Reviving community requires progressive politics The coronavirus pandemic may have forced us into isolation, but it has also highlighted our dependence on one another. Across the world, the crisis has led to huge increases in volunteering, and here in Britain thousands of people have formed mutual aid groups to provide help and support to their neighbours. Might this signal that we are heading towards less individualistic societies, in which community plays a larger role? Two new books argue that this can and should be the future: In Greed Is Dead: Politics after individualism, Paul Collier and John Kay, two distinguished Oxford economists, open with a trenchant critique of the present. ‘We live’, they declare, ‘in societies saturated in selfishness.’ This is because individualism, in both its ‘possessive’ and ‘expressive’ varieties, underpins the ideologies that dominate contemporary public life. But this individualism ‘is no longer intellectually tenable’. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Elinor Ostrom, the authors argue that the prosocial nature of human beings has been wrongly ignored. Societies do best, they contend, when their institutions nurture mutuality, taking account of our cooperative instincts and our natural need for community. “such theories have proven above all to be self-fulfilling prophecies, driving increasingly destructive and irresponsible approaches within the worlds of business and finance” Finally, Collier and Kay raise some important questions about whether individualism is really capable of providing personal fulfilment. Pointing to wellbeing research and mental health statistics, they rightly suggest that neither the consumption celebrated by possessive individualism nor the autonomy sought through expressive individualism offers an effective route to happiness. But beyond these broad-brush intellectual arguments, the authors seem to lack a clear narrative about what has gone wrong in Britain. At times they wax nostalgic for the postwar consensus as a lost expression of communitarianism, but at other points they present it as the product of hubris about the possibilities of central planning. Similarly, denunciations of New Right ideology sit uneasily alongside complaints that the state has taken on too much. The reader is almost led to suspect that Collier and Kay might not quite agree between themselves! Perhaps as a result of this, the authors devote less attention to the political and economic choices of the past decades than they do to the alleged bad attitudes of various social groups. Collier and Kay moralise against the ‘atmosphere of unfettered greed’ that has taken over certain corporations, berate public sector workers for their ‘sense of moral superiority’ and reserve an especial disdain for ‘activists’. This latter group, they allege, are driven by a ‘self-righteous narcissism’ that prioritises ‘intensity of feeling’ over ‘actual knowledge’. Kay expresses particular contempt for the Occupy protestors in London who failed, under his questioning, to offer any sophisticated opinions about the decline of markets in listed securities. Indeed, a frequent refrain throughout the book is that people today are showing the wrong kind of public-spiritedness. Exalting the industrialist over the internationalist, Collier and Kay complain about a ‘global salvationism’ reminiscent of the Charles Dickens character Mrs Jellyby, whose fictional philanthropy they contrast unfavourably with the ‘constructive activism’ of Victorian mill owner Sir Titus Salt and contemporary billionaire Bill Gates. What the book presents then is not so much a political programme as a moral critique, and a call for attitudinal change. Although Collier and Kay offer some policy suggestions – such as greater devolution, a stronger skills policy and more investment in early years education – their advocacy of ‘communitarian politics’ is primarily a plea for leaders and citizens to think differently. The book ends by expressing hope that the reader will have been given the confidence to ‘join in’ with the rejection of individualism on a personal level. But is the decline of community really just about individualist attitudes? Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and social entrepreneur Shaylyn Romney Garrett suggest much more is at play. Putnam has been one of the best-known analysts of growing social atomisation. In 2000, he rocketed to prominence for his book Bowling Alone,22 Putnam R (2000) Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community, Simon & Schuster which presented a stark empirical study of the collapse of American associational life. In their new book, The Upswing: How America came together a century ago and how we can do it again,33 Putnam R and Garrett SR (2020) The Upswing: How America came together a century ago and how we can do it again, Simon & Schuster Putnam and Garrett build on this analysis, but tell a much grander and more optimistic story, and one that links the fate of community to broader social changes. What Putnam and Garrett proffer is a broad-brush macro history of how American society has evolved since the start of the 20th century. Exploring four main themes of economic equality, social cohesion, political comity and cultural altruism, the authors present a veritable cornucopia of social scientific data and charts. These range from traditional economic and social indicators, through organisation membership figures and political statistics, to attitudinal survey results and Google Books Ngram data. What the authors claim to find in this data is striking synchroneity: the first half of the 20th century saw equality, connectedness, comity and altruism all rise together, before reaching a peak in the late 1960s and then declining sharply. Putnam and Garrett describe their findings as the ‘I-We-I’ curve – the story of how Americans came together to create a more connected, cohesive and equal society, before this gradually then became undone. The titular ‘upswing’, followed by the more commonly narrated downturn. “over the past century of US history, expansive government, vibrant associational life and greater social solidarity have in fact gone hand-in-hand, rising and falling in tandem” However, Putnam and Garrett's story also raises some questions they struggle to answer. How, for instance, do the different indicators they track relate to each other causally? The authors avoid the question, referring to them as ‘inter-braided by reciprocal causality’. But this leaves open the all-important question of how we are to explain the downturn towards fragmented individualism that has taken place over the past five decades. Putnam and Garrett hesitantly proffer some contingent historical factors, such as the Vietnam War, the political crises of the 1960s and the economic difficulties of the 1970s. But for a reader outside the US seeing similar trends elsewhere, such explanations feel frustratingly parochial. “What emerges instead is a powerful account of community not as a prelapsarian paradise lost, but as the hard-won product of a half-century of struggle” Putnam and Garrett's rich empirical study usefully compliments Collier and Kay's more polemical intervention. What lessons then, might we take for the UK? The first is that activism is to be celebrated, not despised. Putnam and Garrett emphasise that it was new forms of activist engagement, driven above all by the young, that did much to kick off the upswing. Any effort to revive civic life today will have to draw on the energy and values of the rising generation. Second, rather than considering the problem of atomisation in isolation, we have to place it in broader social and material context. In Britain today, this means that any attempt to create a more connected society must grapple seriously with the immense damage to our social fabric wrought by the past decade of austerity. Not only has it opened up huge gaps in health and life outcomes for people across the country, but also the very communal spaces and public amenities that make civic engagement possible have been hollowed out.55 Marmot M (2020) Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 years on, The Health Foundation. https://www.health.org.uk/publications/reports/the-marmot-review-10-years-on Since 2010, Britain has lost almost 800 libraries and more than 900 youth centres, while since 2014, more than 12,000 public spaces have been sold off by local councils.66 Flood A (2019) ‘Britain has closed almost 800 libraries since 2010, figures show’, The Guardian, 6 December 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/britain-has-closed-almost-800-libraries-since-2010-figures-show. Eichler W (2020) ‘Youth service funding cut by 70% over decade’, LocalGov.co.uk website, 20 January 2020. https://www.localgov.co.uk/Youth-service-funding-cut-by-70-over-decade/49844. Chakelian A (2020) ‘Introducing a New Statesman series: Britain's Lost Spaces’, New Statesman website, 19 February 2020. https://www.newstatesman.com/2020/02/introducing-new-statesman-series-britain-s-lost-spaces Only by repairing this damage, and rebuilding the public realm, can we hope to see any shift from an ‘I’ to a ‘We’ society. This points to a crucial third lesson, which is that attitudinal change is not enough on its own. The social changes that Putnam and Garrett chart reflect how the ‘moral awakening’ of the progressive movement was ultimately manifested institutionally – first through the reforms of the progressive era, and subsequently through those of the New Deal and the Great Society.77 The Great Society was a set of domestic programmes launched by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in 1964–65, designed to combat poverty and racial exclusion through major investments in education, health, welfare and urban renewal. The flourishing associational life and solidaristic culture of the mid-20th century were inextricably bound up with those political and economic arrangements. Reviving community in Britain, then, will require more than moral exhortation. It will take social democratic politics. David Klemperer is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London