Download Social capital produces democracy

Keep it neutral?
Normative aspects of the concept of
social capital
by
Juraj Draxler
Course: Civic Networks and Social Capital
Instructor: Dr. Chris Welzel
Spring 2004
Wordcount: 2475 words (excluding footnotes, bibliography ad cover page)
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Introduction
Scholars use the term “social capital” in two fundamentally different ways. In the
tradition of James S. Coleman or Pierre Bourdieu, “social capital” brings social structure
into the ability and willingness of social actors to behave in a certain way. The other
school, impersonated notably by Robert Putnam, equates social capital to the ability of
citizens to govern themselves or to care about governance issues. Here, social capital is
an aggregate item serving the good of the society, not so much a resource that an
individual can draw upon. This view has become so prevalent in recent years that some
authors refer to it as the theory of social capital. Thus, for example, Newton (2001:201)
presents the social capital theory as one that argues that “a dense network of voluntary
associations and citizen organizations helps sustain civil society and community relations
in a way that generates trust and cooperation between citizens and a high level of civic
engagement and participation.”
I will try to analyze the logic of both approaches. I will also look at the relationship
between the concept of social capital and the concept of civil society, which I argue is the
key to understanding how useful the various applications of the social capital concept are.
“Social capital”
Loury coined the term in 1977, speaking of a set of resources that aid a person in
cognitive and social development, and provide a basis for the development of human
capital. Coleman describes Loury as the first protagonist in a wave of criticism of the
“individualist bias in neoclassical economics”. (Coleman 1990:300-301) Next, BenPorath came up with his F-connection (family, friends and firms), showing how different
forms of social connections affect market exchange. Granovetter, similarly, attacked the
‘undersocialized concept of man’ underlying modern economics and insisted on
‘embeddedness’ of economic actors in social and organizational structures (ibid).
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The most systematic attempts to refine the concept were made by Coleman and Bourdieu.
Coleman emphasized the productive nature of social capital and its inherence in social
structure, contrasting it with human capital, which is vested in individuals. He sought to
use the concept to subvert the “broadly perpetrated fiction in modern society… that
society consists of a set of independent individuals, each of whom acts to achieve goals
that are independently arrived at… “ (1990: 300). Bourdieu (1986:241-258) emphasized
the dimension of capital – all capital, including social, “takes time to accumulate and
reproduce itself.” (1986:241). His view of social capital is similar to Coleman’s, but he
stresses how other forms of capital permeate and affect the social one. Thus, “the volume
of the social capital possessed by a given agent […] depends on the size of the network of
connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic,
cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is
connected.” (1986:249)
Then Robert Putnam, a relatively obscure academic (Boggs 2001:281) shot to fame with
his book Bowling Alone (1995). He drew on his own earlier research into the correlation
between democracy and the strength of civic networks. Putnam broke with the earlier
tradition by insisting mainly on the political function of social capital.1 He drew partly
from the civic culture school, which emphasized and researched the role of norms and
values in democratic governance (Edwards and Foley 1998:133).
At the same time, with his promotion of voluntarism, Putnam tapped into a politically
powerful source. Political promotion of citizen engagement had been in vogue for some
time prior to Bowling Alone.2
But not exclusively, for elaboration of Putnam’s ides in economic realm, see Kenworthy, Lane. 1997.
“Civic Engagement, Social Capital and Economic Cooperation.” American Behavioural Scientist 40:645656.
2
In 1988, the Republican candidate for president, George Bush, declared that America was “a brilliant
diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” The somewhat
awkward metaphor caught on as a catchphrase, and its resonance was made use of in 1989, when the White
House started the initiative of naming one individual every day a “Daily Point of Light”. This was someone
who “engaged in direct and consequential voluntary service focused on solving serious social problems in
their community.” (McConkey and Lawler 2000:43) The initiative was handled by the White House Office
of National Service, created in the same year, a body charged with promoting voluntary services to local
communities. Its director ranked as special adviser to President, the same hierarchical level as the national
security adviser (2000:44). During the first year of his administration, President Clinton signed the National
Service Act, which earmarked large public funds for several service programmes, including AmeriCorps.
(A version of the Cold Was propaganda venture called the Peace Corps, which sent American volunteers
abroad.)
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Of course, Putnam’s use of the concept has heavy normative overtones. In Bowling Alone
and a series of articles preceding it, he postulates that democracy is in crisis in the US.
The message is that something should be done about this.
Let us recapitulate. So far, we have two distinctly different propositions for the concept
of social capital. What they share is the focus on social structure as a resource. In the
older tradition, this resource is viewed primarily as individual, and it serves to emphasize,
contrary to the assumptions of neo-liberal economics, that the man is, after all, a social
animal. In Putnam’s version, the social capital is a phenomenon that makes sense when
looking at the society as a whole. While in Coleman’s and Bourdieu’s version “social
capital” is an analytical tool, in Putnam’s version it parallels the desirable-undesirable
axis: the more “social capital”, the better for the society. Putnam builds on Coleman and
Bourdieu but adds the normative dimension. What it the added value of his version?
‘Social capital produces democracy’
There are several problems with this notion. Kenneth Newton (2001:201) produces
evidence which shows that membership in a voluntary association has little correlation
with individual attitudes of trust. He also claims that “social trust between citizens is not
at all closely related to political trust between citizens.”
Also, surveys throughout Western democracies indicate decreasing trust in political elites
and rising conviction among citizens that they cannot influence much the decisionmaking at the level of national governments (Dalton 1988:266-269). It is hard to see how
increased engagement in voluntary activities could reverse this perceived democratic
deficit.
Of course, there is always Alexis de Tocqueville, the inspiring voice. As Putnam puts it,
“Americans’ propensity for civic associations… most impressed him as the key to their
unprecedented ability to make democracy work.” (1995:65) The clear-sighted French
intellectual saw clearly that voluntarism produced democracy.
Actually, he did not. For Tocqueville, political and civil associations are strictly two sides
of the same coin. There is no reason to infer a one-way causal relationship from his
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statements. “In all the countries where political associations are prohibited, civil
associations are rare.”(115) In fact, he describes the primary impulse for people to form
associations as political: “In civil life every man may, strictly speaking, fancy that he can
provide for his own wants; in politics he can fancy no such thing… whatever natural
repugnance may restrain men from acting in concert, they will always be ready to
combine for the sake of a party. Thus political life makes the love and practice of
association more general; it imparts a desire of union and teaches the means of
combination to numbers of men who otherwise would have always lived apart.” (1990:
115 emphasis added)
This is a far cry from Putnam, who extols association for leisure activities (bowling
clubs) and belittles the importance of campaign-type activities.
So far, the problem of Putnam’s position is the dubiousness of his proposition that there
exists some public sphere largely independent of politics, which fosters engagement in
governance issues.
The way out of this is to identify the activities that are somehow directly responsible for
making citizens participate in political decision-making. This is the idea behind Stolle
and Rochon’s notion of civicness. These authors try to restore the ancient idea of civic
virtue by claiming that as opposed to just any social capital, there exists ‘public social
capital’, producing ‘public civicness’ (sic) which includes only the norms that help foster
positive citizen attitudes, “cooperative spirit, norms of reciprocity, and collective
thinking…” (Stolle and Rochon 1998:49).
But this is a slippery ground. Often, the demarcation between ‘civic’ and ‘uncivic’ uses
of social capital is difficult.3
3
The birth of the state of Israel, for example, was intimately bound with the operations of Jewish guerilla
and downright terrorist groups, such as Irgun or Hagana. These were integral parts of larger Jewish
associations that organized public life and went on to build the state of Israel .
Another example would be the Lebanese organization Hezbollah or the Palestinian group Hamas. Hamas is
the transformation of Islamic Brotherhood, a movement that for twenty years organized schools, charities,
hospitals and public life in general in the Gaza strip, before Israeli oppression made the suicide bombings
an attractive option for many young people. Hezbollah is a similar case, where armed struggle and welfare
provision are two faces of the same coin.
In these cases we do have an element of intolerance and hatred. However, the groups also undoubtedly
promote generalized trust – Hamas within the Palestinian community, while the Israeli groups went on to
establish one of the most successful post-war democracies. If we go on to speak of social capital as
establishing the generalized trust of all humanity, and no longer within a certain civitas, we might as well
abandon the concept altogether.
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Another problem is that Putnam does not go far in defining what he means by democracy.
His operationalization of the concept via election turnout or petition-signing is tricky. Are
Nordic countries less democratic than the US because they sign fewer petitions? It would
point to seeing democracy as a process. But democracy is also a right (most importantly
to vote the government out of power) and a set of institutional arrangements. By
discarding these dimensions, Putnam’s normative drive ends in a blind alley.
Yet his basic proposition is powerful. He claims a space for citizens to engage in
activities that influence the political sphere, the distribution and exercise of power.
It is this normative call, the defence of civil society as the space for an individual where
this individual can be ‘himself’ which links Putnam to other theorists who make use of
“civil society” as a rallying cry against government or state and economy or market. This
sounds straightforward. But is it?
Civil society
Edwards and Foley describe various “competing concepts” of civil society. (1998:125) In
Eastern European context, civil society had been seen as the force denting the power of
the oppressive state. This echoed the situation in Latin America, where intellectuals
envisioned civil society as a political forum that should replace party politics. In the
West, the concept is claimed by political schools of all tinges. US conservatives promote
it alongside push for economic liberalization. For the left in Europe, civil society came
as a welcome concept to oppose neocorporatist arrangements. (1998:125)
The very fluidity of the concept helps to invest it with hopes that have anything to do
with opposition to something in the market or the state.
Krishan Kumar also points out that in the Eastern European context, “civil society” tends
to be conflated with democracy. (Kumar 1993:388) I think this is a crucial point and we
will come back to it.
Kumar, helpfully, also goes quite far in tracing the “career” of the concept of civil
society. Originally civil society was opposed to the state of barbarism. The connection of
civilized man to citizen is clear. However, where is the distinction between political and
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‘civic’? Putnam and others speak of these as two separate spheres. Uphoff, for example,
states the market operates with the logic of profit and loss, the state with hierarchical
authority and the voluntary sector depends, well, on voluntarism (Edwards and Foley
1998:126). To this, Edwards and Foley charge that a business, for instance “functions as
much as a hierarchical organization as it does in response to market signals“(ibid).
Marx traces the distinction between civil society and the state to growth of capitalism
with its distinct sphere of private property. “The word ‘civil society’ emerged in the
eighteenth century, when property relationships had already extricated themselves from
the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only develops with the
bourgeoisie.” (Marx and Engels 1963: 26-7)
Gramsci builds on Marx but gives the civil society more autonomy. For him, “political
society is the arena of coercion and domination, civil society that of consent and direction
(or ‘leadership’).” The State is “an equilibrium between political society and civil
society…” (Gramsci 1971:208) Civil society is the sphere where intellectuals operate to
“perform their key funtion of supplying legitimacy and creating consensus on behalf of
the ruling groups.”
In a way, both build on Hegel (although they also differ from him by focusing on the
contradictions in society), who looks on the ‘concrete person’ of civil society in contrast
to the isolated subject form the sphere of morality. This person “gradually comes to
recognize himself as a member of society and realizes that to attain his ends he must
work with others and through others.”
The theories of Hegel, Marx and Gramsci are, for all their differences, similar in one
important aspect: they are a far cry from Putnam’s mechanistic version of the concept.
“Social capital”, as we have seen, started out as an attempt to overcome the simplistic
notion of society as composed of isolated individuals, invested ahistorically with some
values which they come to realize through common action. Through Putnam’s version of
civil society, this simplistic view sneaks in through the backdoor.
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Clearing up the terms
I propose, first and foremost, to strictly decouple the two phenomena, civil society and
social capital. Civil society should be viewed, in the simplest terms, as the space where
the ideas for changes to the economic and political structures originate. This space does
not necessarily have to be large to be influential. During Velvet Revolution in 1989
Czechoslovakia, a handful of intellectuals dictated the shape of political institutions after
the communist regime collapsed. This was similar throughout Eastern Europe.4
In fact, revolutions show best how unhelpful the conflation of social capital and civic
society is. They entail a breakdown of trust. In such times, people ally for political
purposes – they are interested in shaping the institutions that determine the distribution of
power in society. Not much generalized trust may be present, in fact it is unlikely that
there is, but the political action might give people a taste for associating, as de
Tocqueville described. Civil society, at the same time, may be small but influential.
We might speak of making the civil society wider (extending the networks that initiate
public decision-making over more citizens) and deeper (making intellectual process more
intensive). But it does not make much sense to pretend that generalized trust or voluntary
associations in themselves create better, on indeed any, governance.
For more prescient concepts I propose going back to theorists like Marx, Gramsci or
Hegel. What they offer are paradigmatic visions of society, as compared to Putnam, who
produces a unidimensional concept called ‘civil society’, comprised of voluntary
associations. His concept calls for renaissance in voluntary associational activities yet
describes very little of the dialectic behind it – why it should happen. We end up with
some hint at a little bit of social engineering – support voluntary associations, for they are
good for democracy. What is democracy, we do not exactly get to know…
As for social capital, Bourdieu and Coleman probably cannot be bettered. Social capital
impinges on any structure - market relations, voluntary associations or political parties. It
denotes a social structure with history, meaning its relations are being shaped over time.
4
I would argue that even in the case of Poland, the proponents of the idea of civil society toppling a regime
overlooked the role of economic hardship that pushed people, actually workers, into streets, and the support
given by the Catholic church. I would treat with suspicion formulations that “Poland was the one European
country with extensive elements of a civil society” (Bryant 1993:400). At any rate, this civil society would
not fit Putnam’s definition.
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This encompasses networks and rules of interaction. As such, one can aggregate to the
societal level and speak of establishment of norms through frequent interaction, which
leads to generalized trust. But trust that is heavily dependent on repeated interaction and
on coercive, profit and other factors that influence the individual at any time and over
time. This fits with the general critique of neo-liberal economics. Any structure
comprised of rational actors as posited by rational choice theory is prone to suffer heavily
form dilemmas of collective action. Social capital is a concept that explains things
differently.
Conclusion
Social capital is a useful concept. Investing it with normative content, however, means
giving it a link to concepts beyond its purview. If these are not well defined, the whole
exercise is useless. It is analytical freewheeling.
What Alexis de Tocqueville did in 1830s, on his visit to the US, was to identify
relentlessly how the political arrangement reflects on the daily life of citizens and vice
versa. This is different from the efforts of Putnam and similar “neo-Tocquevilleans”,
whose writ is more limited: to explain that is something is not done (volunteering) and
should be done.
This does not explain too much and ultimately smacks of quiet totalitarianism. The
answer to the question posed in the title of this essay should be clear: yes, keep it neutral.
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Bibliography
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Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. G. Richardson. New York:
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Coleman, James S. 1990. The Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Dalton, Russel J. 1988. Citizen Politics. Public Opinion and Political Parties in
Advanced Western Democracies. Chatham: Chatham House Publishers.
Edwards, Bob and Foley, Michael W. 1998. “Civil Society and Social Capital Beyond
Putnam.” American Behavioral Scientist 42:124-139.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.
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