Robinson Crusoe Stories

It has been said that the much of the truth or falsehood of a political theory lies in its axioms. Think of Hobbes’ brutish ‘naturall condition of mankind’ as the axiom from which follows the corollary of a strong sovereign power to secure human contracts. Think (at another extreme) of the New Right libertarianism of Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, a perfectly consistent treatise, but one which perhaps stands or falls with the validity of its very first sentence, “People have rights and there is nothing anyone can do to violate them.”

Something of this dependence of political theory upon axioms struck me recently when reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, not strictly speaking a work of political theory, but one of political science which rests on a certain political theory. Key to the argument Putnam sets out about the waning of political participation in America and his proposals for its revival is the concept of ‘social capital’. Herein, I believe, lies an axiom, and a revealing one at that. ‘Social capital’ is, according to Putnam, that which has been lost over the past half century of US history, it is the real civic substance that has withered with the decline in American political participation.

But what is social capital and why would its decline matter to us? Social capital means the degree of citizen involvement in community affairs, and which in turn for Putnam significantly affects the performance of government and social institutions. High social capital is an indicator of strong ‘community values’. But it also affects the ‘performance’ of the individual: Putnam tells us “we are more productive” when we have strong social capital, that is, the more networks and contacts we are part of, and upon which we can call in our hour of need (not that we should be thinking Christian caritas here, rather economic ‘advancement’). High social capital indicates the individual is able to advance him- or herself through a greater number of contacts and connections. In the past these social capital-increasing networks would consist primarily in our membership of civic organizations, involvement in town or local government, our involvement in clubs, recreational groups, etc. But these have been almost universally declining in numbers, as Putnam’s endless graphs compel us to see. Though the rather gloomy diagnosis is not without its glimmer of hope: as the book proceeds we are told that it may be less a decline in civic participation that we are witnessing as its transformation, from direct informal methods of participation to more indirect and abstract forms, the internet, social movements and ‘small groups’ being examples which ‘buck the trend’.

Reading a book like this is rather like listening to a doctor telling you how grave is your condition, but who then quickly consoles you with a list of possible remedies and interventions. It reminds me of the Gaia hypothesis which reassured us that ecosystems always adapt, but would never, for instance, go into irreversible feedback loops.

Admittedly Putnam does devote a chapter to what he calls ‘the dark side of social capital’, under which heading he includes phenomena like nepotism and corruption. I suspect that if he had written this book a couple of years later (he is writing just before Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen) he would have reflected longer on whether these phenomena were just unfortunate side-effects of American society. And then there is the hurried-over aside which should have given further pause for thought, that Timothy McVeigh had particularly high social capital, “a network of friends bound together by norms of reciprocity” which “allowed him to do what he could not have done alone.”

Though Putnam's politics lie far from the extremes of a Hobbes or a Nozick (I imagine him as a left-leaning Democrat not unlike Richard Sennett) his slightly left liberalism relies like Hobbes and Nozick on some precepts whose historicity he fails to notice, notably in this central idea of ‘social capital’. Here I think, like the arguments of Hobbes and Nozick, Putnam's tale begins to unravel. Because the concept of social capital as he presents it assumes a certain model of man which it never makes explicit, but which never achieves the validity his argument requires. It assumes man to be homo oeconomicus, just as its model of human agency seems drawn from rational choice theory. Furthermore, the concept of social capital doesn’t separate out capital accumulation from human actions not necessarily motivated by economic gain, for example friendship and comradeship, but instead conceptually elides the two. Ask not what you can do for your friends, but what your friends can do for you, seems the motive that drives the ‘networks’ that Putnam finds everywhere. One can see wealth accumulation, by a sleight of hand, becoming the question to which social capital is the fortuitous solution.

At one point in his opening discussion Putnam suggests that the term ‘social capital’ might translate what the ancients and the Renaissance called ‘civic virtue’. It is at this point that Putnam really tests this reader’s sympathies. Why don’t I think this term ‘social capital’ is equivalent to and can replace ‘civic virtue’? Firstly because the notion of ‘capital’ is itself historically specific and relates to a particular way of organizing social production (to take just one counterexample, Marshal Sahlins and before him Marcel Mauss show us many societies in which the notion of ‘capital’ simply does not apply, worlds in which the idea of accumulation appears somewhat nonsensical and bewildering to their inhabitants, characterized as they are by a logic of homeostasis or even expenditure - very happy and solidaristic societies, one might add, and not because of ‘networking’). ‘Civic virtue’ on the other hand at least has something of greater historical and geographical validity. One can apply it in many more situations without ethnographic insensitivity.

Secondly because social capital as a concept assumes the framework of political economy, of rationally calculating humans who here ‘network’ in order to ‘increase their productivity’. It presupposes isolated man as its axiom, a man who only subsequently chooses to join with his fellow man, and then only for personal gain, instead of beginning conceptually with the (more historically accurate) social group from which man subsequently individuates himself, and then only in specific societies, under particular forms of social production. Alienation is assumed in such a concept rather than interrogated, analysed, or exposed.

And yet ‘civic virtue’, for all its virtues, would not be without the same limits that apply to ‘social capital’. What Hegel called the Weltlauf or ‘course of the world’ which so often undermines the most pious proponent of virtue (civic or otherwise) crops up by another name in Putnam’s book under the heading “Reasons Why our Social Capital, our Civic Engagement, is Declining”. His chapter headings are revealing: “Pressures of Time and Money” and “Technology and Mass Media”. But these reasons are never synthesized nor comprehended, seen as moments of a capitalist economy in which an ever increasing proportion of life is given over to labouring (“pressure of time and money”), and political participation is refracted through a corporate-owned spectacle (“technology and mass media”) with an interest in cultivating participation only by proxy and at a price.

It is no coincidence that the recommendations which issue from Putnam’s diagnosis with its unarticulated axioms, are somewhat naïve. To quote just one, “Let us find ways to ensure that by 2010 America’s workplace will be substantially more family-friendly and community-congenial, so that American workers will be enabled to replenish our stocks of social capital both within and outside the workplace.” Just as Kracauer said of Maria in Lang’s Metropolis, that one can imagine Goebbels endorsing her plea for “mediation between hand and brain”, so one can imagine our latter-day spin doctors taking to the airwaves with Putnamite homilies about replenishing social capital.

Like the flaw of the political economists, without a critical interrogation of the politically implicated nature of one’s axioms, one’s programme tends to be reformist, ameliorist, even impotent. And whether as social capital or as civic virtue, such a programme will always risk being swept aside by the course of the world.

Comments

[John Emerson]

Unfortunately I've only read excerpts from and references to Putnam's book, but I came away thinking that the "social capital" he was talking about was also a shared or common good rather than the possession of an individual, and that Putnam was more like a Communitarian.

And like the communitarians, he seems not to notice some of the systemic problems having to do with power and class. And also, the connection between community and conventionalism, so that many see their loss of social capital (e.g. moving to the anonymous city) as a liberation.

On the other hand, the term is easily convertible, so that a rational individual could easily calculate his own social capital just as you described. In fact this is a big theme in American life -- e.g. Willy Loman inDeath of a Salesman realizing that none of his hundreds of business friends were real friends. Or the car sakesman who attends three different churches in order to troll for customers. (Not uncommon).

The idea came from Bourdieu, didn't it? To me it's a useful way of thinking of class, since two economically-equal individuals often diverge widely with regard to quantity of social capital.

[YH]

John, thanks for this. I think you're right in saying that social capital isn't only conceived of as the province of an individual; Putnam also describes it as the 'glue' which holds society together and the 'oil' which makes it run. He's clearly thinking 'relation' here, laudably so. But my point I think still holds - even when he seems a communitarian and capable of thinking relation and social embeddedness he is still thinking it from the standpoint of the utility-maximising individual, an individual who is - contra Putnam - actually an effect of those processes of alienation (the decline of citizenship in this case) he is unwittingly describing.

You're right the concept crops up in Bourdieu, though Putnam traces it back to an earlier sociologist I hadn't heard of.

I like your Arthur Miller point.

What an American friend once told me backs up your point - that many people on moving to a new town will join the Church in order to 'network'. It's kind of an alien concept to us increasingly secular Brits with our 'undemanding' religions (as William Wilberforce already called them back in 18thC).

[Sean McCann]

It's been awhile since I read Putnam, but I think John has a real point here. I don't remember much of homo economicus; what I remember is the the communitarian, New England-town-meetingy quality. If anything, I think he really underemphasizes the dark side of belonging (racism, sexism, repressive community, political rabidity) and so heavily emphasizes the value of civic engagement that he downplays the legitimate and valuable role to be played by the state. Like a lot of communitarian stuff, it has a real goody-goody quality, but I think even people unsympathetic to Putnam acknowledge that he jumpstarted, and made much more concrete (i.e., real data, by contrast to Etzioni), an important debate. Theda Skocpol, for example, has done a lot of interesting work in response.

[YH]

Sean, certainly the New England town hall is the ideal-typical moment of the book, from which heights contemporary American civic life seems (to Putnam) to have fallen. And I certainly agree re. the claustrophobic aspects of this Gemeinschaft which are thereby overlooked. The endless graphs in the book are well researched and difficult to fault methodologically. It's a great work of scholarship, undeniably, and has been a highly influential one. It's because of this, and because the concept of social capital has passed into everyday usage in the social sciences that I feel it necessary to stand back and question it.