Sitting in his tidy office at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Robert Putnam '63 doesn't strike you as a "public intellectual." In fact if it weren't for the university press books and volumes of policy journals that line the narrow room's bookshelves, you wouldn't even guess that Putnam was an academic. With his red hair and closely trimmed beard that stretches in a thin line around the bottom of his face, Putnam more resembles an Amish elder than a professor of government.
But, as befits one of those rare scholars whose influence extends beyond academe and into popular public debate, "public intellectual" is a label Putnam now wears. He has been summoned to consult with President Clinton. ("It was exactly like a good Swarthmore seminar," Putnam says of their meetings, "lots of intelligent discussion back and forth, people making strong arguments and listening to one another.") His ideas have heavily influenced two of Clinton's State of the Union addresses and were no doubt partially responsible for Clinton convening last May's Summit for America's Future in Philadelphia. His name is dropped frequently on op-ed pages and public affairs shows. He even received the imprimatur of People magazine, America's ultimate arbiter of celebrity, which feted him in a fawning profile.
What accounts for Robert Putnam's notoriety? What about him could simultaneously interest Bill Clinton and People magazine? Believe it or not, his academic ideas. In 1993 Putnam published a deceptively slim volume titled Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Hailed a classic in The New York Times Book Review, Making Democracy Work represented the culmination of a two-decade study of regional government in Italy by Putnam and two colleagues. In the book Putnam came to the unsurprising conclusion that governments in the economically thriving North of Italy outperformed those in the economically backward South. All in all, this sounds like a solid if unremarkable work of social analysis. But what caused a stir was Putnam's interpretation of this phenomenon.
Instead of settling on an economic or political explanation for the governmental performance discrepancy, Putnam sought a social one. Using a slew of statistical measures and a rigorously empirical analysis, Putnam reasoned that the superior quality of governance in Italy's North was attributable to the region's higher levels of something Machiavelli called virtu civile ("civic virtue")--a public-spiritedness among citizens that manifested itself in their tendency to form small-scale, frequently nonpolitical associations. Borrowing from Tocqueville, Putnam argued that these civic associations furnish the citizenry with the trust and cooperation--qualities that fall under the rubric of "social capital"--that are essential to strong democratic governments. In Italy's North, people tend to belong to these associations, and in the South, they do not. "Good government in Italy," Putnam concluded, "is a by-product of singing groups and soccer clubs."
While it advanced an interesting and provocative thesis, Making Democracy Work remains a typically obscure academic book about a government and society in a foreign country. Though it was well-received among social scientists, this was still not the stuff of cultural celebrity. But Putnam's study of Italy had convinced him that social capital is, quite literally, what makes democracies work. So what he did next made sense: He applied his theory of social capital to the United States.
Two articles, one brilliantly titled "Bowling Alone" (Journal of Democracy, January 1996) and another called "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America" (The American Prospect, Winter 1996), contained his initial observations. They were not pretty. Culling data from a variety of sources, including survey research and association membership rolls, Putnam concluded that over the past several decades, as the advent of television has privatized leisure time, Americans have been rapidly disengaging from civic life. As bowling league participation has declined, voter turnout has dropped and church attendance has faltered. Associations as diverse as the League of Women Voters, the Elks Club, and the Red Cross have all experienced precipitous declines in membership.
He elucidates his premise late one afternoon as the corridor outside his office fills with students and professors calling it a day. "Fundamentally, my argument about America is that a variety of social and technological changes over the last generation have rendered obsolete a stock of American social capital, which is just jargon for saying that because of television, and two-career families, and divorce, and Wal-Mart, and a number of other factors, people no longer feel comfortable going to the PTA. The channels through which people a generation ago connected with their communities aren't serving the purposes that they used to. I think America is suffering from a social capital deficit." And without a solid base of social capital, Putnam thinks, America might well be in trouble.
Putnam is not the first person to argue the importance of strong community ties. Political theorists from Aristotle to Tocqueville to communitarians today have been using abstract principles or anecdotal evidence to say largely the same thing. But Putnam, a social scientist by trade, is one of the first to articulate the point with statistical rigor. When Putnam frets that Americans are losing touch with their communities, he offers a copious amount of data to justify his concern. And when he predicts that this weakening of civic life bodes ill for American society, he can base his prediction on his two decades of research in Italy. While Putnam's argument undoubtedly has a certain gooey-eyed appeal--if we were only just more involved in our communities, the world would be a much better place--his brief for it is far from sentimental. Sifting through the myriad graphs and tables that accompany his writings (he presents more than 50 of them in just 185 pages of text in Making Democracy Work), it's hard to accuse Putnam of soft-headed speculation.
To say that Robert Putnam's image of the lone bowler has struck a chord with Americans would be a giant understatement. "I've written about 50 articles in my life--a lot of them intellectually better than this one," Putnam admits. "But this piece has gotten so much attention because so many Americans feel discontent about the state of their connections with their communities."
"Bowling Alone" has transformed Putnam from an academic (a prominent one, to be sure--he received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Swarthmore in 1990) into a certified public intellectual. His counsel is now sought not just by heads of state, but by prisoners in federal penitentiaries who write him to ask about the implications of civic engagement on their lives once they are out of jail. He overhears people in airport terminals debating about whether he is right or wrong. And inevitably his ideas take on lives of their own.
From the time "Bowling Alone" first transcended the academic realm and began receiving national press attention, Putnam has been worried that his arguments might be misconstrued or used to advance causes or agendas with which he did not agree. "If you're talking in a seminar and somebody misunderstands your argument, you can correct them on the spot," Putnam explains. "But if you're speaking in a national context, you can't imagine going around and trying to correct everybody who's misunderstood this or that point." Recognizing the futility of micromanaging his theory, Putnam has resisted the urge to weigh in on its various interpretations. Given its initial widespread acceptance, it has had many.
Liberals originally embraced Putnam's theory because, as Putnam intended, it gave them a way to address an issue that conservatives had typically owned. America's social malaise was not the result of '60s excesses but could be attributed to something more ideologically neutral like a decline in community participation. Liberals also liked Putnam for pragmatic reasons. As Nicholas Lemann wrote last year in an analysis of Putnam's work for The Atlantic Monthly, "[It] suggests the possibility of solving our problems through relatively low-cost association-strengthening local initiatives that don't require higher taxes."
Conservatives, to Putnam's chagrin, also seized on his theory--more proof, they said, that big government is the problem. If democracies ultimately derive their strength from local volunteer groups like bowling leagues and Shriners, then there's no need for a strong central government. Furthermore, conservatives like Francis Fukuyama argued, big government initiatives actually discourage civic involvement as the public sector crowds out the philanthropy of the private sector.
After its initial spate of universal acclaim, however, both sides recognized that Putnam's theory had an elastic ability to skewer not just their opponents' shibboleths but their own as well. Some liberals turned on Putnam when they realized that inherent in Putnam's idea of stronger communities was a criticism of the liberal rights revolution. While Putnam is quick to caution that he is not arguing for a return to the 1950s, his ideas do not exactly place a primacy on the autonomy of the individual. To some liberals, this is heresy. Katha Pollit, writing in The Nation, went so far as to label Putnam "square." Others played the guilt-by-association game, saying the most obvious manifestation of Putnam's cherished American proclivity for association is the militia movement. One such critic alluded to the bowling alley outings Timothy McVeigh once made with his co-defendant in the Oklahoma City bombing trial, Terry Nichols. "Perhaps we would all have been better off if Mr. McVeigh had gone bowling alone," he wrote.
Some conservatives, on the other hand, could not countenance Putnam's indictment of television, which, taken broadly, can be seen as an indictment of the free market they so cherish. As conservatives envision it, the free-market system is ultimately dependent on the same privatization of leisure time, brought about by technological advances such as television, that in the end Putnam blames for civic disengagement. If Americans were to spend more of their nights at PTA meetings or choir practices, then they would spend less time in front of their televisions being exposed to advertisements or other cathode-ray inducements to consume. Volunteerism is fine, these conservative critics seemed to think, as long as it doesn't cut into profits.
Thus conservatives soon went on the attack against Putnam, claiming that America's civic life was fine and that his theory was bunk. Many cited a June 1996 report by the Roper Center's Everett Ladd, which scrutinized Putnam's numbers and accused him of making statistical errors. Others relied on less authoritative sources, the most memorably absurd being a Los Angeles Times article headlined "Bowling Alley Tour Refutes Theory of Social Decline," which reported on several thriving LA bowling alleys where bowling league participation had declined but, because of birthday and office parties, "nobody bowls alone."
That all of this back and forth does not terribly bother Putnam is partial testament to an academic's commitment to the dialectical process of inquiry. "The academic conversation--whether I'm in a Swarthmore seminar room or the wider world of the academy--is not about someone announcing truth," Putnam says. "It's about people stating points of view, listening to what their opponents or what all other people have to say, and then reformulating their argument." To this end, Putnam wrote his two articles, which contained his initial and incomplete thoughts on civic America, to elicit both positive and negative responses that he could then process and incorporate into a book he is writing on the subject, Bowling Alone: Civic Disengagement in America and What to Do About It, due out in the coming year from Simon & Schuster. "Some people have made some important insights that have led me and forced me to develop my thoughts in different ways," he says.
But Putnam's openness to criticism is also attributable to a somewhat nonacademic characteristic: He has a social action agenda. While Putnam believes academics should still concern themselves with developing statistical techniques, learning formal models, and studying things that no one really cares about, he views his work on civic life as part of a larger effort for social and political renewal in America--an effort in which he hopes others will enlist.
His work has sparked an academic growth industry in what can loosely be termed social capital studies. Since he wrote his two articles, a number of social scientists have subsequently launched their own projects on civic engagement. The American Prospect, which ran Putnam's second article, has seen its pages turn into a forum for a debate on civic engagement, with a host of prominent academics (including University of California at San Diego Professor Michael Schudson '69 and Swarthmore Associate Professor of Political Science Richard Valelly '75) weighing in with their views on the topic. All of this attention being paid to his theory--and the problem it seeks to address--pleases Robert Putnam. In this sense he is not an academic who stakes out his turf and then bristles at the thought of any intrusions onto it. Rather, Putnam is like a doctor who has diagnosed a deadly disease and is now hard at work searching for a cure. That others have joined him in this search, and may indeed find a cure before he does, he finds heartening.
Putnam's current focus is on discovering new channels through which people can connect to their communities and build social capital, since his findings of civic decline suggest that the old channels--like Rotary Clubs and bowling leagues--no longer do the job. He looks back to the 1890s for inspiration. Then, as now, the country had just gone through a 30-year period of dramatic economic, social, and technological change; and, like today, the changes had left Americans searching for new civic institutions to replace the ones rendered obsolete by social transformations. Since Americans in the 1890s were able to build new civic institutions, like the Rotary Clubs and bowling leagues that have only recently faded away, Putnam has hope that Americans in the 1990s can do the same. "We need to think of new ways through which we can connect with our communities," Putnam says. "We need to reinvent the Boy Scouts."
Certainly Putnam's work on civic life has taken him in some interesting directions, away from what might be considered traditional academic terrain. He has founded a group called the Saguaro Seminar, which has brought together 30 people with an interest in civic life, ranging from Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos to a community organizer from Oakland, Calif., to look for ways to replenish America's stock of social capital. He has also been traveling around the country to observe social capital formation at the grass roots. All of this, Putnam believes, is just part of his job. "I think the role of an academic is to listen carefully to what people have to say about their experiences," he explains. "An academic then has the ability to generalize from those experiences and share that message in forms that people elsewhere can hear." When you're appearing in both the Journal of Democracy and People magazine, you can be pretty confident your message is being heard. n
Jason Zengerle '96 was assistant editor of The American Prospect from September 1996 until August 1997. He is currently on the staff of The New Republic.
