”
在他身体状况能够访问中国大陆的时候，我这个穷学生没有能力也无机会安排他来访。待到我有机会甚至有能力安排他来华访问的时候，他的身体状况已经不再允许他长途跋涉了。
我这个学生永远的心头之痛。
2011年1月31日 Daniel Bell, Ardent Appraiser of Politics, Economics and Culture, Dies at 91
ByMICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Daniel Bell, the writer, editor, sociologist and teacher who over seven decades came to epitomize the engaged intellectual as he struggled to reveal the past, comprehend the present and anticipate the future, died on Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 91.
His daughter, Jordy Bell, confirmed the death.
Daniel Bell in the early 1980s.
Mr. Bell’s output was prodigious and his range enormous. His major lines of inquiry included the failures of socialism in America, the exhaustion of modern culture and the transformation of capitalism from an industrial-based system to one built on consumerism.
But there was room in his mind for plenty of digressions. He wrote about the changing structure of organized crime and even the growing popularity of gangsta rap among white, middle-class, suburban youth.
Two of Mr. Bell’s books, “The End of Ideology” (1960) and the “Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1978), were ranked among the 100 most influential books since World War II by The Times Literary Supplement in London. In titling “The End of Ideology” and another work, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” (1973), Mr. Bell coined terms that have entered common usage.
In “The End of Ideology” he contended — nearly three decades before the collapse of Communism — that ideologies that had once driven global politics were losing force and thus providing openings for newer galvanizing beliefs to gain toeholds. In “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” he foresaw the global spread of service-based economies as generators of capital and employment, supplanting those dominated by manufacturing or agriculture.
In Mr. Bell’s view, Western capitalism had come to rely on mass consumerism, acquisitiveness and widespread indebtedness, undermining the old Protestant ethic of thrift and modesty that writers like Max Weber and R.H. Tawney had long credited as the reasons for capitalism’s success.
He also predicted the rising importance of science-based industries and of new technical elites. Indeed, in 1967, he predicted something like the Internet, writing: “We will probably see a national information-computer-utility system, with tens of thousands of terminals in homes and offices ‘hooked’ into giant central computers providing library and information services, retail ordering and billing services, and the like.”
Mr. Bell became an influential editor of periodicals, starting out with The New Leader, a small social democratic publication that he referred to as his “intellectual home.” He joined Fortune magazine as its labor editor and in 1965 helped found and edit The Public Interest with his old City College classmateIrving Kristol, who died in 2009.
Though The Public Interest never attained a wide readership, it gained great prestige, beginning as a policy journal that questioned Great Society programs and then broadening into one of the most intellectually formidable of neoconservative publications.
“It has had more influence on domestic policy than any other journal in the country — by far,” the columnist David Brooks wrote in The New York Times in 2005.
Mr. Bell also maintained a distinguished academic career, teaching at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, at Columbia as a professor of sociology from 1959 to 1969 — the university awarded him a Ph.D. for his work on “The End of Ideology” — and then at Harvard, where in 1980 he was appointed the Henry Ford II professor of social sciences
As both a public intellectual and an academic, Mr. Bell saw a distinction between those breeds. In one of his typical yeasty digressions in “The End of Ideology,” he wrote: “The scholar has a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it, adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. The scholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his ‘self.’
“The intellectual,” he went on, “begins withhisexperience,hisindividual perceptions of the world,hisprivileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities.”
In some measure Mr. Bell may well have been referring to himself in that passage — his intellectual persona self-consciously winking at its detached scholarly twin with whom it conspired in a lifetime of work and experience.
Daniel Bolotsky was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on May 10, 1919, to Benjamin and Anna Bolotsky, garment workers and immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father died when Daniel was eight months old, and Daniel, his mother and his older brother, Leo, moved in with relatives. The family changed the name to Bell when Daniel was 13.
Mr. Bell liked to tell of his political beginnings with an anecdote about his bar mitzvah, in 1932. “I said to the Rabbi: ‘I’ve found the truth. I don’t believe in God. I’m joining the Young People’s Socialist League.’ So he looked at me and said, ‘Kid, you don’t believe in God. Tell me, do you think God cares?’ ”
Mr. Bell did join the League and as an adolescent delivered sidewalk speeches for Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate for president. By the time he had graduated fromStuyvesant High Schoolin Manhattan and entered City College in the late 1930s, he was well grounded in the Socialist and Marxist canon and well aware of the leftist landscape, with its bitter rivalries and schisms.
At City College, he had no trouble finding his way to Alcove No. 1 in the cafeteria, where, among the anti-Stalinist socialists who dominated that nook, he found a remarkable cohort that challenged and sustained him for much of his life as it helped to define America’s political spectrum over the last half of the 20th century.
Its principal members, in addition to Mr. Bell, included Mr. Kristol, whose eventual move to the right as a founding neoconservative led Mr. Bell to leave The Public Interest in 1972 while steadfastly affirming his friendship for his old school chum.
There was Irving Howe, the late critic, professor and editor of the leftist journal Dissent, who remained a Social Democrat. And there wasNathan Glazer, who would become Mr. Bell’s colleague in the Harvard sociology department, the author, withDaniel Patrick Moynihan, of “Beyond the Melting Pot,” and the architect of strategies for school integration. In 1998 the four men were the subjects of a documentary film by Joseph Dorman titled “Arguing the World.”
The atmosphere of City College in the ’30s was supercharged with leftist ideology. There were Communists and Socialists, Stalinists and Trotskyites, all giving vent to their views in the years of the Spanish Civil War just beforeHitler’s pact with Stalin paved the way to world war.
In the film, Mr. Bell described the atmosphere in the cafeteria as “kind of a heder,” referring to the Jewish religious schools where arguing a variety of views and redefining positions was the basis of learning. He graduated in 1939.
The associations Mr. Bell made at City College were fundamental. He also met the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and the literary criticAlfred Kazin, whose sister, Pearl Kazin, Mr. Bell married in 1960. She survives him.
Besides his daughter, Jordy, of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., Mr. Bell is survived by a son, David, of Princeton, N.J., four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Mr. Bell never hesitated to expand and revise his thinking through the years. New editions of his older books often include new prefaces and afterwords that look at his old arguments in the light of new developments in politics and society. And he was always quick to point out what he regarded as misconceptions about his work and his life.
In 2003, for example, an article by James Atlas in The Times described him and Mr. Kristol as neoconservatives who had felt that the Vietnam War had a “persuasive rationale.” He answered with a letter that declared, “I was not and never have been a ‘neoconservative.’ Nor did I support the war.”
Indeed, for all the ideological wars he had witnessed, Mr. Bell disdained labels, particularly as they were applied to him. Over the years he would offer his own political profile, declaring what he called his “triune” view of himself: “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture.”
Michael T. Kaufman, a reporter at The New York Times, died in 2010. William McDonald contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 28, 2011
An obituary on Wednesday about the sociologist Daniel Bell referred incorrectly to his academic career. It began at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, not at Columbia University in 1959. 大约10年前读过他《资本主义文化矛盾》。
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