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CONCEPTUAL HISTORIES
SOCIAL CAPITAL
A Conceptual History
JAMES FARR
University of Minnesota
Taking its departure from current debates over social capital, this article presents new textual
findings in a backward-revealing conceptual history. In particular, it analyzes the texts and contexts of Lyda J. Hanifan who was rediscovered by Robert Putnam as having (allegedly first) used
the term; it offers discoveries of earlier uses of the term and concept—most notably by John
Dewey—thereby introducing critical pragmatism as another tradition of social capital; and it
recovers features of the critique of political economy in the nineteenth century—from Bellamy to
Marshall to Sidgwick to Marx—that assessed “capital from the social point of view,” especially
cooperative associations. While it ends with Marx’s use of “social capital,” Dewey is its central
figure. The article concludes by returning to the present and offering work, sympathy, civic education, and a critical stance as emergent themes from this conceptual history that might enrich
current debates.
Keywords: social capital; conceptual history; pragmatism; Dewey; Hanifan
“S
ocial capital” is one of our trendiest terms, heard with increasing frequency by professors, pundits, and politicians worldwide. This is having a
predictable consequence. The term is proliferating meanings and provoking
contests. How could it be otherwise for a term that conjures the disputed con-
AUTHOR’S NOTE: For many different kinds of assistance, I would like to thank Robert Adcock,
Terence Ball, Eugene Borgida, Harry Boyte, Terrell Carver, John Dryzek, Edwin Fogelman, Russell Hanson, Tom Healy, Susan Hunter, John Gunnell, Jeffrey Isaac, James Johnson, Jeffrey
Lomonaco, Karen McClure, Robert Putnam, Daniel Rodgers, Julie Reuben, William
Scheuerman, Harriet Furst Simon, Ben Stone, Benjamin Sullivan, Simon Szreter, Michael
Thobois, Mark E. Warren, Stephen White, Michael Woolcock, participants in the Political Theory
Colloquium at the University of Minnesota, and anonymous reviewers. I owe special acknowledgment and thanks to Mary G. Dietz.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 1, February 2004 6-33
DOI: 10.1177/0090591703254978
© 2004 Sage Publications
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notations of capitalism or renders sociable the reigning category of the dismal science? Scarcely an article on social capital begins without complaining
about the semantic fallout from this situation. Woolcock fears the “indiscriminate applications” that attend such “a wide variety of meanings,” while
Mondak worries “that the meaning of social capital will become muddled”
amidst the “staggering flood of discourse.”1 This concerns empirical theorists who seek stable referents and clear definitions. But it also concerns conceptual historians who take the proliferation and contestation of meanings as
given and intractable.
Future conceptual historians of social capital will have to trace and reflect
upon the trend that began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s. The
booming economies of Western countries during those years will surely not
go unnoticed. Nor will the inexorable march of economic theorizing in the
social sciences. But any finer-grained account will have to result from textual
perusal and contextual reconstruction of the academic scholarship and public
discourse that began with and followed upon the work of Glenn C. Loury,
Pierre Bourdieu, and James S. Coleman.2 Conceptual historians will also
have to account for the spillover of social science into popular culture, the
credit for which goes to Robert Putnam. His famous diagnosis of “bowling
alone” has made its way from such academic venues as the Journal of
Democracy, PS, and Simon & Schuster, to such mass outlets as People Magazine, Cooking Light, and the World Wide Web.3 It will take some time before
the semantic morphing of social capital slows its pace or steadies its forms
such that conceptual historians can do their future work.4
Today’s conceptual historians face a different task: to trace and reflect
upon the discursive pathways that led into the preceding two decades, ideally
beginning with the earliest uses of social capital. Some of this work has
already begun (by Woolcock, Putnam, and others), as has the varied project
of tracing particular conceptual histories.5 The previous uses of the term
“social capital” turn out to be few and far between, and their users unknown
to one another. Putnam credits Loury, Bourdieu, and Coleman, as well as the
sociologist of urban decline, Jane Jacobs (in 1961), and the social psychologists of suburban life, John R. Seeley et al. (in 1956). He also identifies
Lyda J. Hanifan, an obscure rural educator from West Virginia, as having
invoked (in 1916) “the first known use of the concept.”6 Moreover, Woolcock
identifies four traditions of social capital, each associated with a grand theorist of economic sociology: Marx, Weber, Simmel, and Durkheim. To this
list, he adds Benthamite utilitarianism as a fifth tradition.7 This historical
work is intriguing and whets the appetite of conceptual historians for whom
many questions remain. Have we missed important uses of term or concept?
Do other traditions flow into the headwaters of social capital? What was
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Hanifan up to when he wrote as he did in 1916? Why “capital”? What might
inform our present debates by exploring these conceptual innovations a century and more ago?
Questions like these prompt this article. In trying to answer them, I have
set myself two general objectives. The first and primary objective is to present new textual findings in the form of a conceptual history of social capital.
The second and more critical objective extracts some themes that emerge
from this conceptual history as potential insights for enriching or advancing
current debates. In particular, the article pursues these objectives by describing more thickly Hanifan’s texts and contexts, by offering discoveries of earlier uses of the term and concept—most notably by John Dewey—thereby
introducing critical pragmatism as another tradition of social capital, and by
recovering features of the critique of classical political economy in the nineteenth century—from Edward Bellamy to John Bates Clark to Karl Marx—
that assessed, in Henry Sidgwick’s and Alfred Marshall’s phrase, “capital
from the social point of view,” especially cooperative associations. Presented
in this order and contrary to other styles of conceptual history, the article proceeds backward in time, as if peeling layers or excavating sediments. While it
ends (and the history temporally begins) with Marx’s use of “social capital”
in 1867, Dewey is its central figure. In recognition of Dewey’s claim that “the
true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems” (1916 in MW 9:222),8 the article concludes by returning to the present
and offering work, sympathy, civic education, and a critical stance as emergent themes from this conceptual history that might enrich or advance current debate. Preparatory to pursuing its two general objectives, the article
begins by way of a brief discussion of terms, concepts, and current understandings of “social capital”—as well as some overlooked examples—in
order to answer a basic question: What are we looking for in a conceptual history of this kind? Overall, I hope to have contributed to the historical, conceptual, and critical dimensions of the debate over social capital, without denying and indeed relishing the prospect that other conceptual histories might
appear to offer other critical insights.9
SOCIAL CAPITAL IN TERM AND CONCEPT
Putnam has figured so centrally in contemporary debate, that we may
begin with his conceptualization in order to frame what follows. In a way
both compact and capacious, the concept of social capital boils down to networks, norms, and trust. Upon inspection, networks prove dense and valuable, norms pervade individual actions and social relations, and trust appears
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psychologically complex. “Like any other form of capital”—namely, physical or human—social capital aids future productivity of individuals and
groups in civil society, though not mainly economically. And it has as its
“conceptual cousin, ‘community.’ ”10 Putting these elements together, social
capital is complexly conceptualized as the network of associations, activities,
or relations that bind people together as a community via certain norms and
psychological capacities, notably trust, which are essential for civil society
and productive of future collective action or goods, in the manner of other
forms of capital.
This broad concept lies behind the term “social capital”11 found in the earlier writers that Putnam identifies. There are differences among and between
these writers such that we may speak of their varying conceptions, bound
loosely together by their family resemblances to one another.12 Coleman, for
example, emphasized that social capital was an endowment of social structure, not individuals; and he was disinclined to draw “community” into the
family tree. Bourdieu accented “institutionalized relationships of mutual
acquaintance and recognition,” as well as found class “distinction” more
important a “resource” than trust. Loury used the term only once when concluding his initial article to “represent the consequences of social position” as
a possible explanation of differences in “human capital” characteristics,
where one’s social position was dictated by “racialism” and other “social
forces.” Jacobs, too, was strikingly brief, drawing the discussion tightly
around “networks” without articulation of norms or trust. Seeley and colleagues conceptualized social capital as the “status” that individuals accrued
or lent as a result of their group activities; and since the groups came from
upper-crust suburban clubs, the sociologists did not conceal their critical distance from this “commodity similar to money.”13 Similarly, differences may
be found in Hanifan (and others, below) who invoked the broad concept,
briefly or at length, but who also expanded or limited the concept’s domain,
stressed different norms or capacities, valorized certain associations or activities over others, or put the concept to critical rather than commendatory uses.
This last item, regarding criticism versus commendation, invites attention to
the uses to which social capital is put. This, in turn, invites attention to what a
particular writer was doing in using the concept in a particular way in a particular context.
In contemporary literature, social capital is often called a term or word(s),
as well as a concept. Often, distinctions are not and need not be drawn
between these items of speech, language, and thought. Concepts are certainly
linguistic entities, in that none exist or can be articulated without the vocabularies of terms in language. Indeed, this is crucial to the pursuit of conceptual
history, as well as for understanding conceptual change politically. As
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Quentin Skinner observes, “The surest sign that a society has entered into
possession of a new concept is that a new vocabulary will be developed, in
terms of which the concept can then be publicly articulated and discussed.”14
The most striking sign occurs when a shorthand term is coined to match a
concept in order to facilitate discussion, in Skinner’s example, “state” for
state, and in ours, “social capital” for social capital. However, this is not
always the case, especially when a concept is still in its formative period and
no term yet exists for it. There are occasions, that is, in which terms and concepts do not match.
There may be the concept without the term, or the term “social capital”
without the concept (in question). The former situation, alas, is nearly universal before the 1980s, given the capaciousness of the concept and the fact that
“ ‘social capital’ is to some extent merely new language for a very old debate
in American intellectual circles.” Tocqueville—“the patron saint of contemporary social capitalists”—displayed concept without term when surveying
associations in democratic America.15 So, too, did the grand theorists of economic sociology, as well as their predecessors, Hume, Smith, and Mill, when
analyzing civil society under capitalism. Such abundance of conceptual
riches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests why the exciting
discovery lies in early uses of the term itself as that sure sign that social capital has arrived for articulation and discussion. But not just any use of the term
“social capital” will do, since the converse situation of term without (relevant) concept may obtain. For example, when lamenting its “excessive rate”
of destruction in the 1970s, James Buchanan used the term “social capital” to
denominate not associations or trust, but a society’s “capital investment characteristic of adherence to [legal] rules.”16 Or, consider Woolcock’s observation that earlier economists from Alfred Marshall to John Hicks used the
“actual words ‘social capital,’ ” but only to distinguish “temporary and permanent stocks of physical capital.”17 While there is more to Marshall and
political economy, as we shall see, this verdict about the mismatch of term
and concept seems essentially correct.18
Given these brief considerations, what are we looking for in a conceptual
history of this sort? We seek earlier conceptions of social capital (sharing
family resemblances with contemporary ones), when matched by the term,
while attentive to what their authors were doing in using term and conception, in the contexts and as part of the traditions in which they did so. We
begin by turning to the first heretofore known user of the term, about whom
virtually nothing has been written apart from Putnam’s notice. Hardly a
major or canonical thinker, such an innovator deserves some attention, given
our piqued historical curiosity and his conceptual family ties.19
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HANIFAN AND THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENTS
OF CIVIC EDUCATION
In 1916, “L. J. Hanifan, A. M., State Supervisor of Rural Schools” published “a story of achievement” in the Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science concerning a rural West Virginia community’s
development of “social capital.” Hanifan prefaced his story with three paragraphs of conceptual and terminological reflections that began quite
imaginatively.
In the use of the phrase social capital I make no reference to the usual acceptation of the
term capital, except in a figurative sense. I do not refer to real estate, or to personal property or to cold cash, but rather to that in life which tends to make these tangible substances
count for most in the daily lives of a people, namely, goodwill, fellowship, mutual sympathy and social intercourse among a group of individuals and families who make up a
social unit, the rural community, whose logical center is the school. In community building as in business organization and expansion there must be an accumulation of capital
before constructive work can be done.
After playing out the analogy to a business organization and observing that
individuals desire group life beyond the family, Hanifan concluded with a
troubling reminder, as well as a call to inquiry that refused despair: “That
there is today almost a total lack of such social capital in rural districts
throughout the country need not be retold in this article. . . . The important
question now is, ‘How may these conditions be made better?’ ”20
Hanifan was not yet done with social capital. With slight alterations, he
included his Annals article as chap. 6 of The Community Center (1920), his
last and most important publication.21 This book figured in a Teacher
Training Series that appeared just after the end of America’s engagement in
World War I.22 The war itself, as well as rural isolation, poverty, and illiteracy,
provided the backdrop and the urgency to accumulate social capital. Hanifan
used the term a few more times in his book, and the greatly expanded number
of pages provided the opportunity to further link social capital to “the community center idea.”23 The Community Center also incorporated another
work whose form made even clearer what Hanifan was doing in hailing the
community center in terms of “social capital.” He was using the concept to
help create the thing itself; or, rather, he was using the term to name that
which his and others’ efforts were designed to bring about. This earlier work,
of 1913—A Handbook Containing Suggestions and Programs for Community Social Gatherings at Rural School Houses—lived up to its title by providing twenty-one programs “to both help and encourage teachers in the
great work of improving rural social life.”24 The programs were intended as
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little more than first steps toward more effective and imaginative solutions to
the problems of isolation and urban migration. But since it was urgent “that
something be done,” Hanifan suggested hosting dramatic and musical programs, as well as a health day. A peace day invited memorials by aging Civil
War veterans on the “destruction by war,” and an Indian Night peaked by
debating whether “white men were justified in driving the Indians from their
possessions and occupying them for themselves.”25 When the Handbook programs were compressed into two long chapters of The Community Center,
Hanifan added to them public debates to force deliberation over women’s
suffrage, capital punishment, and presidential term limits. He also offered
clues for a more theoretical understanding of social capital (to which we
return) cast in terms of “sympathy” and “work.”
The term “social capital” did not appear in Hanifan’s published writings
before 1916. However, he had by then already sketched an analysis of social
conditions that helped explain what he would call “the total lack of social
capital in rural districts” when first using the term. This sketch analyzed
“deplorable” school conditions, “inequalities of wealth” attending “industrial developments,” segregation and unequal education for “Negro youth,”
and “great many foreigners” in rural as well as urban America who could not
“become good citizens” without “a helping hand.”26 More constructively, the
formative concept of social capital sprung from an earlier articulation of “the
social center idea” about which Hanifan was already enthusiastic.27 Here was
a rural educator’s civic dream: an idea and a movement that placed education
in general—and the school in particular—at the center of public life. The
school would be the site for public work and the symbol of the movement.
The social center movement began in 1907 in Rochester, though its idea
was inspired earlier, and it spread rapidly. On the eve of his presidency,
Woodrow Wilson endorsed the movement, as did Theodore Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette, Mary Parker Follett, the National Municipal League, and the
National Education Association (NEA), among others. The subject of several national conferences, the movement spawned an official Social Center
Association of America and numerous informal programs in America’s hinterland—including in West Virginia where the movement arrived and its
message promulgated in 1913 largely through Hanifan’s own efforts and
those of the State Superintendent of Free Schools, M. P. Shawkey. The movement provided a practical as well as a discursive context for understanding
social capital and Hanifan’s innovative matching term. Not only, that is, did
social center activists provide practical projects for the public work of the citizenry to build up their collective resources for future action; they deployed
the terminology of “sympathy,” “work,” and “community.” Bidding individuals, “Go to, now, let us be social,” Herbert Quick and fellow activists
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inveighed against unbridled individualism. The metaphors of economic life
came readily. Consider “what the public may expect in dividends: material,
civic, and social,” reckoned Kate Upson Clark to the NEA during its convention that endorsed the social center movement. The words of then-governor
Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey were read into the proceedings of the convention by the movement’s national leader, Edward J. Ward, whose writings
were cited by Hanifan. “What is going to be produced by this movement,”
Wilson figured, is “a release of common forces . . . now somewhere banked
up.” Ward himself turned from bank to machine to capture the point: “Social
center development is the construction of the necessary machinery whereby
hitherto wasted civic and social forces may be coordinated to develop for all,
and so for each, benefits in light and power.” More simply, the social center
“economizes social forces.”28
Figurative speech born of economic origins adorned other movements of
the Progressive Era. The social center movement was, as Ward noted, “a
focalizing of many movements,” including the social settlement, the civic
club, the community music, the reading circle, the library extension, the university extension, the industrial cooperation, and the country life movements. Hanifan had these various, intersecting movements in mind when he
admitted that his discussion of “social capital” broached “subjects not generally thought of in connection with community center work,” like good roads
and community surveys.29 This latter instrument for assessing communities’
problems was, also, a trademark of the community civics movement. Under
the leadership of Arthur William Dunn, this movement sought to replace the
“old civics” and its rote memorization of governmental formalities, with a
“new civics” more attuned to local community life and active learning.
Young students at school were to investigate and help solve social problems—ranging from health to recreation to migration to land stewardship—
by working in groups or clubs with their peers, teachers, and elders. Thereby,
they learned by doing, they absorbed their duties as well as their rights, and
they made of themselves active citizens, not just citizens-in-waiting. This
movement was an evident complement and ally to the social center movement since nothing was more natural than to place community civics in the
school as social center. It gained many of the same endorsements by organizations like the NEA, picking up additional ones, including the American
Political Science Association (APSA) when it reconsidered The Teaching of
Government. Two of the authors Hanifan cited as best expressing the social
center idea—Field (in 1911) and Nearing (in 1915)—collaborated on Community Civics (in 1916). In this work, the authors reiterated that the school
ideally provided “the social center bond” and praised certain schools for realizing the ideal.30 What was going on in such schools and in the new civics was
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the public work of civic education. It was no giant feat of imagination to gloss
this work (or its accumulative consequences) in metaphoric terms of wealth,
dividends, or economic growth. “Social capital” was just Hanifan’s “figurative” term for it all, as indeed it was for a far more significant thinker of the era.
DEWEY AND THE CONSTRUCTIVE WORK
OF CRITICAL PRAGMATISM
All signs point to John Dewey as presenting the most authoritative philosophy for the movements of civic education and the texts of social capital. His
fame as both philosopher and educator was unsurpassed in his day. He
addressed the NEA in 1902 on “The School as Social Center” before there
was a national movement. His words were used in the call for national meetings of workers in social centers in 1916, and he was himself a participant in
some of the higher-profile meetings. The leaders of the movement, most
notably Ward, acknowledged their debt to Dewey, as did the leaders of the
community civics movement, most notably Dunn. Indeed, Dunn articulated
his own “justification and aim” in community civics simply by citing
Dewey’s words (from the 1897 Ethical Principles Underlying Education) on
citizenship training. The special editor of the Annals in which Hanifan came
out with “social capital” introduced the volume by quoting Dewey’s School
and Society. A number of authors in the volume quoted Dewey or drew upon
his oft-cited notions about cooperative experimentation, learning-by-doing,
or the new civics. The author documenting the democratic appeal of the community music movement—“music for the people, of the people, and by the
people”—cited Dewey’s words as inspiration. Hanifan himself cited
Dewey’s famous treatises, including School and Society, as well as Schools
for Tomorrow and Democracy and Education. These citations outnumbered
those for any other author.31
Dewey’s philosophy was the seedbed for the concept of social capital in
this era, one fruit of which was the term itself. For Dewey, “society means
association; coming together in joint intercourse and action for the better
realization of any form of experience which is augmented and confirmed by
being shared” (1920 in MW 12:196). Democracy itself was nothing other
than “a mode of associated living” (1916 in MW 9:93) experienced by citizens in and through their communication with each other, via associations,
education, and public work. Dewey’s social center address (1902 in MW
2:83) noted that “the content of the term ‘citizenship’is broadening; it is coming to mean all the relationships of all sorts that are involved in membership
in a community.” While Dewey would briefly imagine one Great Community
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(later in The Public and Its Problems), his principal message concerned the
diverse communities of democratic life, as found in the collectivities of
schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces, down to the groups, associations,
and clubs in them. These collectivities provided “the network of social activities that bind people together” (1915 in MW 8:362). They also provided sites
for an education that mined and “conserved” for future use the “native fund
of power” that individuals have when organized in society, drawing upon the
“resources of the whole group” (1897 in EW 5:79, 437).
Dewey gave his philosophy a number of names, the most famous (and
often misunderstood) being pragmatism. Apart from narrowly philosophical
meanings, pragmatism was about work, what works to solve problems, and
the habits that sustained the work of problem solving. One could call it (following Campbell) Social Pragmatism in order to underscore its relentlessly
social understanding of work, problems, and habits. One could also call it
Critical Pragmatism in order to highlight its relentlessly critical stance
toward received traditions in philosophy or public life.32 Pragmatism was
itself one of many offspring of the critical philosophies of Kant and Hegel, a
heritage it repaid by being critical of them most of all. Dewey (1925 in LW
1:298) would presently come to think that all “philosophy is inherently criticism” where criticism was “discriminating judgment . . . concern[ing] goods
or values” relevant to the problems of public life. Among these problems,
critical pragmatism took a stance against any agency that denied or deprived
the democratic goods of sympathy and cooperation—in short, social capital—to individuals or communities. Whether human beings or social forces,
such agencies of denial or deprivation represented “the evils of the present
industrial and political situation” (1897 in EW 5:72). Dewey numbered
among them poverty, unemployment, and isolation, as well as ignorance, racism, and nationalism. He criticized government for failing to address these
evils or to live up to its own avowals of democracy. He assailed capitalism for
its dogmatic philosophy of unbridled individualism and property rights, as
well as for its corporations that “treated competitors, employees, and the
public in a purely economic fashion” without regard to “private sympathy or
public duty” (1908 in MW 5:446). “Trusts” (usually in quotes) abused their
fiduciary powers and gave “trust” a bad name. Traditional education shared
the individualism of capitalist ideology, though it was otherwise out of step
with the radical changes wrought by capitalism. And it was fixated on “the
trinity of fetishes”—reading, writing, and arithmetic (1896 in EW 5:440).
Three points about critical pragmatism deserve emphasis regarding social
capital. First, criticism must be attended by construction (a point underscored
in Dewey’s later Construction and Criticism). Criticism is prompted by problems or crises in social life that it in turn seeks to help solve, resolve, or ame-
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liorate.33 Never purely negative, that is, criticism serves constructive purposes by fashioning ideas about the work or action required and then guiding
that work or action, drawing upon the very social conditions that relate to
problem or crisis. We leverage one part of a given reality against another;
there is nothing outside, above, or providentially guaranteed. Where social
capital is denied, deprived, or absent, shared public work via active networking in associations is the only solution or amelioration available. Dewey himself exemplified what a public intellectual might do to realize the constructive point of criticism and to rebuild social capital. He established (in 1896)
and was the driving force (until 1904) behind the Laboratory School at the
University of Chicago as an action-oriented alternative to traditional education. The so-called “Dewey School” intended to do its part to bring “the
child” into “the same social movement which has transformed slaves and servile laboring classes into persons as ends in themselves” (1896 in EW 5:451).
Dewey also helped found and lead the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and
the League of Independent Political Action (LIPA).34 These associations
were constructive, meliorist, and yet radical efforts of cooperative action to
solve the problems or resolve the crises that called them into existence.
Second, critical pragmatism gave prominence to sympathy. This entailed
the ordinary sense of feeling concern or compassion for others, especially
those denied or deprived life’s essentials, including social capital. But, more
fundamentally, sympathy was a capacity of the imagination that could be cultivated to understand and identify moral commonalities with others: “more
than mere feeling; it is a cultivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.” Because of its
sweeping consequences, sympathy is “the general principle of moral knowledge” (1916 in MW 9:128). Dewey is indebted here, down to the phrasing, to
Adam Smith and David Hume. For them, as for Dewey, sympathy was “the”
general principle of moral knowledge because it articulated the unique
capacity that constituted or made possible via imaginative projection everything else in moral psychology and social life. (This would appear to include
what we mean today by trust, though it is not uninteresting that none of them
elevate trust within moral psychology and indeed barely note it at all.) For
Dewey (1887 in EW 2:294), “all that we call society, state, and humanity are
the realization of [the] permanent and universal relations of persons which
are based upon active sympathy.”
Third, despite criticizing the negative consequences of capitalism, Dewey
appropriates its own vocabulary to bring “social” and “capital” together for
rhetorical and critical effect. This was a terminological strategy of critical
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pragmatism. Dewey called books “banks” in which onetime was uniquely
invested “the capital handed down from past generations”; in contemporary
life such capital circulates in “the social commonwealth” freed from “monopolistic possession of any class or guild” (1898 in EW 5:256-57). Moreover,
only when the individual learner participates in “the social consciousness of
the race” does “he becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization”
(1897 in EW 5:84). Drawing even closer to social capital, Dewey decried in
his social center address (1902 in MW 2:92) the “unutilized talent dormant all
about us” as so much “wasted capital” that “society suffers” for want of providing “opportunities for adults” to realize their “particular capacities”
amidst the “resources of the community.” What’s more, Dewey used the very
term “social capital” in four different publications (1900, 1909, 1915, and
1934), three of which preceded Hanifan’s usage.
“Social capital” appears in Dewey’s writings for the first time in The Elementary School Record. Brought together as a single volume in 1900, the
Record consisted of nine monographs that Dewey edited and to which he
contributed. Each monograph consisted of articles on the principles or practices of the Laboratory School. The School embodied the action-oriented
pedagogy of critical pragmatism, especially the commitment that schools
were in fact and could better be social communities of cooperative learning
via shared work and group activities. In the ninth and last monograph, Dewey
articulated the underlying psychology by criticizing both the old psychology
that “regarded the mind as a purely individual affair” and “the traditional or
three R’s curriculum” in which isolated students memorized their lessons in
reading, writing, and arithmetic. To the old psychologists, Dewey responded
that the “individual mind [is] a function of social life.” To the fetishists of the
three R’s, he countered that these subjects needed to be connected to children’s social life activities, not as individualized exercises of “mechanical
drill” and “abject dependence.” Take their measure differently and reconstruct their teaching accordingly, for
these subjects are social in a double sense. They represent the tools which society has
evolved in the past as the instruments of its intellectual pursuits. They [also] represent the
keys which will unlock to the child the wealth of social capital which lies beyond the possible range of his limited individual experience.
To underscore the message, Dewey preferred to think of the three R’s as “work
in language, literature, and number.”35 Such work drew upon and helped produce a fund of accumulated power that society counts as its capital.
Dewey made exactly these points in exactly these words in a second publication. He included them in the revised edition of School and Society in 1915.
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Indeed, Dewey reprinted all five of his articles from The Elementary School
Record as chapters in the new edition. This brought them into a text and under
a title of enormous influence and popularity whose first edition (of 1900) had
gone through eleven impressions and nearly twenty thousand copies. (It is
also a work that has never been out of print.) The reference to “social capital”
was thereby rendered materially more prominent and, like the chapters themselves, “more accessible to a wider range of readers,” a reviewer noted.36 It
was made intellectually and critically more prominent, too, given its juxtaposition to arguments articulated in the original (and now the first three) chapters of School and Society. The most striking of these arguments was that “a
new movement in education” was emerging due to the revolutionary forces
of industrialization, urbanization, and technology. “It is radical conditions
which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.” Schools needed rethinking as centers of community and social life.
The curriculum needed overhaul to contribute to “the larger social evolution.” Individual studies needed to be thought of “as instrumentalities
through which the school shall be made a genuine form of active community
life.” They were to regard each student’s interests as “natural resources,
uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of
the child.”37 New studies were needed to harvest these resources and invest
this capital. Old ones, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, needed recasting
to unlock the wealth of social capital.
If traditional education fettered social capital, racism was its ball-andchain. Fighting racism provided a public stage for “social capital” in an
address by Dewey to the National Negro Conference in 1909. Dewey began
his short address by expressing “sympathy” for the purposes of the conference, namely, to advance the equal rights of African descendants in America
and to encourage enfranchised Americans to adopt the point of view and
think consequentially about the disfranchised. “There is no ‘inferior race,’ ”
Dewey declared, “and the members of a race so-called should each have the
same opportunities” for education and advancement through schools, vocations, and work, as any other. This shifted the burden to society as a whole to
provide such opportunities, not only as a matter of justice and fairness, but to
“utilize all of the individual capital that is being born” into it. But “social capital” was also at stake, as Dewey dramatized when concluding his address.
All points of skill are represented in every race, from the inferior individual to the superior individual, and a society that does not furnish the environment and education and the
opportunity of all kinds which will bring out and make effective the superior ability wherever it is born, is not merely doing an injustice to that particular race and to those particular individuals, but it is doing an injustice to itself for it is depriving itself of just that much
of social capital.38
Farr / SOCIAL CAPITAL
19
In the audience hearing this was W. E. B. DuBois, who may also be counted a
critical pragmatist. Together, DuBois, Dewey, and a Committee of Forty
would harness the constructive energies of the conference to found the
NAACP the next year.
None of these uses of “social capital” by Dewey—1900, 1909, or 1915—
were attended by an elaboration or used in a title as Hanifan would. Had
Dewey done so, it is hard to imagine that he would not have long since been
noticed as the first or most prominent twentieth-century user of the term (and
concept). Yet, elaboration, title, or prior notice notwithstanding, the term is
there; the concept is omnipresent in his writings. Dewey’s numerous readers
doubtless took in one or the other or both. It is natural to speculate in particular about Hanifan, given his closeness in time, vocation, and philosophy to
Dewey. Did Hanifan get “social capital” from Dewey? The question and evidence are tantalizing, but the answer is (at present) inconclusive. Hanifan
clearly read and prominently cited Dewey in the bibliography of his 1920
book on the community center, a topic upon which Dewey had famously spoken much earlier. However, he did not cite him in his original Annals essay of
1916. He studied “association and culture” in a course with Dewey’s friend
and collaborator, William I. Thomas, at the University of Chicago in 1908,
but no precise connections through Thomas to Dewey are evident. Hanifan
was at Harvard in 1909, already concerned with the education of West Virginia’s African American citizens, when the proceedings of the National
Negro Conference were received and catalogued by the College Library (see
MW 4:156n). However, we do not know whether he read Dewey’s address in
them, if at all. Hanifan appears to have absorbed Dewey’s concept, not to
mention the philosophy of critical pragmatism of the Progressive Era. But he
may well have (thought he) invented the term himself. If true, this would confirm the pattern identified by Putnam that users of “social capital” have been
unknown to one another, until recently. Dewey, it turns out, also breaks this
pattern, in the context of his fourth and final usage. He was aware of at least
one other who takes us back even further in time,39 into the context of nineteenth-century political economy, opening another conceptual horizon.
BELLAMY AND THE COOPERATIVE ASSOCIATIONS
OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
Dewey returned to “social capital” one last time. The concept that this term
matched was a different (because more narrowly economic) one, but nonetheless revelatory for our conceptual history. Dewey unleashed the term in a
lead article of Common Sense that bore the title “A Great American Prophet.”
20
POLITICAL THEORY / February 2004
The prophet was Edward Bellamy, the utopian socialist and self-styled
nationalist whose 1897 book, Equality, Dewey thought palpably relevant in
the early 1930s to “the shaping of popular opinion for a new social order.”
Common Sense was the organ of the LIPA that then counted Dewey as its
chairman, DuBois as one of its vice chairmen, and a new party as its mission.
In the midst of the Depression, Dewey was an even more critical pragmatist
and socialistic democrat than before, praising the teachings of Henry George
and hailing the return of Bellamy Societies across the country. (The editors
proclaimed, “Bellamy clubs are springing up everywhere.”) For Dewey,
Bellamy was the ideal prophetic and pragmatic figure, known for his “religion of solidarity” and critique of the trusts. His “Utopia”—read by “hundreds of thousands” in Equality or Looking Backward40—was a tool of criticism. It made one “realize by force of contrast the realities of the social world
in which we now actually live”; it indicted “the injustices, oppressions, and
wreckages attendant on the present economic system”; and it conveyed “a
sense of the terrible gulf between what is possible and what is actual.” Yet,
Bellamy was “definitely constructive” for providing a “translation of ideas of
democracy into economic terms.” “Social capital” was one such term. Dewey
did not elaborate, but he drew attention to Bellamy’s “picture of a socialized
economy” in contrast to “private capital” whose usual associations with liberty were turned upside down.
It is not merely that he exposes with extraordinary vigor and clarity the restriction upon
liberty that the present system imposes but that he pictures how socialized industry and
finance would release and further all those personal and private types of choice of occupation and use of leisure that men and women actually most prize today. His picture of a
reign of brotherly love may be overdrawn. But the same cannot be said of his account of
freedom in personal life outside of the imperative demand for the amount of work necessary to provide for the upkeep of social capital. In an incidental chapter on the present servility to fashion he brings out the underlying principle. “Equality creates an atmosphere
which kills imitation, and is pregnant with originality, for everyone acts out himself, having nothing to gain by imitating anyone else.” It is the present system that promotes uni41
formity, standardization, and regimentation.
The conceptual connections between a “socialized economy” and “social
capital” did not need belaboring to the readers of Common Sense. For them,
social capital conveyed a democratic and egalitarian vision based on solidarity: namely, labor and social wealth should be shared cooperatively. Readers
of Bellamy’s Equality, running back nearly four decades, would have found
the term already in service of this vision.
In a chapter from which Dewey quotes—“Private Capital Stolen from the
Social Fund”—Bellamy himself stakes out “social capital.” He ties it to the
social fund, as the total accumulated wealth of society created by all laboring
Farr / SOCIAL CAPITAL
21
heads and hands, minus immediate needs of consumption. The wealth of the
social fund is, he calculates, two hundred–fold more than would be the case if
all workers labored alone; it was thereby the collective product of “the social
organism, the machinery of associated labor and exchange.” The title of his
chapter suggests that the social fund exists even under capitalism since it is
looted by private capitalists, where looting was measured by the difference
between wealth created and wages paid. No one but a socialist, however,
would put matters this way; no one but a utopian would set it up as Bellamy
did, namely, in an imaginary future a century off, in the year 2000, after a revolution that peacefully ended private capitalism and brought to everyone,
equally, economic and social wealth in the form of health, education, culture,
associated living, and personal liberty. This is the world to which Julian West,
a young capitalist from 1897, awoke. Amazed by all he finds, he exclaimed to
his host and interlocutor, Dr. Leete,
I like that idea of the social fund immensely! It makes me understand, among other
things, the completeness with which you seem to have outgrown the wages notion, which
in one form or other was fundamental to all economic thought in my day. It is because you
are accustomed to regarding the social capital rather than your day-to-day exertions as the
main source of your wealth. It is, in a word, the difference between the attitude of the capitalist and the proletarian.
“Even so,” the doctor replied, shifting terms for conceptual effect, “the Revolution made us all capitalists.”42
This social-fund concept of social capital—perhaps best conceived as
socialized capital, maybe even socialist capital—differed from the one articulated by Dewey or Hanifan in the opening decades (much less Coleman and
Putnam in the closing decades) of the twentieth century. It was and is a different concept, even acknowledging the considerable range in the family of subsequent conceptions of social capital. Yet, the social fund concept of social
capital deserves attention here in our conceptual history for terminological,
temporal, and thematic reasons. Moreover, it is not hard to appreciate why
Dewey (and others surviving the Gilded Age or suffering the Great Depression) would have found this concept relevant to the other. A socialized economy under egalitarian conditions seemed designed to foster (or consist in)
dense networks of associations in community, organized activities of cooperative work, and heightened social capacities like sympathy and solidarity.
Furthermore, such associations, activities, and capacities (that is, social capital in the contemporary sense) were already being denied or deprived to far
too many individuals, groups, and communities under capitalism—from
African Americans to industrial workers to rural denizens to children in traditional schools. That, at any rate, had been the burden of Dewey’s critiques
22
POLITICAL THEORY / February 2004
and the occasion of Hanifan’s concerns, not to mention what Bellamy was
doing in using “social capital” in the critical and utopian way that he did.
Bellamy was targeting the present economic system, as Dewey noted. But he
also intended to challenge the scientific claims of a “false political economy”
that obscured social problems under capitalism or that limited the social fund
doctrine only to questions of land (possibly George). Compliments thereby
went to a “true” political economy whose categories were “simple” and
clearly based upon labor and solidarity (probably Marx).43 Bellamy did not
name names in his utopia, and his own reading inclined more to the Social
Gospel. But he pointed in the right direction, for prominent political economists had in fact used the language of social fund, social wealth, even “social
capital” in roughly the same way.
Political economists had already deployed “social capital” in the context
of the transformation of classical political economy in the nineteenth century.
Alfred Marshall (in 1890) had done so (as Woolcock notes). But, before Marshall, so had John Bates Clark (in 1885), Henry Sidgwick (in 1883), and Karl
Marx (in 1867). (One suspects others.) They were each in their own way
challenging classical political economy, either by radicalizing its labor theory of value (Marx), accommodating it to utilitarianism and marginal utility
theory (Sidgwick and Marshall, differently), or moving to replace it altogether with a marginalist theory of production and distribution (Clark). They
were also attacking what they regarded as the unsocial point of view of classical political economy, as well as its “wage-fund doctrine”—namely, the doctrine that wages were advanced to workers by capitalists from an antecedent
fixed fund that the capitalists’ foresight and abstinence had made possible.
Social capital was “capital from the social point of view”—to use the summary locution first introduced by Sidgwick and, following him, Marshall.44
This contrasted with the “individual” point of view of a capitalist assessing
his personal holdings or trade investments. Predicated of any political community, up to the nation, “social capital” was an aggregate of tools, inventions, improvements in land, and other material elements, including “roads,
bridges, and the organization of the State,” Marshall tallied. The skill and
ability of humans counted, as well. Therefore, education was always at the
margins of discussion, blurring the later distinction between physical and
human capital. “General education adapts the mind to use its best faculties in
business and to use business itself as a means of increasing culture.” Beyond
“the wealth laid out in education,” Sidgwick added “immaterial” elements
like “good-will” as “a part of ‘social capital’ ” because it was a cultural ingredient of the “habits of purchasing.”45 (Recall Hanifan using “good-will” as
one of the synonyms for what he meant by the term.)
Farr / SOCIAL CAPITAL
23
Social capital, thus aggregated, provided an expanding fund for further
production. Hence, it displayed as its defining twin qualities prospectiveness
and productiveness. It was the “productive action of capital”—not just labor,
as Henry George thought—that occasioned Clark to first use “social capital.”
He would later speak repeatedly of the productivity of “the fund of social
capital.”46 Despite his far more radical project, Marx had much earlier, in
1867, used the term “social capital” (gesellschaftliche Kapital) as an aggregate or “quantitative grouping” of individual capitals that formed a fund for
further production. An individual’s capital was thus “an aliquot part of social
capital.” There was that “part of social capital domiciled in each particular
sphere of production.” However, Marx was wont to emphasize the variable
magnitude of social wealth as created by labor alone. By contrast, “classical
economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a
fixed degree of efficiency.” False theoretically, this “dogma” mainly served
“apologetic purposes” since it was used to deny that workers had “the power
to enlarge the so-called labour-fund at the expense of the ‘revenue’ of the
wealthy.”47 Even the more sanguine Marshall admitted by 1890 that the wage
fund doctrine was a “slovenly way of talking” that was “used by some capitalists who were anxious to prevent the working classes for endeavoring to
get higher wages.”48 The terminology of “fund” was still apt, when correctly
understood.
Beyond these affinities, the postclassical political economists diverged
dramatically in their respective theories and ideologies, and in ways that need
not concern us. However, one final issue does: the role of associations in their
account of social capital. Classical political economists, certainly Adam
Smith and David Ricardo, had long since inquired into the associations that
facilitated economic life, beneath or beyond the market and the division of
labor. The later critics analyzed them even more, largely because there were
more of them. In the works of Marx, Sidgwick, Marshall, and Clark alone,
one finds a teeming life of corporations, combinations, trusts, cartels, jointstock companies, guilds, trade unions, brotherhoods of labor, friendly societies, mutual aid societies, communes, and cooperatives of endless variation.
These associations served competing or complementary economic purposes:
to maximize profits, monopolize markets, increase efficiency, render mutual
aid, raise wages, shorten the working day, share wealth, mitigate or inflame
class antagonism. Herein lies the contribution of the political economists to a
conceptual history of social capital, beyond the use of the term itself. This
contribution has been overlooked in current debates that otherwise underscore the importance of associations for begetting social capital.
The associations that most attracted the attention of the political economists were those of the nascent and growing cooperative movement of stores,
24
POLITICAL THEORY / February 2004
farming, and/or labor. They did more than serve or modulate the economic
purposes of capital viewed socially. They drew upon and helped reproduce a
wealth of capacities and virtues for their members and the “social organism”
at large. The International Working Men’s Association, for example,
acknowledged “the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces
of the present society.” It aspired to “the republican and beneficent system of
the association of free and equal producers.” It also inspired Marx, in the year
of Capital’s publication, to instruct the delegates of the association to sponsor programs of education—mental, bodily, and technical—to bring young
people to “cooperate in the great work of social production, as a progressive,
sound and legitimate tendency.”49 For Marshall, “the co-operative movement
and other kinds of voluntary association” promised to harness or unleash
“various motives besides that of pecuniary gain,” thereby “widening the
scope of collective action for the public good.” In this, their “moral advantage” far exceeded their “material one.” Besides cooperation, Clark saw in
cooperative associations, as Bellamy would, “the principle of solidarity”
which “even in its present crude state, presents the beginnings of a reign of
law” in economy and society. Marshall too looked forward, imagining a time
when “the higher work of the co-operative movement” would build “trust and
confidence” in workers who managed their own affairs. Even studying these
associations promised to promote virtuous capacities: they “call for and
develop the faculty of sympathy, and especially that rare sympathy which
enables people to put themselves in the place, not only of their comrades, but
also of other classes.”50 So it was that sympathy, solidarity, trust, and related
capacities or virtues were conceptually bound to the present and future work
of cooperative associations.
“Let us finally imagine”—with Marx and toward conclusion—“an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common,
and expending their many different forms of labor-power in full selfawareness as one single social labor force.” Such an imagined association,
famously in Capital, helped reveal the “secret” of the fetishism of commodities. A utopian thought experiment, that is, clarified that the things we
exchange have in themselves no magical powers. Social wealth was and
ought better to be understood as a fund and function of human work and
cooperative associations. Had Marx, the first identified user of the term, ever
wished to speak more eulogistically about “social capital”—say, as
gemeinschaftliche Kapital versus gesellschaftliche Kapital—this would
have been the moment to do so. But that might have required too much irony,
even for Marx, since capital was more fetishized than commodities were.
Indeed, “interest-bearing capital is the most consummate automatic fetish,
the self-expanding value, the money-making money.”51 The lessons of asso-
Farr / SOCIAL CAPITAL
25
ciations, real or imagined, nonetheless still applied. However the term was to
be used, “social capital” should not cloak the work for which it fronts or be
reified as a power higher than the human associations that made it possible.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
The political economists of the nineteenth century—from Marx to Marshall to Bellamy—took capital from the social point of view. Today’s social
capitalists, apparently, take “the social” from capital’s point of view. The one
reflected an age coming to terms with capital, the other an age coming to capital for its terms. Then, “social capital” expressed an explicit antithesis to an
unsocial perspective upon capital, now, an implicit antithesis to a noncapitalist perspective on society. “Social capital” was once a category of
political economy in a period of its transformation, now one of economized
politics, expressing the general dominance of economic modes of analysis in
society and social science. But, in the long view, these perspectives may not
be logical antinomies so much as two sides of the same coin. Both, surely,
sought or seek to comprehend the social relations constitutive of modern capitalist societies, and to position capital as their governing asset. And both, significantly, did so in the very terminology of “social capital.” Thus a pathway
that leads to the contemporary family of conceptions has now restored to it an
even earlier discourse, in the same terms, than before we knew. This is historically instructive and genealogically important, I believe. The nineteenthcentury political economists may thus be as deserving as Tocqueville to be
remembered, in Putnam’s words, as “the patron saints of contemporary
social capitalists.” If not, they certainly deserve historical remembrance for
having provided the terminological, temporal, and thematic point of departure for subsequent conceptual change. They used the term, sought its conceptual constituents, and hailed the associations of the cooperative movement. Dewey and the civic educators of the Progressive Era are most
certainly as deserving of memory, including Hanifan’s debt to them. Via
Hanifan, one discursive path to the present is mapped, and a conceptual history completed.
Regarding social capital or any key concept, there is no compulsory relationship between the findings of a conceptual history and the prospects of
contemporary theory. Yet, in recovering the conceptions of overlooked thinkers or texts, we have revealed lost distinctions, forgotten connections, and
unfamiliar but coherent uses of social capital that might yet enrich or advance
our thinking about how the concept might be used now or in the future. Certainly, “it is apt to seem much less convincing to suggest that a concept might
26
POLITICAL THEORY / February 2004
be coherently used in an unfamiliar way than to show that it has been put to
unfamiliar but coherent uses.”52 The coherent uses of social capital in Dewey
or the political economists are not in any case utterly unfamiliar, as we have
seen and now selectively summarize.
“Social capital” may be—because it has been—used as a figurative term
for a prospective and productive fund that is created by shared, public work.
Used figuratively, it relies for its metaphoric power on the dominant discourse of economics in a capitalist society. As such, there is no reason to
insist that, properly speaking, it is a form of capital, despite an overlapping
terminology of work and other ostensibly economic categories. (Upon pain
of reification, it might be a wise general practice to use italics and/or scare
quotes when identifying “social capital,” if not simply to refer directly to
work and its consequences.) Shared, public work is primary to social capital,
in any case; social capital needs constant refunding by such work. The public
work of civic education as organized in explicit programs is of prime importance, especially in those cases where social capital is lacking, depleted, or in
need of refunding. The moral psychology of social capital understood in
these terms depends in large measure upon sympathy, not only as the compassion to work with or for others less fortunate, but as that more fundamental capacity to imagine one’s self in their places and to consider consequentially their welfare in ours. Upon sympathy, then, depends cooperation and
solidarity, among other capacities, including conceivably trust. Since sympathy is a cultivatable capacity, civic education is obviously important to its further cultivation. Finally, despite or because of its figurative status and positive connotations, “social capital” may be—because it has been—put to
critical use to spotlight those agencies or forces that deny or deprive identifiable groups or communities of the freedom or equality of shared work, civic
education, or sympathy and solidarity. The point of the speech act is to imagine and undertake constructive negations of these agencies or forces. This is
the critical stance of a pragmatist in matters of social capital.
No one can be compelled to consider social capital in these ways, even
after being shown that it has been put to such use in the past by theorists as
pragmatic as Dewey, as prophetic as Bellamy, or as pedagogical as Hanifan.
Social capitalists may continue to cleave to trust and bonding, or to pin their
hopes on picnics and organized sports. Their antagonists may persist in pitting Social Capital versus Social Theory or in asking, “It May Be Social, But
Why Is It Capital?”53 Perhaps the earlier conceptions remain tied to an irretrievable past. If not, their reintroduction may only fuel the proliferation and
contestation of contemporary ones. New problems of causality may come
along, though this would not disrupt any extant explanatory harmony. As
Putnam candidly admits, “the causal arrows . . . are as tangled as well-tossed
Farr / SOCIAL CAPITAL
27
spaghetti.”54 Aware of these possible reactions and apprised of how much
remains to be done in going forward in the terms of the past, we might here
tender a simple possibility beyond genealogical warrant for reconsidering
social capital in terms of criticism and pragmatism, public work and civic
education, sympathy and solidarity: it might enrich or advance current debate
by providing better fit or greater clarity for some old problems or some new
initiatives, in theory and practice. By way of conclusion and suggestion, let
us briefly consider three.
First, poor or marginalized communities are now, belatedly, receiving
attention in terms of social capital. Rural, urban, African American, and
working-class communities struggle against pitched odds to create the networks or muster the norms or accumulate the real monetary capital for combating poverty and isolation. It is instructive in this context that the editors of
and contributors to an important collection like Social Capital and Poor
Communities express some misgivings about social capital, as usually understood, and seek to take a more critical stance in terms of it. Among other
things, we are admonished “to interrogate” the concept before “we celebrate
the divine nature of social capital” or fall sway to its “kinder, gentler means of
social control.” In the foreword, Putnam allows that the concept has been
contested recently, finding it timely to repair to Hanifan again, with emphasis
this time on his “practical concerns about overcoming poverty in rural Appalachia, nearly a century ago.” Dewey, Bellamy, and Marx also addressed
practical concerns about African American disfranchisement, class differentials in urban society, and the suppression of intellect in traditional schools.
With them or Hanifan we have a conception that strongly backs practical concerns about “making social capital work,”55 not to mention giving backbone
to the protestations by social capitalists that their concept is not fuzzy or
warm, apologetic or nostalgic, middle-class or small town.
Second, sympathy hides in the shadow of trust in the contemporary moral
psychology of social capital. It might deserve to emerge in its own light and
be investigated in relation to trust, especially since trust may not be able to
bear the full burden placed upon it by social capitalists. This, in turn, opens up
the question of other capacities and virtues that are essential to cooperative
associations, as recognized by earlier theorists. It is in any case sympathy, not
trust, that captures the “civic virtue” that allows me to act with and toward
others after I have tried, euphemistically, “ ‘to put myself in their shoes.’ ”56
This projective capacity of the imagination surely bears upon our ability to
judge the trustworthiness of others, or actually to place trust in them.
“Whether trust is really an essential ingredient for widespread cooperation
and exchange is not so clear.”57 Perhaps sympathy is. If so, there is much theoretical and empirical work still to do, among other reasons because “the
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POLITICAL THEORY / February 2004
term sympathy has not been popular with experimental behavioral scientists”
and has only recently been thought relevant to social capital in agricultural
economics.58 There is much practical work to do, as well, especially in figuring out how better to activate and act upon sympathy.
Finally, the future of social capital, like its past, may well lie with programs of civic education already enacted or yet to be imagined. This promises—and risks—more than the quite general claim that education of most
any sort is essential to human or social capital. Even this quite general claim
was submerged in the discussions of networks, norms, and trust that pervaded the late 1980s and 1990s. Putnam, who remains the bellwether in all
these discussions, said very little about education in his first forays with
social capital. He now hails the importance of education in general, and
places “civics education” at the top of the “agenda for social capitalists,”
especially “well-designed service learning programs.”59 We know that the
most efficacious of these programs are not only well-designed and sustained,
but are intentionally civic in their language and problem orientation.60 Even
then, such programs would benefit theoretically from a pragmatist critique of
the Deweyan sort. And they would benefit practically if they thought of their
arena of work not only in school, but in the school as social center (as it were)
devising programs that are creative, inclusive, and egalitarian, reaching out
and across generations, associations, and communities. The programmatic
tasks—much less the obstacles—are daunting. No serious civic educator
these days is so Pollyannaish as to think otherwise or to imagine an easy go of
the work required. But the basic vision and sense of practical urgency that
refuses to give up need not be imagined de novo. This is what Dunn, Dewey,
Hanifan, and the other civic educators of the Progressive Era were all about in
the past. They may yet help us imagine our future, if Dewey (1938 in LW
12:238) is right that “intelligent understanding of past history is to some
extent a lever for moving the present into a certain kind of future.”
NOTES
1. Michael Woolcock, “Social Capital and Economic Development: Toward a Theoretical
Synthesis and Policy Framework,” Theory and Society 27 (1988): 155; Jeffery J. Mondak, “Editor’s Introduction, Special Issue on Psychological Approaches to Social Capital,” Political Psychology 19 (1988): 433.
2. Besides works cited below, see Glenn C. Loury, “Why Should We Care about Group
Inequality?” Social Philosophy and Policy 5 (1987): 249-71; James S. Coleman, “Social Capital
in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): 95-120; Pierre
Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Farr / SOCIAL CAPITAL
29
3. Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of
Democracy 6 (1995): 65-78; idem, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
4. Already see especially valuable discussions in Alejandro Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 1-24; Nan
Lin, Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Simon Szreter, “The State of Social Capital: Bringing Back in Power, Politics,
and History,” Theory and Society 31 (2002): 573-621.
5. See Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19; and, on the Web, “as far as credit for inventing the term,
Hanifan’s is the claim to beat.” Putnam acknowledges his research assistant, Brad Clarke, for
finding Hanifan.
7. Woolcock, “Social Capital,” 160, building upon Alejandro Portes and Julia
Sensenbrenner, “Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes on the Social Determinants of Economic Action,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993): 1320-50.
8. With the exception of the four original publications in which he uses “social capital,” I
refer here and below to Dewey’s works by date, as included in EW, MW, or LW, followed by volume number and pages. The shorthand references are to Early Works, 1882-1888 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1969-72); Middle Works, 1899-1924 (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1976-83); and Later Works, 1925-1953 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984-91).
9. Most welcome would be a conceptual history that branched off or included Pierre
Bourdieu, making its way through French and continental social theory.
10. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 21, 22.
11. Quotation marks are placed around terms as one would when quoting words actually
used; they are dispensed with when referring to concepts or when no distinction need be drawn
between term and concept.
12. These notions are from H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, UK: Clarendon,
1961); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York:
Macmillan, 1953).
13. James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1990), 300-18; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook
of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York:
Greenwood, 1986), 248; Glenn C. Loury, “A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences,” in
Women, Minorities, and Employment Discrimination, ed. P. A. Wallace and A. LeMond
(Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1977), 177; Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 138; John R. Seeley, Alexander Sim, and Elizabeth W.
Loosley, Crestwood Heights: A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life (New York: Basic Books,
1956). Loury’s single mention of “social capital” in his 1977 essay prompted Lester Thurow to
note “the concept of ‘social’ human capital investments” and anticipate a “greater” role for it, in
“Comments,” in Women, Minorities, and Employment Discrimination, 188.
14. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2:352.
15. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 24, 292.
16. James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan, in Collected
Works (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1995), 7:39.
17. Woolcock, “Social Capital,” 159.
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18. There are also some interesting near matches in the history of social capital. Consider a
striking and surprisingly overlooked one. In their penultimate page, Gabriel Almond and Sidney
Verba refer to “social overhead capital,” having already discussed “networks,” “norms,” “trust,”
and “community.” They also use economic metaphors about “dividend” or “reserve of influence”
accruing from group participation. See The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1963), 274, 284, 297, 299, 322, 504. For the record, there are also some interesting near
matches in nineteenth-century literary contexts. Clarence Cook, for example, contrasted Aesop’s
account of the ass in a lion’s skin with that of the jackdaw who made “a little social capital for
himself, out of borrowed feathers,” in “Togas and Toggery,” Scribner’s Monthly 14 (1877): 799.
Walter Dean Howells had a lady in a comedic situation complain of a fawning gentleman who
“makes social capital out of his obtrusive services,” in “Out of the Question. A Comedy,” Atlantic
Monthly 39 (1877): 200.
19. Space limitations precluded a more extensive discussion of Hanifan (1879-1932).
20. Lyda J. Hanifan, “The Rural School Community Center,” The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 67 (1916): 130-38.
21. Lyda J. Hanifan, The Community Center (Boston: Silver, Burdett & Company, 1920). A
reviewer—probably the student of public oratory, Charles F. Lindsay—found the book of help to
the “many teachers who face the gigantic task of awakening social consciousness in those rural
communities that need the vitalizing touch of original and zealous leadership.” Although he
judged the programs “hackneyed,” he praised “a good chapter on ‘Social Capital.’” See
Charles F. Lindsay, “Review of The Community Center,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 10 (1920):
102-4. My copy of The Community Center was originally in the Free Traveling Library of the
state of Minnesota, a fitting vehicle for Hanifan’s message.
22. “Necessities of war” also conscripted the school as a “national center” to help government “make the world safe for democracy” (in The Community Center, 1, 3, 7). In a rare notice of
Hanifan, Kevin Mattson selects only this issue to discuss in Creating a Democratic Public: The
Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy during the Progressive Era (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 11. This neglects Hanifan’s prewar efforts and his
postwar expectations.
23. Hanifan, The Community Center, 32, 40f, 142, 181.
24. Lyda J. Hanifan, A Handbook Containing Suggestions and Programs for Community
Social Gatherings at Rural School Houses (Charleston, WV: State Department of Education,
1913). The Handbook was reprinted in 1914, 1915, and 1916, with dates on the respective covers.
The U.S. commissioner of education, P. P. Claxton, requested an additional 3,500 copies for distribution to county superintendents across the United States.
25. Hanifan, Handbook, 9, 19, 22, 27.
26. Hanifan’s critical analyses were reported in successive issues of the Biennial Report of
the State Superintendent of Free Schools of West Virginia (Charleston, WV: State Department of
Education), 1912: 53; 1914: 29, 32; 1916: 88. Given these, I find nothing to suggest that Hanifan
was “self-conscious about using the term capital to encourage hard-nosed businessmen and
economists to recognize the productive importance of social assets” (Putnam, Bowling Alone,
445n12). This suggestion has misled critics like Stephen Samuel Smith and Jessica Kulynych, “It
May Be Social, But Why Is It Capital? The Social Construction of Social Capital and the Politics
of Language,” Politics and Society 30 (2002): 64, 184n60.
27. Lyda J. Hanifan, “The Rural School and Rural Life,” West Virginia School Journal 4
(1912): 204-7; “District Supervision: West Virginia and Oregon as Examples,” in National Society for the Study of Education, Twelfth Yearbook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1913);
and “Social Centers and Rural Schools,” Atlantic Educational Journal 10 (1914): 62-65.
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28. Herbert Quick, “The Social Center and the Rural Community”; Kate Upson Clark, “What
the Public May Expect in Dividends: Material, Civic, and Social”; and Woodrow Wilson quoted
in Edward J. Ward, “The Schoolhouse as the Civic and Social Center of the Community,” Journal
of Proceedings and Addresses of the National Education Association, Fiftieth Annual Meeting,
1912: 187, 254, 443. Also, Edward J. Ward, The Social Center (New York: D. Appleton, 1913),
34f, 357. A good treatment of the movement is in Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public.
29. Ward, “The Schoolhouse,” 443; Hanifan, “The Rural School Community Center,” 138.
30. American Political Science Association, The Teaching of Government (New York:
Macmillan, 1916), 82-100; Jesse Field, The Corn Lady: The Story of a Country Teacher’s Work
(Chicago: A. Flanagan, 1911); Scott Nearing, The New Education: A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (Chicago: Row, Peterson, 1915); Jessie Field and Scott Nearing,
Community Civics (New York: Macmillan, 1916), especially 83-86, 133. The authors, as well as
Hanifan himself, drew upon Mabel Carney, Country Life and the Country School: A Study of the
Agencies of Rural Progress and of the Social Relationship of the School to the Country Community (Chicago: Row, Peterson, 1912), 150-59. On the community civics movement, see Arthur
William Dunn, Community Civics and Rural Life (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1920); Julie A. Reuben,
“Beyond Politics: Community Civics and the Redefinition of Citizenship in the Progressive Era,”
History of Education Quarterly 37 (1997): 399-420.
31. Peter W. Dykema, “The Spread of the Community Music Idea,” and Ambrose L. Suhrie,
“Introduction: The Educational Program of a Democracy,” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 67 (1916): xi, 218; Arthur William Dunn, The Community and the
Citizen, rev. ed. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1907), iii; Hanifan, The Community Center, 209-12; and,
regarding Dewey’s participation in important meetings of the movement, Mattson, Creating a
Democratic Public, 162n27.
32. James Campbell, “Dewey’s Conception of Community,” in Reading John Dewey, ed.
Larry A. Hickman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). “Critical pragmatism” has
also been used for the writings on race and art by Alain Locke who was William James’s student,
Horace Kallen’s friend, and Dewey’s associate, by Leonard Harris, ed., The Critical Pragmatism
of Alain Locke (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
33. Compare Jürgen Habermas’s view: “critique is set in motion by the practical interest in
deciding the process of crisis toward a favorable issue,” in Theory and Practice, trans. John
Viertel (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 214. For Dewey’s pragmatism as a critical theory, see Matthew
Festenstein, “Inquiry as Critique: On the Legacy of Deweyan Pragmatism for Political Theory,”
Political Studies 49 (2001): 730-48.
34. On Dewey’s democratic engagements, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
35. John Dewey, “The Psychology of the Elementary Curriculum,” The Elementary School
Record (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900), 223, 225, 230, 231.
36. Anonymous, “Review of School and Society,” The Elementary School Journal 16 (1915):
67.
37. John Dewey, The School and Society, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1915), 3, 9, 11, 27, 45.
38. “Address,” in Proceedings of the National Negro Conference (New York: National Negro
Conference, 1909), 71-73.
39. Dewey was familiar with the economists who used “social capital,” whether or not he
noted the term. On Marshall, Sidgwick, and Clark, see 1908 in MW 5:237, 243, 401, 459, 485. On
Marx, see many works, culminating in Freedom and Culture (1939).
40. Dewey ranked Looking Backward second only to Marx’s Capital on a list of the most
influential books of the half-century preceding 1935. In reporting this, Alan Ryan adds that
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POLITICAL THEORY / February 2004
Bellamy’s utopia was “driven by fear rather than hope,” in John Dewey and the High Tide of
American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 114f. Yet Dewey claimed that Bellamy’s
utopia “accords with the American psychology in breathing the atmosphere of hope,” in “A Great
American Prophet,” Common Sense 3 (1934): 6-7.
41. Dewey, “A Great American Prophet, 6-7.
42. Edward Bellamy, Equality (New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 90-91.
43. Ibid., 246.
44. Henry Sidgwick, The Principles of Political Economy (London: Macmillan. 1883), 130;
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 9th (variorum) ed., ed. C. W. Guillebaud (London:
Macmillan, 1961 [1890]), 1:78.
45. Marshall, Principles, 1:208; 2:223; Sidgwick, Principles, 127f, 130.
46. John Bates Clark, The Philosophy of Wealth (Boston: Ginn, 1885), 126; idem, The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest, and Profit (New York: Macmillan, 1899).
47. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Okonomie, in Marx-Engels Werke
(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972 [1867]), 23:636; idem, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed.
Ernest Mandel, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976 [1867]), 1:758, 763, 776, 777, 779;
idem, Theories of Surplus Value, pt. 3 (Moscow: Progress, 1971), 81 ff.
48. Marshall, Principles, 1:823; 2:817.
49. Karl Marx, “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The Different Questions,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1985
[1867]), 20:188-90.
50. Marshall, Principles, 1:25, 45, 307; Clark, Philosophy of Wealth, 148, 180, 183.
51. Marx, Capital, 171; idem, Theories of Surplus Value, 455.
52. Quentin Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives,” in Philosophy in History, ed. R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 198.
53. Ben Fine, Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at
the Turn of the Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2001); Smith and Kulynych, “It May be
Social, But Why Is It Capital?”
54. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 137.
55. Putnam, “Foreword,”; Cathy J. Cohen, “Social Capital, Intervening Institutions, and
Political Power”; and Ross Gittell and J. Phillip Thompson, “Making Social Capital Work:
Social Capital and Community Economic Development,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, ed. Susan Staegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren (New York: Russell Sage,
2001), xv, 267, 286.
56. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 340.
57. Margaret Levi, “Capitalizing on Labor’s Capital,” Social Capital and Poor Communities,
247. Also see Mark E. Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
58. Lauren Wispe, The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum, 1991), 163; Lindon J.
Robison, A. Allan Schmid, and Marcelo E. Siles, “Is Social Capital Really Capital?” Review of
Social Economy 60 (2002): 1-21.
59. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 405.
60. Richard G. Niemi, Mary A. Hepburn, and Chris Chapman, “Community Service by High
School Students: A Cure for Civic Ills?” Political Behavior 22 (2000): 45-69; Harry Boyte and
James Farr, “The Work of Citizenship and the Problem of Service-Learning,” in Experiencing
Citizenship: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Political Science, ed. R. M. Battistoni
and W. E. Hudson (Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 1997).
Farr / SOCIAL CAPITAL
James Farr teaches political theory at the University of Minnesota where he is a professor of political science. He is completing some studies on changing conceptions of “science” in American political thought.
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