Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard University, makes a significant contribution to the growing body of literature chronicling America's on-going struggle between individualism and community. Following in the wake of the team of researchers led by Robert Bellah, who in the mid-1980s published the seminal volume, Habits of the Heart, Putnam's book breaks new ground in two areas. First, it provides us with an exhaustive array of statistical and survey data that paint the most complete portrait to date of Americans' struggle with community life. Second, Putnam's book and the public debate surrounding it have helped elevate the term "social capital" to national buzzword status, providing us with the much-needed conceptual language to describe what so many people experience every day. [End Page 132]