Civil society and social capital
One of the themes of early pluralists in both the United States and Britain is that a strong civil society, community organization and citizen activism are important both as bulwarks against the state and as mechanisms for deliverying public goods.
The early American pluralists, Dewey and Follet, emphasized that individual identity did not exist outside of groups and that group identity was essential both to protect individual freedom and to limit the power of the state. For Follet (1918) the group was the building block of a healthy and democratic polity. In a sense groups provided an alternative mode of collective organization to the state and also, then, a mechanism for delivering public goods and political interaction. Follet believed that groups were a mechanism for self-government. For authoritarian and social democratic thinkers the resolution to collective action problems lies in the state. For pluralists the dependence on the state for collective provision of goods results in an overbearing state and the loss of individual liberty. Consequently, many pluralists looked to the community or the group for collective provision.This is precisely the sort of argument that Putnam is making in his work on social capital. Putnam sees the decline in membership of local associations of whatever type as a major cause of social and economic ills in the United States and elsewhere. For Putnam membership of associations builds trust and this social capital is essential for economic development: ‘Social capital is coming to be seen as a crucial ingredient in economic development around the world’ (Putnam 1993: 37). Putnam, like the early English and American pluralists, sees membership of associations as essential for both personal and community development. For Putnam, the strengthening of civil society is a necessary mechanism for restoring democracy and economic development throughout the world.
Putnam is a graduate of Yale and locates himself firmly within the tradition of American pluralism (Merelman 2003: 196).He makes errors similar to those of traditional and American pluralism. The poor of the inner cities are not poor because of structured inequality, economic reorganization or racial prejudice but because of their failures to join groups and build social capital (see DeFilippis 2001). Putnam examines Tuscany and Sicily and suggests that Sicily’s lack of economic development and democracy is because of the absence of social capital not because of patterns of land ownership or it position on the periphery of Europe. He is insistent on the causal relation being one of lack of social capital leading to the absence of economic development rather than the other way around. Like other pluralists he sees a simple, voluntarist solution to deep-seated structural problems and ignores the constraints that may exist on group organization. What this perspective leads to is a limited role for the state. The state has to develop social linkages rather develop large-scale welfare and economic programmes to tackle social inequality and economic development.
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