Abstract

RAMIREZ PLASCENCIA, Jorge  and  SOLIS GADEA, Héctor Raúl. To reread to Daniel Bell. Forty years after the publication of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Espiral (Guadalaj.) [online]. 2017, vol.24, n.68, pp.9-35. ISSN 1665-0565.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, published by Daniel Bell in 1976, exercised a visible influence on the intellectual debates of those years and it has maintained a relatively constant presence in sociological literature. Bell argued mainly that culture had radically changed in a direction that made it incompatible with the reproduction of the capitalist economy. Forty years after the appearance of the book, in this article we seek to assess the consistency of this thesis. The perspective is critic. We want to show its weaknesses revealing the misuse of Weber’s idea concerning the relationship between protestant ethic and development of capitalism, the shortcomings of the theory of society built by Bell in order to settle the existence of contradictions and the adoption of concepts of culture and religion restrictives.

Keywords : capitalism; Daniel Bell; modernism; cultural contradictions; social theory.