Robert D Putnam

Robert D. Putnam was born on January 9, 1941, in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Port Clinton, Ohio. He pursued his education at Swarthmore College, Oxford University, and Yale University, earning a PhD in 1970. His academic career began at the University of Michigan before he joined Harvard University in 1979. Over his tenure at Harvard, he held several leadership roles, including Dean of the Kennedy School, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Putnam became the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus, after retiring from active teaching in May 2018.

Putnam’s early research focused on comparative politics, leading to his influential book, “Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy,” published in 1993. This work highlighted the crucial role of social capital in democratic success. His subsequent and most widely recognized work, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” (2000), further explored the decline of civic engagement and social capital in the United States since the 1960s. This book earned him significant attention and led to collaborations with political leaders across both sides of the Atlantic, including Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and Prime Ministers Blair and Cameron. He also co-founded the Saguaro Seminar, an initiative dedicated to fostering civic renewal through collaborative dialogue.

His career is marked by numerous accolades for his contributions to political science and the humanities. He received the Skytte Prize in 2006, often considered the highest honor for a political scientist. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal for “deepening our understanding of community in America.” More recently, in 2018, he was honored with the Karl Deutsch Award for cross-disciplinary research by the International Political Science Association. Putnam has authored fifteen books, translated into twenty languages, with his most recent works including “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” (2015), which examines class disparity among American youth, and “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again” (2020), an analysis of 20th-century American social and political trends.