Civil Society and Social Capital Beyond Putnam

Abstract

Both civil society and social capital have proven useful heuristics for drawing attention to neglected nonmarket aspects of social reality and constitute a needed corrective to narrowly economistic models. However, both break down, although in different ways, when treated as the basis for elaborating testable hypotheses and further theory. Civil society is most useful in polemical or normative contexts, but attempts to distinguish it from other sectors of society typically break down in unresolvable boundary disputes over just what constitutes civil society and what differentiates it from “state” and “market.” Work by Robert Putnam and others has assimilated social capital to the civic culture model, using it as just another label for the norms and values of the empirical democratic theory of the 1950s. This strategy undermines the empirical value of James Coleman and Pierre Bourdieu's useful social relational concept.