Daniel Bell is dead: The man who famously declared himself “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture” has passed away at age 91. Bell was central among the New York intellectuals, and one of the era’s last surviving figures. He authored such seminal works as Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), The End of Ideology (1960), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978), and with his classmate and friend Irving Kristol, Bell helped found and edit the Public Interest in 1965, eventually departing from the journal when Kristol moved to the political right. In 2005, Paul Berman wrote in Bookforum about Bell’s place in the Columbia class of ‘68, observing that Bell “noted a strange and repeated tendency on the part of the American Left to lose the thread of continuity from one generation to the next, such that each new generation feels impelled to reinvent the entire political tradition.”
