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Oct 18, 2024

Review of documentary on Robert D. Putnam (opinion)

You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Robert D. Putnam Delevan Street Films After making the rounds of film festivals for more than a year, the documentary Join or Die

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Robert D. Putnam

Delevan Street Films

After making the rounds of film festivals for more than a year, the documentary Join or Die begins streaming on Netflix today. It offers a layperson’s introduction to the life and work of Robert D. Putnam, a political scientist and professor emeritus of public policy at Harvard University. The directors, Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis, are just about old enough to have matriculated from kindergarten when Putnam published “Bowling Alone,” a landmark paper on the fraying social fabric of the U.S., in 1995.

A best-selling book of the same name appeared five years later, and Putnam’s subsequent work has largely followed up its implications. While the concept of “social capital” has been proposed in a number of forms by different theorists, Putnam’s definition of it as consisting of “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” is distinguished, in part, by a fairly unabashed normativity: A sense that the abundance of durable voluntary associations among individuals is optimal for human flourishing.

Attracting eyeballs to a documentary about social science research is a steep challenge, unless sex or violence is somehow involved. In spite of its ominous title (faintly suggestive of a true-crime program, possibly involving a cult of serial killers) Join or Die is not sensationalistic in the least. But the documentary is making its home-screen debut two and a half weeks before Election Day, and Putnam’s work touches some raw nerves. Nothing in it strikes me as incendiary, but you never know.

One of the directors was an undergraduate student of Putnam’s at Harvard and kept in touch with him over the dozen years or so between graduating and making the documentary. The personal connection is tangible: the film is an affectionate portrait of the public intellectual as energetic senior citizen.

And citizenship is clearly a defining interest for Putnam. His catchphrase about the decline of bowling leagues pursues the implications of something Alexis de Tocqueville noted about the democratic mores of the United States after touring it in the 1830s.

“Americans of all ages,” he wrote, “constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small … I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.”

The documentary sketches how Putnam’s role in a decades-long study of differences in regional-level governmental functioning in Italy led, by the mid-1990s, to a hypothesis about the American scene, where a decline of public confidence in political institutions had been evident for a couple of generations. Putnam’s research suggested that trend was related to shrinking membership in the sorts of voluntary, nonpolitical associations that were sprouting up everywhere Tocqueville looked in the 1830s.

They were spaces where, in Putnam’s words, “familiarity, tolerance, solidarity, trust, habits of cooperation, and mutual respect” were generated—imperfectly, to be sure, but enough to compensate somewhat for the atomizing tendencies of a country characterized by high social and geographic mobility.

Correlation and causation have a fraught relationship, but it was not all that worrying to the pundits who very quickly made “Bowling Alone” (the article version) the talk of 1995. But other social scientists challenged Putnam’s data, or how he interpreted it. While the documentary moves quickly past the criticisms, it also shows him recalling the experience as difficult and painful but a spur to much additional research.

This was to his benefit. When Bowling Alone (the book) was published by Simon & Schuster, the assessments in scholarly journals were lengthy and respectful. (None of the reviews I’ve located were dismissive of the quantity of its data or the quality of its statistical analysis.)

The details of Putnam’s work interest the documentarians less than its worldly impact, to which a number of talking heads attest on screen. They include the Clintons (Hillary in an interview with the directors, Bill in a video from his presidency) and Pete Buttigieg as well as the conservative economist Glenn Loury and Senator Mike Lee (Republican of Utah). President Obama conferred the National Humanities Medal on Putnam in 2013.

Join or Die shows Putnam and Obama together in a group photo from the 2000s, when they worked together on a project looking into ways social capital might be generated. But the details of that effort—what they came up with, and whether it had any impact—are not discussed.

Or not for long, anyway: The intermittently legible notes I scribbled while watching the film a couple of weeks ago include the words “searching for the redemptive narrative,” with nothing to indicate who said them. The very possibility appears only as a blip.

Toward the end, the directors interview the creator of Meetup, an app enabling people with shared interests to get together. Putnam is not asked to comment. But to me it sounds like trying to swim your way out of quicksand.

Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.