“Daniel Bell, a post-Marxist sociologist who is probably best known for his 1976 treatise The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (which was reissued in 1999 with a new preface by the author in which he comments on the ways in which his work has held up to the changes in society that occurred during the intervening generation) believes that our society is in many ways most accurately defined as a post-industrialist one. That is, we can best understand the economic underpinnings of our lives (as well as the political and social structures of our lives) if we seek to understand the way in which our society is structured in terms of its having developed from a traditionally industrialized society.”