Until the disruption of sociological orthodoxy in the sixties and seventies, most of the American sociological works shared a “logic of segregation” that scientifically shaped and legitimized the boundaries of distinction in American society. The aim of this paper is to shed light on how the logic of segregation affected the thought of the contemporary American sociologist Daniel Bell in three different phases of his intellectual journey: in the fifties when he was influenced by the structural-functionalist paradigm, then in the sixties, when he outlined the theory of post-industrial society and, finally, in the seventies, when the rise of a strong demand for social rights prompted him to deal with the paradoxes of the welfare state and the break-up of American social order.
