I found this work recommended by Jon Haidt in a podcast he appeared on. And Robert D. Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” is one of those books that, despite its age, continues to resonate in our increasingly fragmented world. In it, Putnam diagnoses the decline of social capital in American life, our increasing disconnection from civic institutions, community groups, and even casual social bonds. If Wendell Berry enshrined the golden days of American civilization in his writings, Putnam eulogizes it.

And let me be clear on my use of the word “book” in my introduction. This is an 800 page tome that reads like a statistics textbook more than a book. Putnam’s sociological commentary is sparsely interspersed between pages and pages of data. This isn’t light reading for a sunny Saturday afternoon, but for careful technical reading.

Putnam details how Americans are less likely to join bowling leagues (hence the title), participate in civic clubs, or even attend religious services. The erosion of these social institutions, he argues, has left us lonelier, less engaged, and, ultimately, worse off. I couldn’t help but see this through the lens of the church’s role in forming communities of belonging. While Putnam (a self describing “non-religious Jew”) is primarily focused on secular associations, the decline of church attendance and participation is woven into his broader thesis. The question is, what does this mean for those of us in the Church?

One of Putnam’s most striking points is that social capital is not just about “having friends” but about “being formed” in communities with shared moral and civic habits. This aligns with the biblical vision of the church as not just a gathering place but a people being shaped together into the image of Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16). The church is meant to be more than a loose collection of individuals, it is a covenant family bound together in Christ. But when the culture at large moves away from embodied, communal life, the church must resist the temptation to become just another consumer driven institution.

What Putnam describes sociologically, the church has felt existentially. The 21st Century Church sees it in the struggle to keep people engaged beyond Sunday morning, in the rise of digital faith that lacks deep commitment, and in the way individualism has eroded covenant community. If anything, “Bowling Alone” is a call to reassert the church’s role as a counter cultural community. One where relationships are not transactional but covenantal, where fellowship is not optional but essential.

Yet, if there is a pastoral critique of Putnam’s work, it is that he treats social capital largely as a civic good, rather than something rooted in deeper theological realities. The church does not simply offer one more form of social connection. It offers the ultimate form, the communion of saints united in Christ. While Putnam laments the loss of civic engagement, the church must remind people that true belonging is not just found in clubs or leagues, but in being part of God’s family.

In the end, “Bowling Alone” is both a warning and a challenge. It shows us the cost of a society that has forsaken community, but it also gives the church an opportunity to respond. We must recover the joy of belonging- not just in programs, but in the real, tangible work of being the body of Christ together. If we take Putnam’s observations seriously, we might find that the church has exactly what a lonely, disintegrating world needs. A true and lasting home and a true and lasting Savior.

I’m not going to offer a comprehensive review, since there is already -plenty- of material out there doing so in a manner far more valuable than what I have to offer from my reading. Putnam’s argument has been dissected and debated to death, and while there are worthy definitional disputes to engage with, the book has been cited so much for a reason. This should not be your only take on social capital, but it has been a useful resource for introducing many lay readers (including myself) into the immensely useful concept.

That said.

I am only giving it 3 stars, because I was particularly underwhelmed with Putnam’s normative prescriptions. He is far too skimpy with the bridging/bonding social capital distinction. This lack of scrutiny paints an overly rosy picture of social capital. The KKK and gentleman’s agreements are not an incidental result of social capital, it is a quite natural result. Assuming otherwise depoliticizes an incredibly important political variable. But unfortunately, this is exactly what Putnam does. Like most 20th century social scientists, he is more concerned with upholding centrist non-offensive political takes that won’t offend his Harvard sensibilities, rather than pursue research with legible and substantive implications for underserved populations.

But he isn’t honest about this, and claims instead that social capital should be a generic be-all-end-all goal for the 21st century. Recover the losses from decades of televised/suburbanized/generational atrophy (for what it is worth, I also believe he underestimated the suburban variable and does little to examine how sparsely settled population patterns may be more conducive to sedentary entertainment activities (ie TV watching)). But as he fails to acknowledge with the bridging/bonding factor, some of this is NOT social capital we should attempt to recover. Some of those institutions (or more precisely: their values) have fallen out of grace with Americans. Institutionalism and civic groups are only as meaningful as the values they imbue. The blind praise for civics reads as another flavor of patriotism for patriotism’s sake.

This is not to forsake social capital, far from it, but it is to politicize the concept. Social capital can and should be (and historically has been) an agent for progressive change. He hints at this with his bloated discussion at the Progressive Era section, but it gets lost with the ample page space spent repeatedly bemoaning Elks clubs and bowling leagues. This didn’t need to be the case, there are sections (particularly the one on the internet) where Putnam offers prescient commentary still holding up in 2024. But we have to be more conscious of what kind of social capital we are promoting.

And, we also need to be honest, social capital does not primarily come from those civic institutions. Any and all social relations (in the mathematical, any two objects have a gravitational relationship, sense) have the potential to produce social capital. As a resource it is far less fungible than Putnam makes it out to be (though to be fair, there are a couple times he says this). We shouldn’t assume it’s impossible to have a social capital rich environment without an endless array of bureaucracies.

But we still should recognize there is value in the right institutions. And that annoying persistence in anomie is why this book is still…. Cited.

"...I began to wonder if some of the challenges America was facing as we approached the end of the twentieth century might have their roots in a shrinking stock of social capital."

Bowling Alone was an interesting look at the changing social landscape, but its overall presentation left a lot to be desired for me...

Author Robert David Putnam is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government.

n  Robert D. Putnam:n
n  n


Bowling Alone is a book that comes up over and over again in the reading I do on social psychology, so I decided to finally get to reading it for myself. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the writing here as much as I'd hoped to. The overall tone of the book reads more like a long-form encyclopedia article, than it does a traditional nonfiction book that tells a story.

Sadly, I found most of the writing here to be dry and arduous. Putnam covers the material here in an apersonal, matter-of-fact, flat manner. There are many charts, graphs, and other data sets included here.
The updated edition mentions that the hypothesis and trends laid out in the previous edition have largely continued. That is; there has been a steady but inexorable decline in all overall social participation in modern Western societies.

Putman mentions that he was not sure how his book would be received, and that its success as well as inclusion in the reading material of many university courses surprised him. He writes:
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"Bowling Alone was fortuitously timed to resonate far beyond academia. Before I had anything of substance to say on the matter, many Americans had already noticed that they were less civically engaged than their parents had been. So when a Harvard professor came along with a tome full of charts and graphs that said, in effect, “It’s not just you, it’s all of us,” it hit a nerve. Bowling Alone had unwittingly spoken to the Zeitgeist of an anxious nation slowly waking up to its own fraying social fabric."

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Early on, Putnam introduces and then defines the concept of "social capital."
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"In recent years social scientists have framed concerns about the changing character of American society in terms of the concept of “social capital.” By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital—tools and training that enhance individual productivity—the core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.
Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.
The term social capital itself turns out to have been independently invented at least six times over the twentieth century, each time to call attention to the ways in which our lives are made more productive by social ties. The first known use of the concept was not by some cloistered theoretician, but by a practical reformer of the Progressive Era—L. J. Hanifan, state supervisor of rural schools in West Virginia. Writing in 1916 to urge the importance of community involvement for successful schools, Hanifan invoked the idea of “social capital” to explain why. For Hanifan, social capital referred to those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit…. The individual is helpless socially, if left to himself….
If he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community. The community as a whole will benefit by the coöperation of all its parts, while the individual will find in his associations the advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbors..."

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The book's formatting is broken into well-defined chapters, that talk about socialization across these different realms:
• Political Participation
• Civic Participation
• Religious Participation
• Connections in the Workplace
• Informal Social Connections
• Altruism, Volunteering, and Philanthropy
• Reciprocity, Honesty, and Trust
• Against the Tide? Small Groups, Social Movements, and the Net
• Pressures of Time and Money
• Mobility and Sprawl
• Technology and Mass Media
• From Generation to Generation


***********************

Unfortunately, as previously mentioned at the start of this review, the writing here fell flat for me. Although there are some interesting academic data presented here, the overall presentation of this one is just so slow and tedious... And before anyone yells at me, I will say that my reviews are always based on my personal enjoyment of a book and its overall presentation, and not how much data or graphs it contains.
Sadly, that will see this one fairly heavily penalized.
2.5 stars.

Social capital is the grease that keeps society moving, but over the past 30 years it has decreased. Bowling Alone is the influential book that gathered the data behind this trend and put social capital on the radar of the nation.

Social networks give rise to generalized reciprocity and trust. This is social capital. Reciprocity and trust are most useful when applied generally and not just those who have helped you in the past. Social capital allows society operate smoothly. People rely on social connections for friendships, romantic relationships, job referrals, and community and political organization. Social capital is correlated with individual happiness and with community goods such as lower crime rates.

For all the good that it causes, social capital is, like most tools, not unambiguously good. Gangs and the KKK are held together by social capital just as the PTA and Habitat volunteers are. Being gay in a close knit conservative Christian community can ruin lives. The rarely realized ideal is a society with large amounts of social capital and a large tolerance for difference, but the tensions between these tendencies are hard to reconcile.

Bowling Alone analyzes empirical data to show that social capital had been declining for 30 years (the book is copyright 2000, data from earlier). Putnam considers political participation, civic participation, religious participation, workplace connections, altruism, volunteering, and philanthropy, and perceptions of reciprocity, honesty, and trust. All measures have shown declines, from mild to dramatic. Some new trends seem to defy the decline (e.g., internet communities), but Putnam makes a compelling case that social capital is generally declining.

Consider volunteering as an example. In the US, we volunteer about twice as much as in other developed nations. Volunteering may be formal (through an organization such as United Way) or informal (house sitting for a neighbor). Over half of Americans volunteer when informal volunteering is counted. Volunteering is correlated with higher levels of philanthropic giving.

Education predicts volunteer activity; college graduates are twice as likely to volunteer. Parents volunteer the most because of their involvement with activities related to their children (e.g., school, sports teams). Community size, wealth, and family status are other predictors of volunteer activity. Americans who entertain at home are also more likely to volunteer than those who do not.

Community involvement is the most important predictor of volunteer activity. Data from 1996 shows that 73% of members of secular organizations and 55% of members of religious organizations volunteer. Only 19% of individuals not involved in organizations volunteer. Members of religious organizations tend to volunteer mostly for their church. Organizations provide volunteer opportunities for their members and act as recruitment pools.

Over the past 30 years, volunteer activity has not dropped across the board. Formal volunteering has decreased, but informal volunteering is more common. More people outside of organizations are volunteering, but they do not form long term relationships. There is a troubling generational decline with respect to volunteer activity. The "long civic generation", the generation before the Boomers, has volunteered more at every stage of life than the Boomers and Generation X is worse (although there have been indications that the Millenials may be reversing this slightly).

What is behind the declines in volunteering and other types of participation? Given the difficulty of analyzing social trends, Putnam's explanations are guesses. Up to 10% of the decline in these measures can be attributed to time and money pressures on families, up to another 10% can be explained by suburban sprawl and long commutes, and another 25% can be explained by electronic media, especially television. By far, the largest contributor generational succession. The Boomers and Generation X replace the long civic generation in numbers, but their percentage participation is comparatively abysmal. This may explain up to half of the decline in participation. Why this is occurring is an open question.

Overall, Bowling Alone was a fascinating and informative book. The quantitative information makes it a valid and credible resource. The publication of Bowling Alone prompted debate over the conclusions Putnam drew, but makes it clear that there are trends to consider, and whether they are considered good, bad, or neutral, they are worth examining.

read for my social democracy seminar.

it seems really logical now, but when the book was written in 1995, and it was really, really revolutionary. his main thesis is that americans are not volunteering in the same ways in before - we are not joining community organizations anymore. young people are still volunteering, but mostly individually. (his title comes from the fact that people don't join bowling leagues anymore.)

i would recommend reading the first half, skimming the statistics, and reading the conclusion. it's genius for what it is, and i wish more people would read it. it was so ground-breaking.

I'm really late to reading this but it's been cited so many times that I had to finally make it a priority.

Most of the words in the book are spent trying to convince the reader that community (as measured by "social capital") has eroded in the USA since the peak of 1964. And most of the remainder of the words are spent trying to convince the reader that we're worse off for it.

The author may be right on both counts, but we're not going to put that genie back in the bottle. You're as likely to succeed at steering the culture backwards to a prior "ideal" point as you are at keeping the tide at bay. It's just not going to happen. I think the book would have been stronger without trying to prescribe a "fix" for a problem that remains poorly understood, and if it had instead stuck to deepening understanding of the changes.

On this last point (re understanding the changes), the book remains out of date, even though I read the 20th anniversary "updated" version. The Pandemic tested many of the theories of the book and demonstrated some of the deleterious effects of enforced isolation on our mental and physical health. It also showed some of the ways that strong communities can thrive virtually.

Fascinating topic, and this book's contribution are significant, but by no means authoritative.

We have to figure out a way to rebuild community. However, during COVID, many have discovered that family, friends, neighbors and pets are important for society and for our mental health.

I remember this as being a bit unrealistic in the respect that many changes in mobility, family definition, community cohesion are changing into permanent definitions that must be worked within rather than change.

There is a lot in this book that is fascinating, but like Putnam's other study, "American Grace," this probably works better as a book to scan through for a few hours rather than a book to sit down and read. Putnam gives it a structure that makes that easy - you can get a sense of the argument from the intro and conclusion, and then the book is strewn with graphs and charts which endlessly drive home the point. America used to be a nation of joiners, a nation of volunteers (volunteering actual time, not just a quickie donation) a nation of civic participators. Over the last decades, since the 70s or so, all that joining and volunteering and participating has plummeted. Nobody joins clubs anymore, people just stay home and watch TV. Putnam makes a good case that one big reason for this is the generational shift. The WWII generation were the big time civic engagers. They frequently socialized with neighbors. They (at least in the 90s) were the ones who were continuing to volunteer. Their kids and grandkids were just not joining clubs or participating in politics in at all the same way. A lot of this change is visible even to someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s like me. There are also some really interesting charts toward the end of the book ranking states by "social capital" and showing that low social capital means a more violent state, a state with worse schools, etc. I'm sure some will take issue with the whole concept of measuring "social capital" but the study is thought-provoking.
I did wonder a lot though about what came before the WWII generation. This study starts with them, and shows the massive drop off of the late 20th century. But judging from the charts and graphs, all this civic engagement was ramping up in the 30s, as that generation was coming of age. So this isn't necessarily a story of a nation of participators that has gone bad recently, but rather it might be a story of one big time joiner generation. Maybe the whole lot of them are just outliers, and recent generations have returned to the time honored American tradition of minding one's own business.

Probably the best sociology book I've ever read; tackling essential questions of American society and politics. WHile it is dense, Putnam advances a fascinating argument that retains its relevance 20 years later.

Putnam's argument is that social capital (SC) has declined across the board in US society, among almost every race, age group, and area, and that this is bad for citizenship, health, education, democracy, and overall well-being. SC is the idea that the relationships we for through community groups, church, local/state politics, charity work, sports, and other forms of mostly local involvement have a value, just like physical or financial capital. They create trust in society, lowering the cost of economic transactions and the need for 3rd party litigation or policing. They provide help when we are down without a clear expectation of payment, a concept known as generalized reciprocity. SC enhances schooling and child-raising, as communities are more engaged with what kids are learning and doing. When someone else's parent helps you get a summer job, stops you from doing something stupid, or discusses going to law school with you, that's SC. People with high SC form lots of clubs and groups, attend lots of meetings, speak out and write letters to the editor, go to church services or basketball games or the Rotary, and volunteer for charity work or local politics. SC positively affects all kinds of outcomes, from political participation to educational results to health to the general sense that the average person is trustworthy.

The concept of SC made a lot of sense to me based on where I have lived in my life. Living and teaching in a small town in rural Western Massachusetts, I noticed the benefits and positive feelings of a high-SC community (also happened to be a fairly affluent community). Parents and colleagues invited my wife and I over for dinner often. There was only one pub open all the time, so when you went you always saw someone you knew. Parents volunteered obsessively, went to PT meetings even when their kids were doing fine in school, packed the stands at sports games, and actively engaged in politics and educational issues. Given the small size of the school, kids were consummate joiners and participators. As the teacher for the sophomore class (history), I taught every kid, which means if I had stayed long enough I would know basically every family in the town. The other places I have lived range from small cities like CHapel Hill to big cities like Chicago, and even though I've enjoyed those places as well, there isn't as much of a sense of dense social/communal relationships there. Of course, Putnam makes clear that urban neighborhoods can have just as much SC as anywhere else, although these places tend to have overlapping communities in the same spaces.

Putnam shows in exhaustive detail how SC has declined since the 50s in basically every place and demographic in the country. He identifies several culprits, none of which fit cleanly into any political narrative. First and foremost is generational change. Sparked by the massive national effort of WWII and the postwar boom, the "Greatest Generation" formed and joined huge numbers of organizations, building massive social capital. As they were replaced by the boomers and Gen X, participation and SC started to decline. This is not a MAGA argument, as Putnam makes clear that we can't recreate the conditions (a world war and unprecedented, probably once-in-history economic boom) that sustained this spike in civic-mindedness (of course, Putnam also talks about the PRogressive Era as the largest spike in social capital in US history, as Americans sought ways to rebuild community in the face of urbanization, industrialization, and mass immigration.

ANother culprit is suburban sprawl, especially the commute and the "triangulation" of life. My family, for instance, was quite civically engaged when I was growing up, but suburban life didn't help. My dad commuted upwards of an hour to Boston or Providence, my mom also had a long commute, and much of our shopping took place in nearby towns. Thus, we weren't all that looped into community life in Weymouth (we also went to private Catholic schools in a different town). SUburban life, especially the time that is sucked into commuting, is in a sense geared toward privacy rather than community, and the broad movement toward suburbia as the dominant AMerican habitation has made community harder to sustain.

Another big contributor is TV (this book was published in 2000, so we can only imagine the Internet has worsened this problem). TV from the 50's to the 90s came to suck up an inordinate amount of people's time and attention, leaving them with little time or mental space for political participation. This was honestly the most shocking part of the book: the sheer volume of TV watching that Americans did (and still do) and how it is associated with almost every negative trait you can think of: health, mental health, voting, joining, socializing, etc etc. This is a simple explanation but the data behind it are powerful.

For those who say that Putnam overlooked or downplayed the exclusionary effects/potential of social capital and community, I reply "What?" He has a whole chapter on the dark side of social capital, and the concept of bonding capital is all about how social capital often reinforces group identity at the expense of the outsider. He also discusses how the golden age of social capital was discriminatory, but the larger point of the book is that SC and communal participation have declined in every demographic, making it a problem that all Americans should care about.

This book is really hard to peg politically, and it suggests areas of common ground we can build on. Community and active citizenship are good for everyone and for society, but we need both bonding and bridging SC (which creates bonds across lines and btw communities) to get the good side of social capital and not the negative side. Liberals will like the proposals for more flexible work hours, campaign finance reform that gives more power to ordinary people, and the expansion of education budgets.. Conservatives will like Putnam's emphasis on local control, community, and custom (although those don't HAVE to be solely conservative values, conservatives place more value on those things). Both sides can agree that community, engagement, and fraternity/sorority are essential pieces of human happiness, which gives us a chance to shift the conversation to how to restore this aspect of society.

This book is a great read for trying to understand how Americans became polarized and angry. We are cut off from each other, siloed into ever-more homogenous and often virtual communities that generally reinforce our views, engaging more and more in individualized entertainment, and increasingly watching politics rather than participating it. It isn't surprising that we feel the DC is distant and corrupt, that people on the other side are losing their minds (although that may be true for many), and that we are helpless to do anything. Putnam doesn't have a solution, but he lays the problem out so clearly and convincingly that we can point ourselves in the right direction.

Putnam does a supurb job, through extensive and detailed demographic research, of isolating a compelling social problem -- declining social and civic participation. He describes this trend in interesting ways. For instance he argues that the increasing demand for and subsequent supply of lawyers in contemporary US society represents the handicapping erosion of trust and good faith among fellow citizens. This was an "a-ha" for me, an interpretation about a well-known phenomenon (who hasn't seen those lawyer commercials on TV encouraging you to get what you're owed?) fascinating to me, as are the other "transaction costs" we often unconsciously incorporate into our lives because we don't have neighborlines. Beyond describing the facts as they are, however, Putnam also forecasts in economic, political, and moral terms the consequences already accruing and what might lay in store for the future if people don't embrace a renewed ethic of participation. I recommend it for people who wonder at the causes and consequences of our increasing tendency to keep to ourselves.

Interesting! Touching many subjects of interest. As always with reading these older, seminal works, I REALLY wish someone would pick this up and do an update. I would love to see how the Millennials and GenZ compare to the generational data presented in this book.