The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties

Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960. First edition. Octavo. Original cloth and dust jacket (not price-clipped). Edgewear to dust jacket, particularly to foot of the front wrapper and spine, including a few small closed tears to jacket; some smudging and sunning to spine and jacket; faint sticker mark to rear wrapper; leaves bright and unmarked. A well-preserved first edition of Bell's most influential work; difficult to find in this condition. Near-fine in a very good-plus dust jacket.. First edition of Daniel Bell's (1919-2011) most influential work evaluating the changing intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. Bell was a prominent American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor who once described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." Bell began his career as a journalist and served as managing editor of The New Leader (1941-1945), labor editor at Fortune (1948-1958), and co-editor with Irving Kristol of The Public Interest (1965-1973). Bell also taught at a variety of institutions, including the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Harvard University, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964. Bell was an influential contributor to post-industrial thought and his most influential work, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, first published by the Free Press in 1960, presents Bell's thesis that the celebrated humanist ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are both spent and bound to be supplanted by more localized movements that negotiate within the increasingly affluent, technocratic, and liberal paradigm. An uncommonly bright first edition of Bell's intriguing (and some may say prophetic) assessment of the changing intellectual currents of the modern West, which was named by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books since the end of World War II.