Robert D. Putnam

Robert D. Putnam (born January 9, 1941, Rochester, New York, U.S.) is an American political scientist and educator best known for his study of social capital.

Just before Putnam turned one year old, the United States declared war on Japan, and his father, serving in the U.S. Army, was deployed in Europe. Upon his father’s return, the family settled in Port Huron, Ohio, the kind of community the younger Putnam would later cite in his studies.

Putnam graduated with highest honours from Swarthmore College in 1963 and then studied for one year at the University of Oxford (Balliol College) in England. Back in the United States, he received M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1970) degrees from Yale University. Putnam joined the political science faculty of the University of Michigan in 1968 as a lecturer and later rose to the position of professor. He joined the faculty of government at Harvard University in 1979 and was later appointed Don K. Price Professor of Politics (1989) and Stanfield Professor of International Peace (1996). He became the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy in 2000. Putnam also served in various administrative capacities at Harvard, including as dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government (1989–91).

In his most influential books—Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), coauthored with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, and Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)—Putnam argued that strong and prosperous societies rest upon community relationships and mutual trust, what he called “social capital.” In societies with deep social networks, Putnam noted, people tend to engage in reciprocal acts of service or assistance on the tacit understanding that a benefit extended by one person to another will be returned in kind in the future. Putnam’s research also led him to a distressing observation: the United States had experienced a significant decline in the level of civic engagement since the 1960s. A consequence of that decline, he suggested, is the widespread mistrust of their democratic institutions by the American people. Putnam did not regard this problem as limited to the political sphere. The inability of Americans to connect with friends, families, and extended communities, he suggested, also has an impact on their health, productivity, public safety, and a number of other social goods. In 2011 he coauthored (with David Campbell) American Grace, a critically acclaimed study of religion in the contemporary United States and its impact on social capital. Putnam’s later books included Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015) and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020; written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett).

Putnam was the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science (2006), one of the most distinguished awards in political science. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In keeping with his view of the importance of civic engagement, Putnam was also active outside academia, serving as a consultant to the White House and to foreign governments, as a member of the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation, and on the staff of the National Security Council.