Bowling+Alone

From //Journal of Democracy// 1995
 * "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital"**

Robert D. Putnam is known as "the most influential academic in the world today." Putnam is a political scientist and also a professor of public policy at Harvard University. Born in Port Clinton, Ohio, he graduated from Swarthmore College in 1963. He gained a Fulbright fellowship to study at Balliol College and then from there went on to Yale University to get his master's and doctorate. His works consist of thought on a widespread variety of politics, comparative politics, international relations and public policy.
 * Putnam, Robert D. (1940 - )**

What urban life has become in contemprary middle-class America and for millions of others worldwide living in an increasingly materialistic and solipsistic culture of corporate work obsessive consumption, and over determine leisure. Contemporary urbanites now follow a path of less civic engagement, meaning that human contacts of all kinds characterize theri communities and has become extremely eroded which brings thus closer to depletion.
 * Main Argument**


 * Other Ideas in the Article**
 * Social and technological futures of societ
 * social crisis/civic engagement


 * Sources**
 * Putnam's critiques were an updated version of Louis Wirth's essay on "Urbanism as a way of life."

Reading was okay, interesting points.
 * Comments**

--Jason Rouleau