Daniel Bell (b. 1919) was born in New York City on May 10, to an immigrant Jewish family; though religion would later play a central role in his sociological theorizing, he considered his Jewishness to be ethnic rather than religious. He graduated from City College of New York in 1938, and after a year of graduate study at Columbia University spent the next twenty years in journalism, writing and editing for the New Leader, Fortune (as labor editor), and The Public Interest, which he cofounded with Irving Kristol in 1965. In 1958 he became an associate professor at Columbia, where he received a Ph.D. in 1960 and was promoted to full professor in 1962. In 1969 he moved to Harvard University, where he received a Henry Ford II endowed chair in 1980, from which he retired in 1990.

Daniel Bell, b. 1919. A Harvard academic and prominent figure in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...