Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell passed away yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 91.  Bell was, of course, a leading sociologist and public intellectual, whose long and fascinating career is, and will likely long be, of great interest to U.S. intellectual historians.  A leading Cold War liberal thinker in the 1950s, Bell later became a founding co-editor of The Public Interest which eventually made him a charter neoconservative, though Bell's version of neoconservatism was always idiosyncratic. Irving Kristol declared that his college friend and co-editor represented the "social democratic wing" of neoconservatism. Bell, for his part, referred to himself as a right-wing social democrat, "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."