The Upswing

Professor Robert Putnam's earlier book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), is brilliant. He argued that the ways Americans increasingly distanced themselves from community involvement over the past few decades - including decreased voter turnout, attendance at public meetings, service on committees, and work with political parties - has undermined the active civic engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens. I find his thesis convincing and relevant to so many democratic societies today.

Therefore, when I found out recently that Putnam published another book (with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) in 2020, The Upswing: How America… show more.

Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett provide an analysis of the past 125 years of American history that makes a significant contribution to the growing movement to reform American Society. They carefully analyze trends in American life in a way that delineates the tangle of problems we are currently experiencing while at the same time offering hope that we can overcome them. The essence of their analysis is that across a wide variety of societal indicators, the past century and a quarter has involved an upswing in prosocial or communitarian norms and practices, beginning in the progressive era of the… show more.

The Upswing is the culminating triumph of Robert Putnam’s work on ‘social capital’, - the glue that binds people into a community. Although his book charts the trajectory of an American tragedy – the erosion of community in America over the past 60 years, it comes with an uplifting message. He shows that America has climbed out of a society rabid in self-obsession before. That upswing began around 1900 and was build bottom-up, as people came together, community-by-community. What happened then – an ‘inflection point’ in which new ideas and brute shocks combined to change the downward trajectory, is underway… show more.