Daniel Bell, the distinguished and influential American sociologist and social theorist, died at the age of 91 years in January, 2011. Bell had an amazingly wide range of interests and knowledge. While he could be called a sociologist—he had served as a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and then as Henry Ford II Professor of Sociology at Harvard University—his academic life came after a long and varied career in serious journalism, as managing editor of the socialist weekly The New Leader, as editor of Common Sense, and as an editor and writer on the American business magazine Fortune. He also founded, with Irving Kristol, and edited for some years, the influential American quarterly The Public Interest.
