This paper investigates how key social issues related to American culture, social character, and politics are addressed in the work of two of America's leading liberal sociologists, David Riesman and Daniel Bell. It maps out the trajectory of Riesman's and Bell's early contributions to a critique of mass society in post-war America, as well as Bell's later formulation of liberalism in crisis and his assessment of culture in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. This analysis pays particular attention to the intellectual, biographical, and social settings that helped to shape the often conflicting ideas of each thinker, and examines the discursive shifts within liberal thinking as it attempted to explain and deal with perceived new social crises from the 1950s to the present.
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