Disconnecting: Social and Civic Life in America Since 1965

Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. 541 pp. Figures, tables, appendixes, notes, and index. $26.00.

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone represents a sea change in intellectuals' evaluation of postwar America's associational life, indeed, in their assessment of the postwar period itself. The earlier judgment found powerful expression in David Riesman's renowned disdain for suburban women's "kaffee-klatsches" and his view of the postwar's local civic activities as "child's play, enjoyable as recreation but hardly a challenge or a source of significant political experience." ¹ Sustaining this view, subsequent writers like Elaine May often construed postwar voluntary organizations as failed attempts to replace with artificial substitutes the real community "previously supplied by kin and [urban] neighborhood." ²

For a variety of reasons, scholars in the 1990s began to see postwar public life with new eyes. One spur to this re-evaluation was the broadened definition of "politics" offered by women's historians in the 1980s, a definition that encompassed women's and men's work in voluntary associations and that led to fresh understandings of American politics and state development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ³ When historians with this perspective turned their attention to the postwar period, they respected rather than disdained voluntary organizations, seeing them as integral to rather than outside of politics as Riesman and others had. ⁴ Also pushing toward the re-interpretation of postwar associational life has been interest in Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a work that has encouraged debate about the nature and trajectory of civil society in the United States since the eighteenth century. ⁵ And, finally, the 1990s witnessed a dawning belief among journalists, pundits, and politicians that Americans had become so politically disengaged and socially isolated that every aspect of American life from democracy to mental health seemed threatened. ⁶ Scholars searching for the origins of and potential solutions to these problems of disconnectedness developed a new appreciation for the cul-de-sac picnics and school board dramas that Riesman found such a trivial drain on America's intellect and energies.

Robert Putnam's book is the boldest and most complete appreciation yet offered for postwar associational life. Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, here convincingly supports an argument that he initially published with less compelling and even faulty evidence in a 1995 issue of the Journal of Democracy: From 1900 to 1965, Americans' civic engagement and social connections increased dramatically, reaching a twentieth-century peak in the period between 1945 and 1965. Since then, this web of interrelationships has steadily torn apart as Americans have withdrawn from political and social life. These trends demonstrated, Putnam attempts to explain the increasing isolation of Americans and offers a solid case for its significance.

Putnam's primary conceptual tool is "social capital." Most thoroughly theorized in 1990 by sociologist James S. Coleman, social capital refers simply to human connectedness. We are rich in social capital if we have connections to lots of different people, and we are poor in this resource if we are more socially isolated. One kind of social capital ties us to people we perceive to be like us, and this is called bonding social capital. Another kind connects us to people we perceive as less like us, and this is called bridging social capital. Moreover, these social ties can be weak--those we have, for instance, with the clerk who takes our order at Starbuck's each morning--or strong--those we have, presumably, with our parents and pre-teenaged children. Social capital accumulates in both informal social settings, like visits with neighbors over the back fence, and more formal encounters, like those in regular meetings of a city's Democratic precinct captains. All kinds of social capital are important to our...