“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

Abstract

In this selection, from the Journal of Democracy (1995), political scientist and urban policy specialist Robert Putnam describes the “bowling alone” phenomenon – that more and more people take up bowling as a form of recreation, but fewer and fewer belong to organized leagues – as a metaphor for what urban life has become in contemporary middle-class America, and for millions of others worldwide, living in an increasingly materialistic and solipsistic culture of corporate work, obsessive consumption, and over-determined leisure. Whereas cities once held out the promise of a wider, higher form of human community, Putnam argues that contemporary urbanites now follow a path of less, not more, civic engagement and that our collective stock of “social capital” – the meaningful human contacts of all kinds that characterize true communities – is so dangerously eroded that it verges on depletion. He observes that urban dwellers today are not connected to one another through collective action as they or their forebears in small towns or rural areas once were. Instead, virtually all measures of social engagement – voting, participation in social organizations, active church membership, even friendships and family ties – seem to grow weaker every year. In part, this phenomenon arises from the well-known causes: social and geographic mobility, the decreasing importance of families as women join the workforce, and the technological transformation of leisure. Putnam argues, these forces have now risen to the level of social crisis and must be addressed by conscious policies to increase civic engagement of all sorts and to strengthen the connection between people in their roles as neighbors, co-workers, and fellow citizens.