Social capital and political fantasy: Robert Putnam’s bowling alone

Abstract

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has achieved something akin to celebrity status rare for any academic by virtue of his compelling use of a metaphor, "bowling alone," to characterize the transformation of American social and political life during the postwar era.' He argues that a pervading sense of civic malaise and disengagement has taken over a society in which the vast majority of people are materially satisfied but deeply alarmed about the political, cultural, and moral direction of the country. "During the first two-thirds of the century," Putnam writes, "Americans took a more and more active role in the social and political life of their communities in churches and union halls, in bowling alleys and clubrooms, around committee tables and card tables and dinner tables ... then, mysteriously and more or less simultaneously, we began to do all those things less often" (p. 183). Of course, Putnam is not the first writer to call attention to the disintegration of civic culture in the United States, but what distinguishes his work is a focus on eroding "social capital" the collapse of networks of interaction among individuals that imbue human life with qualities needed for community, collective action, and democratic participation along lines theorized by Jean Jacques Rousseau and later celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic Democracy in America. Hence: "Weakened social capital is manifest in the things that have vanished almost unnoticed neighborhood parties and get-togethers with friends, the unreflective kindness of strangers, the shared pursuit of the public good rather than a solitary quest for private goods" (p. 403). In a word, Americans have abandoned en masse bowling leagues and are now, more often than ever, taking to the lanes alone as a sign of their social disconnectedness. When the article upon which this book was written first appeared in 1995, Putnam was, as he concedes, a rather obscure academic; now he is invited to Camp David, lionized by talk-show hosts, pictured with his wife on the pages