Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

• Author: MONTANYE, JAMES A.
• Position: Review

* Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community By Robert D. Putnam New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Pp. 541. $26.00 cloth.

Robert Putnam's 1995 essay on civic disengagement in the United States ("Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 [January 1995]: 65-78) piqued the interest of conservatives and neoliberals alike en route to becoming perhaps the most discussed social science article of the twentieth century. Conservatives read Putnam's essay as a demonstration of the crowding out of private civic and humanitarian organizations by the rising tide of government social programs. Neoliberals, in contrast, saw an opportunity to advance public welfare by using government to promote programs geared toward rebuilding the social-capital infrastructure in the United States, which Putnam argued had depreciated during the last third of the twentieth century.

Conservatives are unlikely to be persuaded by the data and arguments Putnam has marshaled in this book-length version of the essay, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Neoliberals, on the other hand, will find reasons to rejoice, not only because of the book's new material and policy prescriptions but also because attempts to meet the challenges Putnam has posed would revitalize the flagging communitarian social program. Whether or not scholars and policy analysts accept Putnam's analysis and conclusions, they must be prepared to deal with the points Putnam has raised because his book promises to have cachet in policy circles for a long time.

The book's central theme is simply stated: "For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago--silently, without warning--that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century" (p. 27). The ebb and flow to which Putnam alludes pertains to the shifting dimensions of "social capital," which he clarifies as follows:

Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals-social networking and the norm of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense, social capital is closely related to what some...