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Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert D. Putnam, New York: Simon &Schuster, 2000, 541 pp., $26.00 cloth.
Robert Putnam's 1995 article "Bowling Alone" and the debate it sparked are so well known among social scientists (and to some extent the general public as well) that a conventional review of his latest and already much-reviewed book seems almost beside the point. His central theoretical concept-the amalgam of social networks, norms, and trust, dubbed "social capital"-has entered into common parlance, as has his historical thesis that in recent decades social capital has declined markedly, with serious consequences for our social and political life.
Bowling Alone advances the debate in four ways: Drawing upon new data sources, Putnam traces the decline of a wide range of associational activities in much greater detail than ever before. He arrays a wide range of possible causal explanations for this decline, establishes methodological and quantitative criteria for acceptable explanations, and then winnows the list of suspects to a handful that meet these criteria. He links a variety of social, civic, and political problems to the decline in social capital. Finally, he sketches an agenda of steps that various sectors of society could take to arrest and reverse this decline.
In the year since the initial publication of Bowling Alone, a surprising degree of consensus has developed concerning its strengths and weakness. On the one hand, it appears implausible to continue arguing (as some did in the mid-l990s) that nothing is changing and that Americans are as connected as ever. Something is different; while there are important pockets of associational vigor, in the aggregate we are less connected with one another than we were four decades ago, and less involved in a wide range of activities outside our own home. If we are not yet a nation of spectators,...