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Civic Disengagement in Contemporary America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Robert D. Putnam
Robert D. Putnam*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Over The Past Two Generations The United States Has Undergone a series of remarkable transformations. It has helped to defeat global communism, led a revolution in information technology that is fuelling unprecedented prosperity, invented life-saving treatments for diseases from AIDS to cancer, and made great strides in reversing discriminatory practices and promoting equal rights for all citizens. But during these same decades the United States also has undergone a less sanguine transformation: its citizens have become remarkably less civic, less politically engaged, less socially connected, less trusting, and less committed to the common good. At the dawn of the millennium Americans are fast becoming a loose aggregation of disengaged observers, rather than a community of connected participants.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , April 2001 , pp. 135 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2001

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Footnotes

*

This is the text of the Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro lecture delivered at the London School of Economics on 6 May 1999.

References

1 Because this essay was originally delivered as a lecture, I forgo extensive citation. However, the lecture drew heavily on the material subsequently published in my Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, London, Simon & Schuster, 2001, and I there provide much fuller documentation of the arguments presented in synthetic form here. I want to thank Kristin Goss for her skilled help in editing my extemporaneous oral remarks into written form. I am also grateful to Sir Nicholas Bayne and Rosalind Jones for their forbearance during the unavoidable delay between my original lecture and the appearance of this written essay, as well as for their exceptional hospitality during my visit to LSE.

2 Putnam, Robert D., ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’, Journal of Democracy(01. 1995), pp. 65–78.Google Scholar

3 This is a dataset of which social scientists were previously unaware. I learned about it by accident when a graduate student at the University of Minnesota wrote a term paper critical of ‘Bowling Alone’ that included a footnote saying that there was a dataset that he had learned about from his marketing professor that might be relevant to this. So, I followed up that lead, and the firm that owned the dataset — DDB — allowed us to use it for this project.

4 Putnam, Robert D., with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993.Google Scholar