Robert David Putnam

Robert David Putnam was born on January 9, 1941, in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Port Clinton, Ohio, where he participated in a competitive bowling league as a teenager. Putnam graduated from Swarthmore College in 1963 where he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. An outstanding student, he won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to earn a master's degree and doctorate from Yale University, the latter in 1970. He taught at the University of Michigan until joining the faculty at Harvard in 1979, where he has held a variety of positions, including Dean of the Kennedy School, and is currently the Malkin Professor of Public Policy. Putnam was raised as a religiously observant Methodist. In 1963, Putnam married his wife Rosemary, a special education teacher and French horn player. Around the time of his marriage, he converted to Judaism, his wife's religion.

In 1995 he published "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" in the Journal of Democracy. The article was widely read and garnered much attention for Putnam, including an invitation to meet with then-President Bill Clinton and a spot in the pages of People.

In 2000, he published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a book-length expansion of the original argument, adding new evidence and answering many of his critics. Though he measured the decline of social capital with data of many varieties, his most striking point was that many traditional civic, social and fraternal organizations – typified by bowling leagues – had undergone a massive decline in membership while the number of people bowling had increased dramatically.

Putnam published his data set from this study in 2001 and subsequently published the full paper in 2007.

In 2004 the President of the Italian Republic made him a Commander of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. He was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2006 and a Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal by the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2003, he was a Marshall Lecturer at the University of Cambridge in 1999 and was honored with the Ithiel de Sola Pool Award and Lectureship of the American Political Science Association.

Putnam has been criticized for the lag between his initial study and his publication of his article. In 2006, Putnam was quoted in the Financial Times as saying he had delayed publishing the article until he could "develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity" (quote from John Lloyd of Financial Times). In 2007, writing in City Journal, John Leo questioned whether this suppression of publication was ethical behavior for a scholar, noting that "Academics aren't supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings." On the other hand, Putnam did release the data in 2001 and publicized this fact.

In 2007 he briefly met Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to discuss the role of civil society in the Libyan political context.

In 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for "deepening our understanding of community in America."

In 2015, he was awarded the University of Bologna, ISA Medal for Science for research activities characterized by excellence and scientific value.

In 2016, Putnam explained his inspiration for the book, by saying,