Robert Putnam and social capital

Robert Putnam is a well-known Harvard political scientist about whom I have written before. For several years now I have used his Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy in my European politics course at Redeemer. It is an excellent study of the effects of longstanding regional political cultures on political institutions in that country, with broader applicability elsewhere as well.

With a hat tip to bookforum.com, here is an interview with Putnam in The American Interest Online: Bowling with Robert Putnam. Putnam's stock in trade is something called "social capital," a broad concept encompassing virtually anything people do co-operatively, including the formation of political parties and related groups, but also choral societies, garden clubs, private philanthropic foundations and business enterprises, among many other communal formations. Social capital can be good or bad, as Putnam indicates in this article. Hamas and al Qaeda are certainly manifestations of bonding social capital among its membership, but few outside of these terrorist organizations would argue that their influence is particularly beneficent.

Though Putnam's views mostly coincide with those championing what has come to be known as civil society, there is a pronounced difference, as seen in Putnam's expressed desire to establish mandatory national service as a means of fostering "bridging," as opposed to "bonding," social capital. Here he is reminiscent of those championing public education as a means of bringing together children and young people from diverse ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds. Contrary to Putnam, whom I otherwise appreciate, I question whether it is the state's normative task actively to build this bridging capital. With the proponents of civil society, I believe it is better to leave this primarily to the nonstate communities themselves, with the state limiting itself to supporting such efforts indirectly.

Differentiation and Robert Putnam's work

Dooyeweerd's understanding of the historical norm of differentiation has sometimes been criticized by those who would prefer to affirm a more traditional and less complex society. Darryl G. Hart appears to fall into the latter category, judging from his Recovering Mother Kirk. Indeed it is easy to fall into a certain nostalgia for premodern social patterns, especially when we are confronted with the ills of contemporary urban life.

However, it may be that Robert Putnam, a professor of government at Harvard, has provided needed empirical support for Dooyeweerd in his writings, particularly his Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Putnam's study of Italy is based on research taking place over the twenty years following the establishment of quasi-federal regional governments in that country in 1970. The new regional governments in the north, e.g., Emilia-Romagna, Toscana and Umbria proved to be most effective, while those in the south, e.g., Sicilia, Calabria and Campania were least effective.

Why? Well, not so coincidentally, the Italian north is the historic seat of the civic republics of the late middle ages, such as Florence, Genoa, Venice and Bologna. The south, on the other hand, was from Norman times ruled by various absolutist regimes well into the nineteenth century. Patterns of horizontal co-operation developed naturally in the former and not in the latter.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, northern Italians were still great joiners, joining everything from choral societies and amateur football clubs to charitable and civic organizations. The level of interpersonal trust is high in these regions. In the south, by contrast, the level of trust is low, and interpersonal relations tend to be governed by hierarchical and exploitative patron-client dynamics. Here the number of local newspapers and other civic formations is much lower than in the north.

Putnam concludes that centuries-old political cultures have contributed to the different performances of the regional governments and even to the economic gap between north and south. Social capital or its absence is all important to the vitality of a society. Writes Putnam:

Trust lubricates cooperation. The greater the level of trust within a community, the greater the likelihood of cooperation. And cooperation itself breeds trust (p. 171).

If Putnam's findings are correct -- and they do seem highly persuasive -- then they shatter two enduring stereotypes:

1) Economics drives politics. To the contrary, already existing civic traditions were far more significant than economic resources in facilitating both good government and economic prosperity. This seems to refute the likes of Marx, Ellul, Canadian philosopher George Grant, and the functionalists who were the early proponents of the European Union.

2) Traditional feudal societies are more communally-oriented than advanced industrial societies which tend to atomize people. By contrast, the most industrial region of Italy is by far the north, and it is precisely here that people are most likely to join revolving credit associations, art clubs and mutual aid societies. Southern Italians are far less likely to join any type of organization and, while family ties are strong -- perhaps a little too strong, in the views of some observers -- the level of social connectedness outside families is relatively weak.

Here is where the connection may lie to Dooyeweerd's differentiated society.

Dooyeweerd argues that, as a society moves from its earlier undifferentiated status to greater differentiation, increasing numbers of social functions come to be dispersed in a larger number of communal settings. This is one of the foundations for his theory of soevereiniteit in eigen kring or "sphere sovereignty." A reactionary conservatism may attempt to reverse this process, and this in part explains the allure of German national socialism and the various European fascisms in the interwar period.

I wonder whether Putnam's findings might be seen to lend needed empirical support to Dooyeweerd in this respect: vibrant communities are associated with differentiated societies rather than with undifferentiated societies, where a single kind of hierarchical relationship dominates the multiplicity of human activities. Thus any attempt to reverse the historical process of differentiation is misguided and, quite simply, reactionary.

Robert Putnam and an Italian referendum

One of the more significant studies in my discipline of political science is Robert Putnam's award-winning Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. I used to have my students reading this book, because it demonstrates the durability of political cultures over many centuries and their power to make or break political institutions. I was reminded of Putnam's study when I recently came across this map:

As many will be aware, the Italian peninsula was politically divided between the end of Roman/Byzantine rule and the mid 19th century, when the Kingdom of Sardinia united the various realms into a single Italian kingdom under the House of Savoy. There was no inevitability to this union, and even today many linguists are wont to speak of the languages of Italy rather than of a single Italian language with dialectal differences.

Why I am not a premodern

I have recently come across another review of my book written by one Calvin Townsend and published in the spring issue of The Review of Politics. It is titled "Idols of Modernity," and for some bizarre reason it has been posted on a website styling itself as "The Information Source for the Home Building Industry." Although I do not know Townsend personally, I understand that he teaches political studies part-time at Trinity Western University and appears to be a Straussian of some sort, judging from his critique of my approach. For Townsend it seems I am too modern, caught up in "'routinized' versions of neo-Thomist and neo-Calvinist illusions." The reviewer continues:

The irony of the book, in this reviewer's judgment, is that the author could have found much better support for his critique in a return to premodern Christian political thought and the tradition of Christian natural law which for centuries was the cornerstone of western ethical and political thought. I agree with Leo Strauss that a return to the wisest of the ancient thinkers could be a source of liberation from the tyranny of modern ideologies.

Reading this critique has reminded me that, whatever my affinity for the likes of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Johannes Althusius, I am not a premodern. To be sure, I was delighted when the O'Donovans published From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, containing a variety of classic, premodern political philosophy texts. I strongly believe that we ignore the wisdom of our forebears to our peril; indeed we have much to learn from them. I heartily dislike the sort of cultural amnesia which assumes that enlightenment commenced the day before yesterday and everything preceding it is a product of unreasoned prejudice and superstition.

At the same time, the notion that we can simply return to premodern ways is a nonstarter for at least two reasons. To begin with, since premodernity comes in both christian and classical pagan versions, it is by no means obvious that there is a single phenomenon called premodernity. As a Christian himself, Townsend would evidently have us recover the christian elements. Yet his appeal to Leo Strauss, who definitely followed the classical Greeks and Romans and was deeply suspicious of attempts to ground political philosophy in divine revelation, would take us in a different direction.

In the second place, I believe it is necessary to distinguish between what might be called spiritual and structural components of modernity. The former category would include the likes of the social contract, with its assumption that all communities and the obligations thereto can be reduced to voluntary associations; the idolatrous esteem for human autonomy and the concomitant denigration of all heteronomous authority; the belief that human beings are capable of saving themselves; and the deprecation of creation as a source of evil. This spirit of modernity we must definitively reject.

The latter category would include the rise of political democracy; the post-westphalian consolidation of national states; technical advances in the fields of communications, transportation and economics; and the softening (but not the elimination) of gender roles. These structural components we can cautiously affirm as products of legitimate cultural development, even if such development has occurred under the misguided influence of a secular worldview.

I have recently read Meic Pearse's Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage. He writes of the deepening chasm that has opened between the west and all other societies, which remain premodern in their underlying assumptions. At some point I hope to write a review of this book, possibly in tandem with Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, so I will not say too much about it now. However, after undertaking a devastating analysis of the sorry plight of a decadent west so certain of its own evident superiority, Pearse concludes that it is time for the west to rejoin the rest and put aside its promethean ways. He is especially damning of the sexual revolution and the havoc it has wreaked on those societies least able to afford its excesses. So far so good.

But then I go back to Robert Putnam, whose Making Democracy Work compares the "premodern" south of Italy with the ultramodern north, with the latter coming off much more favourably than the former. Putnam's study indicates the presence of a vibrant civil society functioning in the north, based on higher levels of interpersonal trust and co-operation than in the south. Ought we to regret the smoothly functioning political institutions, revolving credit associations, amateur football clubs, the relative lack of corruption, and other manifestations of a highly differentiated society? I don't think so.

In the same way, although I can easily resonate with an intentionally premodern political theorist such as Robert Kraynak, whose Christian Faith and Modern Democracy is delightfully contrarian and offers a worthwhile dissenting perspective, I cannot ultimately follow his prudential judgement that the best constitution at present would be a pre-democratic constitutional monarchy. (That said, I quite agree with him that the classical mixed constitution is superior to unadulterated democracy.)

The old cliché has it that we cannot turn back the clock. Too often this is an excuse to do nothing about a particularly odious development commonly, albeit erroneously, thought to be progressive. Yet a number of biblical scholars and commentators have noted that while paradise began with a garden, redeemed humanity will live in a glittering city. As my esteemed colleague, Al Wolters, puts it, redemption in Jesus Christ means the restoration of creation, not its repristination. We should not wish to repeal millennia of cultural development, even if it has occurred under the influence of pagan and secular worldviews. This is why I believe neo-Calvinism represents such a significant advance in our understanding of God's world. We cannot simply be content to drag our feet in conservatistic fashion. We cannot return to the old ways -- at least not all of them. God's world is an intrinsically dynamic world; creation order includes within its very structure the possibilities of further development, under the obedient guidance of his image-bearers.

So I happily accept Townsend's critique. Guilty as charged: I am not a premodern.

Orthodoxy and political culture

Why is it that one never hears of military coups d'état in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain or the United States? Why does federalism work in Germany and India but not consistently in Nigeria or Russia? Why does constitutional government function so smoothly in most of Europe, and more recently east Asia, but scarcely at all in subsaharan Africa or the Middle East? The answer is to be found in that all-important concept of political culture, which can be defined as the total complex of political institutions and supportive traditions characterizing a given people, including attitudes towards political authority, participation, political rhetoric, styles of leadership, expectations of government, limitations on government action, and so forth. The word constitution, used in its older unwritten sense, might in some respects be deemed synonymous with political culture.

There have been efforts at quantifying or measuring political cultures, the most famous of which was undoubtedly that of Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba nearly half a century ago, whose results were documented in The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. A more recent and fascinating study of regional political cultures within a single country was published by Robert Putnam a dozen years ago, titled Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. A decade and a half ago Seymour Martin Lipset came out with a book, Continental Divide, comparing the political cultures of Canada and the United States.

Since the end of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, much work still needs to be done in studying the unique Russian political culture. Samuel Huntington sees Russia as the pivotal state in what he describes as a distinct Orthodox Christian civilization, whose values clash with those of the west. By contrast, Nikolai Petro views Russia and the Orthodox countries of Eurasia as sharing a common civilization with the west. In The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture, Petro argues that Russia's political culture, which appears to outsiders to foster little other than dictatorial régimes, is more complex than this stereotype would have it. In fact, there has long existed, side by side with authoritarian and totalitarian rule, an alternative political culture, often found amongst domestic dissidents and émigrés. This political culture is one which Petro calls "constrained autocracy," focussing on the complex of independent social initiatives which, since the late 1980s, has come in the west to be called civil society. Here the emphasis is not so much on the formal mechanisms of democracy and popular rule as on those institutions serving to limit the power of the autocrat.

Petro has recently weighed in on the subject with the following article: "The Orthodox Are Coming," in which he explores the implications of increasing Orthodox Christian influence within the European Union as its outer boundaries move continually eastward. Indeed, Petro sees the Russian Orthodox Church itself as one of the more crucial institutions supportive of civil society, if not always of political democracy in its western forms. Writes Petro:

A new generation of Western scholars on religion (Zoe Knox, Christopher Marsh, Elizabeth Prodromou, Nikolas Gvosdev) have even applied Western literature on civil society to contemporary Orthodoxy. By looking at the Church’s highly delegative, almost “confederative” system of administration, and focusing on its community-centered initiatives, they argue that the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is playing an important role as the country’s largest civic organization.

Petro believes it is time to rediscover what unites east and west rather than what divides us:

We, in the Catholic-Protestant West, should prepare for the coming of the “Orthodox Century" by appreciating all that unites us. If the dividing line between East and West continues to exist in our hearts and minds, removing it from the political map of Europe will accomplish very little. In the long run Europeans must become much better educated about their common Byzantine and Eastern Christian heritage. Even in the short run, however, the essential elements of this common inheritance can be used to shore up pan-European democratic institutions. Recent scholarship by Silvia Ronchey, Helene Ahrweiler, and Antonio Carile, provide a conceptual link between Byzantine political thought and the modern age, and highlight how much current European aspirations to pluri-culturalism and subsidiarity (the idea that matters should be handled by the lowest competent authority), have in common with the Byzantine political model.

To be sure, there is something to be said for Petro's approach, which is a worthwhile corrective to those who would paint the Russian and Balkan political cultures in a single monochromatic hue. Yet there are two difficulties with his interpretation which ought not to be overlooked.

First, far from being a western construct, the notion of a fundamental east-west divide finds longstanding support within Russia itself, where there is a rather substantial subculture fearful of the decadent, apostate west. This is the side of the Russian soul which is insular and xenophobic, claiming a unique role for "Holy Russia" in upholding true belief against the heresies of Catholicism, of the various forms of protestantism and of modern secularism. Eurasianists, as they have sometimes been labelled, place little if any value on democracy and constitutional government, which they view as alien imports.

Second, even if Petro is correct in identifying an alternative political culture championing the independent initiatives of civil society, it is by no means inevitable that its adherents would govern in significantly different fashion from their opponents if they were to inherit the reins of power. Good intentions do not by themselves translate into representative constitutional rule, especially if there is no past experience with this in the political culture as a whole.

Of course, this should not be taken as an argument for cultural determinism. Yet cultures do not generally change quickly and abruptly. The habits of centuries are not easily shaken off, as Putnam discovered in his study of the Italian regions. This is where Huntington is almost certainly closer to the mark than Petro in isolating the apparently ineradicable boundaries separating the world's religiously based civilizations. It also suggests that the outer boundaries of the European Union may one day prove to be narrower than is generally supposed, despite the formal presence within Europe of Greece and Cyprus -- for now at least -- and soon-to-be members Romania and Bulgaria. Might Dimitri Obolensky's "Byzantine Commonwealth" be recreated as a counterpart to a western-oriented European Union? I doubt this is to be wished for, but we shouldn't be surprised if something like this does eventually occur.

Statement on Social Justice, 13: Culture

Section 13 of the Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel is titled, Culture.

We affirm that some cultures operate on assumptions that are inherently better than those of other cultures because of the biblical truths that inform those worldviews that have produced these distinct assumptions. Those elements of a given culture that reflect divine revelation should be celebrated and promoted. But the various cultures out of which we have been called all have features that are worldly and sinful—and therefore those sinful features should be repudiated for the honor of Christ. We affirm that whatever evil influences to which we have been subjected via our culture can be—and must be—overcome through conversion and the training of both mind and heart through biblical truth.

We deny that individuals and sub-groups in any culture are unable, by God’s grace, to rise above whatever moral defects or spiritual deficiencies have been engendered or encouraged by their respective cultures.

I see the authors addressing two issues here. First, the popular notion that all cultures are equally good and that differences among them are a matter of legitimate diversity rather than better or worse. Second, that human beings are simply products of their respective cultures.