Journal of Urban History

http://juh.sagepub.com/

Review Essays: Are Urban Historians Bowling Alone? Social Capital Theory and
Urban History : Ram A. Cnaan, with Stephanie C. Boddie, Charlene C. McGrew, and
Jennifer Kang (2006). The Other Philadelphia Story: How Local Congregations
Support Quality of Life in Urban America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, xvii + 334 pp., maps, tables, figures, appendix, notes, references, index, $69.95
(cloth). Steven Conn (2006). Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the
Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, xvii + 274 pp., photographs,
illustrations, maps, epilogue, notes, index, $19.95 (paper). Richardson Dilworth, ed.
(2006). Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, xi + 240 pp., maps, tables, photographs, notes,
index, $28.95 (paper). Paul Lyons (2003). The People of This Generation: The Rise and
Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
xvii + 274 pp., illustrations, notes, index, $47.50 (cloth)
Guian McKee
Journal of Urban History 2010 36: 709 originally published online 17 May 2010
DOI: 10.1177/0096144210365681

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Review Essays
Journal of Urban History

Are Urban Historians 36(5) 709­–717

© 2010 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
Bowling Alone? Social sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
http://juh.sagepub.com

Capital Theory and

Urban History

Ram A. Cnaan, with Stephanie C. Boddie, Charlene C. McGrew, and Jennifer Kang (2006).
The Other Philadelphia Story: How Local Congregations Support Quality of Life in Urban America.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, xvii + 334 pp., maps, tables, figures, appendix,
notes, references, index, $69.95 (cloth).
Steven Conn (2006). Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, xvii + 274 pp., photographs, illustrations, maps, epilogue,
notes, index, $19.95 (paper).
Richardson Dilworth, ed. (2006). Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life
in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, xi + 240 pp., maps, tables, photographs,
notes, index, $28.95 (paper).
Paul Lyons (2003). The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, xvii + 274 pp., illustrations, notes, index, $47.50 (cloth).

Reviewed by: Guian McKee, University of Virginia, Charlottesville

DOI: 10.1177/0096144210365681

Nearly a decade ago, political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, a work that
traced and decried what the author saw as a sharp decline in Americans’ civic engagement.
Putnam argued that decreasing participation in organizations ranging from churches to civic
groups to bowling leagues had undermined the formation of social capital, the personal and
group connections that maximized community resources, trust, and knowledge. More broadly,
Putnam claimed that such decreases in social capital threatened a democratic society’s ability to
function.1 With its striking title and engaging thesis, Putnam’s work spoke to public anxieties
about the changing nature of American communities. As a result, Bowling Alone generated
extensive public debate. The book, though, actually built on and responded to an already deep
scholarly literature on social capital formation in sociology, political science, and to a lesser
extent, economics. Since Bowling Alone’s publication, the subject has continued to engage
researchers in each of these disciplines, many of whom have rejected Putnam’s thesis and even
questioned the utility of the underlying theory.2 Historians, however, have made almost no con-
tribution to this scholarship.3 The lack of attention to social capital theory among urban histori-
ans is particularly notable, given the centrality of communities, whether rural, suburban, urban,
or metropolitan, to social capital theory.
What explains this lack of interest among historians generally and urban historians specifi-
cally? Four recent books about Philadelphia bear on this issue. These studies vary in scholarly
discipline, including works by political scientists, sociologists, and journalists, as well as histo-
rians. Only two of the books explicitly address social capital theory, but the others nonetheless
offer insights into the potential applicability (or lack of utility) of the theory for historical schol-
arship. All four studies, however, focus on the networks and ties between people and organiza-
tions. In each of the studies, these connections are seen as shaping not only the manner in which

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710 Journal of Urban History 36(5)

urban problems are addressed, but also how the city functions and how people relate to the
metropolitan environment. Since this is the substance of social capital theory, the four works
considered together provide an opportunity to probe historians’ lack of interest in the social
capital approach to studying communities.
More than any of the other studies under consideration, Social Capital in the City: Community
and Civic Life in Philadelphia, edited by Richardson Dilworth, considers social capital as its
core subject. Featuring essays by scholars from a range of social sciences (including two histo-
rians), this volume offers a series of fascinating assessments of how social capital operates in an
economically distressed city. The case studies cover a broad range of subjects and time periods:
from the 1876 centennial exhibition to the development and operation of urban credit unions.
Many of the essays are historical in focus, making the volume of independent interest for histo-
rians while also increasing its value as a test of the possible utility of social capital theory in
historical research.
Dilworth’s introductory essay lays out key themes of the volume, emphasizing the need to
closely link social capital theory to the study of urbanism itself, rather than simply using the city
as a container or site. In a valuable section at the end of the essay, Dilworth also powerfully lays
out warning signs that Philadelphia’s stocks of social capital may be in decline, from falling
rates of homeownership to increases in people driving to work alone. He insightfully contrasts
a sweeping reform movement in the early 1950s to the largely disinterested response that greeted
a series of scandals in Mayor John Street’s administration in the early twenty-first century. Dil-
worth’s framing thus clearly sets out what is at stake in Social Capital in the City.
In establishing this model of urban social capital, however, Dilworth too easily accepts Sam
Bass Warner Jr.’s privatism thesis about the nature of urban life and interactions.4 Just as Warner
saw Philadelphia, and cities generally, as being so consumed with the pursuit of private gain that
public goods and problems were almost inevitably ignored, Dilworth holds that social capital
theory seeks “to define the value of community by the individual benefits we derive from social
networks” and claims that “social capital explains the importance of community by suggesting
that people join communities for their own selfish ends” (p. 3). This stance is tempered by Dil-
worth’s helpful introduction of an important differentiation between “bridging social capital,”
which expands social networks and forges new connections between people and among groups,
and “bonding social capital,” which tightens intergroup links among relatively homogeneous
communities. Dilworth argues that the latter form of social capital, typified in the city by such
social forms as fraternal societies and political machines, tends to increase intergroup hostility
and intolerance even as it delivers benefits to group members. Dilworth acknowledges that
urban heterogeneity might also offer unique possibilities for the creation of bridging social
capital, with its attendant tendency to work across social differences. He concludes, though, that
urban social capital is strongly inclined toward its most dangerous “bonding” form. Ultimately,
Dilworth warns that overemphasis on the value of social capital, and community generally, risks
“obfuscating genuine structural inequalities that close off life opportunities for many.” He calls
instead for a renewed scholarly focus on Warner’s “private city” concept (p. 9).
Historians such as Jon Teaford, Terence McDonald, Phil Ethington, Robin Einhorn, Sven
Beckert, and Mary Ryan (among others) have of course long since complicated Warner’s priva-
tism thesis with more nuanced portrayals of urban development, financing, elite actions, public
ritual, and intergroup relations.5 Dilworth’s concern about structural problems, though, is well
founded, as issues of poverty, inequality, racial segregation, and unemployment remain deeply
rooted in cities such as Philadelphia. Similarly, policy makers have too often been easily
diverted from structural issues. Yet this point merely raises questions of possibility and feasibil-
ity: what can be done in an urban environment characterized by political and fiscal constraints?
In turn, further questions arise about the relative value of feasible ameliorative strategies, pursued

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Review Essays 711

by community groups, versus transformative strategies, requiring currently unrealistic policy

actions at the city, state, or federal level. Here, the constituent studies of Social Capital in the
City offer significant insights. They provide, in short, an assessment of the pragmatic call to do
what can be done to improve urban conditions and mitigate the city’s problems—whether such
actions are transformative or not, and even if they perhaps obscure some of the structural reali-
ties faced by Philadelphia’s neighborhoods.
The first section of Social Capital is the most explicitly theoretical. The authors offer an
indication of how social capital theory can illuminate aspects of how cities function. Sociologist
Jerome Hodos’s examination of Philadelphia’s 1876 centennial exhibition demonstrates that the
planning for the centennial facilitated the consolidation of elite, “good government” business
interests in the city—the development of bonding social capital—while also allowing business
leaders to form new connections with the city’s Republican political establishment—a simulta-
neous form of bridging social capital. In conjunction with more limited efforts to reach out to
labor, the centennial thus created a hegemonic Republican ideology in the city, one that Hodos
argues soon became a “straightjacket” for business groups after politicians gained the upper
hand and washed away any trace of the coalition’s original reform ethos (p. 20). In a different
vein, Mark Brewin argues that the highly participatory election rituals of the nineteenth-century
city helped to generate social capital, as the “social nature” of such voting procedures “actually
produces higher measures of political efficacy, political optimism, civic virtue, or social trust”
(pp. 42-43). Regularization and rationalization of voting by reformers eroded these values, lead-
ing to declines in social capital and political engagement. Similarly, David R. Contosta and
Carol Franklin’s study of more than a century of civic activity in support of Philadelphia’s Wis-
sahickon Park directly tackles the balance between the mostly positive networking aspects of
bridging social capital and the exclusive and limiting dimensions of bonding social capital.
Contosta and Franklin find that the value of networking in protecting the park outweighed the
risks of exclusivity. Such activity, they suggest, was critical for the long-term viability of Wis-
sahickon Park. All of these essays demonstrate that social capital theory can provide a valuable
framework for historical interpretation of individual, group, and community civic activity.
The remaining sections of the volume, on social capital in education and in neighborhood
institutions, turn more directly toward an assessment of whether a focus on community risks
“obfuscating structural inequalities” or simply reflects the need to improve urban conditions in
any way possible. Barbara Ferman’s study of the potential role of urban universities as genera-
tors of social capital challenges the hard dichotomy between bonding and bridging social capital.
Her examination of a youth civic engagement project at inner-city Temple University finds both
powerful intergroup bonding opportunities and, at the same time, the formation of valuable
networks outside the neighborhood for the young people who participated. Ferman suggests the
existence of a third type of “supporting capital,” which provides “many of the characteristics of
bonding capital without the constraints . . . perhaps a prerequisite to the full-blown world of
more distant, less emotionally supportive, more instrumental connections” (pp. 98-99). Univer-
sities can play a critical role in providing the framework and an institutional base for such sup-
porting capital. Melina Patterson, however, offers a less optimistic view of universities; her
study of community projects supported by the University of Pennsylvania finds that despite suc-
cesses, the programs mostly offer hope but do not ultimately “rearrange the networks of social
capital that privilege some at the expense of others” (p. 121). This suggests a core dilemma of
social capital theory: how to evaluate a project that makes a marginal but not transformative
difference in an impoverished community.
The final section of the volume, on neighborhoods, extends but does not answer that question.
Readers learn from Michael Janson’s essay that community credit unions emerged in the hierar-
chical structures first of industrial corporations and later of religious institutions and finally of

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712 Journal of Urban History 36(5)

service-industry employers but that they thrived because of their capacity to build social capital
by extending horizontal, network-based ties through the community. Jennifer Lee explores why
African Americans as a group have been less successful as small business owners than Jewish
or Korean immigrants and concludes that the latter groups had far greater access to capital sup-
plied by family, kin, and coethnic networks. Valerie Harvell’s study of the civic engagement of
church-attending black women finds a high correlation between participation in religious orga-
nizations and secular civic and political activity, although Dilworth points out that the nature of
the survey leaves doubt about the direction of any causation—does church participation engen-
der civic engagement, or are those who are more involved in civic life predisposed to greater
involvement with their churches? All of these studies are provocative but evade the central ques-
tion of how great a difference such social capital actually makes in a community. More broadly,
this shortfall limits their value for assessing social capital theory’s potential utility in tracing and
understanding historical change.
Two other studies in this section, both of which address social capital in the Kensington
section of Philadelphia, come closer to providing such a model. Kensington is a traditionally
working-class, white-ethnic neighborhood that was devastated in recent decades by deindus-
trialization and population decline. A study by Judith Goode and Robert T. O’Brien examines
the role of social capital formation in community redevelopment efforts in Kensington. Adopt-
ing the Marxist differentiation between use and exchange values, Goode and O’Brien argue
that social capital as developed by many Kensington residents has focused on use values, the
deep network of longstanding personal and even institutional relationships that not only help
them with basic life necessities but also provide a sense of identification and belonging.6 These
values come into conflict with a different form of social capital built up by residents engaged
with community redevelopment programs that draw them into networks outside their neigh-
borhood. The bridging social capital that they develop is based on exchange values tied to the
worth of land, buildings, and economic activity in the neighborhood. These residents, Goode
and O’Brien maintain, are co-opted by the state and market actors with whom they must inter-
act, and they adopt outside values over those of their neighbors. Goode and O’Brien argue that
such relationships demonstrate “the limits of abstract discussions of social capital and civic
engagement . . . as a panacea for social problems. It helps us see the way discussions about
social capital themselves serve as techniques of power through legitimating social networks to
create a community of exchange value, an exploitative labor market, and consumption values
for the elite” (p. 175-76). This formulation raises, but does not answer, difficult questions.
Who is and is not elite, and what actual alternatives exist for addressing the neighborhood’s
problems without engagement in such networks? Which compromises are necessary, and
which go too far?
Patricia Stern Smallacombe’s study of Kensington suggests some of these difficulties as it
casts doubt on the value of neighborhood ties. While acknowledging the protective benefits of
the bonding social capital that many Kensington residents enjoy and that Goode and Schneider
celebrate, Smallacombe finds a troubling paradox: “staying in the neighborhood and embracing
local cultural outlooks often closes off access to the very tools to help people who stay create a
more secure situation for themselves or the next generation” (p. 178). Embracing the existing
ethos of the neighborhood and its networks, in this view, may do more harm than good as the
exclusionary nature of the neighborhood’s bonding capital cuts residents, especially young
people, off from the outside world. This extends beyond obvious racial and ethnic barriers to
include access to and interest in “education and training leading to sustainable employment as
well as cultural diversity in the wider society.” The result is social and economic isolation. In an
economically depressed community, maintaining parochial values of place, social continuity,
and familiarity extracts a high cost. The contrast between the two essays suggests the hard

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Review Essays 713

choices that are actually involved in the development of social capital. Even efforts to bring
marginal change through creation of bridging capital may be accompanied by significant exclu-
sions and social disruption, yet the intensification of group connections through the deepening
of bonding capital may simply perpetuate an undesirable status quo. Can change matter, in other
words, if it provides some benefit in specific situations but does not change the underlying
political economic dynamics of a city or a society? Such applications of social capital theory
highlight a social dynamic that can be productively applied to historical analysis.
The final essay in the book, by political scientists Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Gins-
berg, touches on the dilemma that the Kensington studies imply. Their analysis also inadver-
tently suggests why historians have ignored social capital theory. Although they helpfully syn-
thesize much of the theory and conclude that the evidence in the volume at least partially
counters Putnam, they are ultimately dismissive of much of this citizen activism because it does
not lead to “political mobilization for collective ends” (p. 228). In effect, this marginalizes such
community action because it does not bring transformative change.
A second study, Ram A. Cnaan’s The Other Philadelphia Story: How Local Congregations
Support Quality of Life in Urban America, opposes the views highlighted by Goode and Sch-
neider, Crenson and Benjamin, and Dilworth. Based on a survey of 2,120 Philadelphia congre-
gations, The Other Philadelphia Story exemplifies the value of social survey research. Examin-
ing such issues as formal and informal care by church groups, the use of congregational space
for a variety of social purposes, the activities of black and Latino as compared to white churches,
and the role of women in congregational social service activity, Cnaan concludes that Philadel-
phia’s churches make a tremendous contribution to the well-being of the city’s people: “taken
together, they comprise a massive force, almost a social movement, of doing good locally and
beyond” (p. xvii). The book explicitly challenges scholars such as Mark Chaves who have
minimized the social service activities and contributions of religious groups.7 Still, Cnaan is
deeply skeptical of the faith-based initiatives promoted by President George W. Bush’s admin-
istration, warning that congregations can never replace the public sector in social service provi-
sion and arguing that a greater role for churches in social service provision will require signifi-
cant increases in public funding.
The Other Philadelphia Story relies directly on social capital theory, in particular on the
importance of “loose connections” that draw unrelated people into communities—such as
church congregations—where they can develop bonding social capital with other members of
the group. Through such connections, they can then access assistance in periods of crisis. Cnaan
also argues that in a highly religious society such as the United States, “congregations are the
places where many Americans easily acquire social capital” (p. 63). Other countries might offer
different mechanisms for social capital development, but in the United States, Cnaan argues,
religious congregations are not only tremendously important but probably irreplaceable.
Unlike many of the contributors to Social Capital in the City, Cnaan thus has little ambiva-
lence about the value of social capital development. He focuses almost entirely on the good that
can arise from community, and specifically from the efforts of religious groups to provide assis-
tance both to their coreligionists and to the wider community. For the most part, he argues, this
aid is given with little judgment and with little expectation that recipients will adhere to a par-
ticular religious doctrine. Instead, most of the groups view such actions as a part of their mission
and as something dictated by their faith. For Cnaan, the relative size of such efforts, or their
capacity to promote broader social transformation, is unimportant. He even dismisses the cri-
tique that bonding social capital promotes exclusivity and hostility toward outsiders, maintain-
ing that close ties are a precondition for the good that these groups accomplish: “it is within
small cohesive groups that repeated interactions occur in such a way that mutual support is
encouraged and trust can be tested” (p. 277). Cnaan does allow, however, that congregations are

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714 Journal of Urban History 36(5)

not always effective locations for the development of bridging social capital. Still, The Other
Philadelphia Story provides an empirical defense of the value of limited actions and a depiction
of the realities of social capital formation in a large U.S. city.
Two recent works by historians make no mention of social capital theory but address issues
that intersect with many of its themes. As such, they provide test cases to determine what, if
anything, their authors might have gained by integrating the theory into their analysis. In The
People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia, Paul Lyons seeks
to broaden the story of the New Left beyond its traditional anchors in Ann Arbor, Morningside
Heights, and Berkeley (as Doug Rossinow has done with his analysis of the New Left in Austin,
Texas).8 Lyons, who previously wrote about the “old left” in Philadelphia, accomplishes some-
thing more as his scholarly reach extends beyond the expected Philadelphia-area case studies of
large institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and small elite Quaker colleges such as
Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford.9 Although he admirably chronicles the New Left at
each of those schools, Lyons also profiles New Left activities at Temple University, at the time
a mostly working-class, urban commuter university, and the region’s much more conservative
Catholic institutions, including Villanova University, St. Joseph’s College, and LaSalle College.
By itself, this is a notable contribution, as few if any studies of the New Left have given serious
attention to such institutions.
Lyons’s core finding is that while all of the New Leftists shared common concerns with the
central issues of the era, their specific focus, tactics, and cultural and political styles emerged
from the particular contexts of their own colleges and universities. At the Quaker schools, the
New Left drew students attracted to “a politics of authenticity, a rebellion against the life of the
mind so quintessential to hot-house institutions like Haverford” (p. 56). All-female Bryn Mawr
added the force of an emerging feminist consciousness. Students at the Catholic colleges found
inspiration toward activism in John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and in the reforms of the Sec-
ond Vatican Council; radicalism, though, never arrived at the Catholic schools as protests in
favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War remained moderate, small scale, and framed in
the context of Catholic social teachings. Temple and Penn produced more hard-edged activist
movements, tempered within the often harsh frame of a racially divided and increasingly impov-
erished inner city. Despite these differences of setting, activists at each of the campuses shared
commonalities as well: all were “more interested in issues of alienation, community, and mean-
ing than in what C. Wright Mills denigrated as the older labor metaphysic” (pp. 4-5); equally,
all of them suffered from setbacks and from their own inexperience.
The concluding chapter draws many threads of the New Left together with wider dimensions
of the period’s history, both in Philadelphia and nationally. Among Lyons’s more insightful
observations is that amidst the tumult of the period, much did not change on these campuses as
student life went on as it had in earlier years. Furthermore, Lyons notes not only the factionaliza-
tion of the New Left around issues of race, gender, and sexual preference but also the emergence
of a liberal alternative in the 1968 McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns. Student support for such
efforts, Lyons notes, indicates how the New Left “seemed to be inspiring but often losing many
students open to reform but not necessarily to revolution” (p. 197). This is an important point
often lost in discussions of the youth movements of the 1960s. In a provocative move that links
the study tightly to urban history, Lyons also argues that “the overriding economic, social, and
political reality within which the Philadelphia New Left must be understood is the process
of deindustrialization that ravaged both white and black working-class and poor communities”
(p. 227). The New Left in Philadelphia never managed to overcome the polarizing tensions that
this structural transformation created. As such, Lyons’s key regret is that the New Left failed to
develop its early “tentative exploration of the humanist dimensions of Marxism—that is, the
Young Marx; new working-class theory; radicals in the professions—which might have been

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Review Essays 715

more appropriate to a post-industrial order” (p. 223). In the end, he finds a living Philadelphia
New Left legacy in a broad range of participatory, progressive community organizations and
movements, most of them dedicated to a chastened pursuit of small-bore reform.
Although not without faults—more direct comparisons to the New Left in other cities and
regions would have enriched Lyons’s analysis; for all their value, many of the campus profiles
at the less active colleges involve lengthy recitations of mundane activities—The People of This
Generation represents a significant addition to the literature of the 1960s, the New Left, and
urban activism. Most important is the connection Lyons draws between the New Left’s failure
in Philadelphia and the socioeconomic and political economic transformations that deindustrial-
ization brought to the city. And what then of social capital theory? Would explicit attention to
such a theoretical model have helped Lyons? Much of the analysis involves group and inter-
group dynamics, and Lyons certainly could have pointed out that the New Left’s capacity for
developing bonding social capital at the expense of bridging social capital contributed to its lack
of political sensitivity and its inability to develop broad alliances. Such a move, though, would
have added little of significance to the analysis.
A very different book, Steven Conn’s Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of
the Past offers similar insights into the question of why historians have written so little about
social capital theory. Conn provides a concise, sweeping synthesis of the Philadelphia region’s
history in relation to its present-day character. This is a bold project and one that in many ways
succeeds admirably. Conn offers less a formal history of Philadelphia than an episodic consid-
eration of the meaning of history in a large and diverse metropolitan area and of the implications
of connections between past and present. In doing so, he explores a series of themes about the
city and region: the nature of regional identity, the long-term implications of William Penn’s
founding utopianism, the use and abuse of historical memory, the emergence of middle-class
identity, the environmental history of the region’s two major rivers, and the relationship between
regional character and the work of artists who have made the area their home.
Conn’s approach to each theme can be characterized as one of meaningful meandering. The
chapter on utopianism, for example, begins with William Penn’s vision for Philadelphia and its
relation to city planning, continues with an account of the city’s early success at establishing
religious pluralism, returns to an assessment of how Penn’s original city plan has fared, explores
the shifting cultural significance of Benjamin West’s iconic painting Penn’s Treaty with the
Indians, shifts to a detailed and engaging account of the evolution of Quakerism, assesses the
influence of the Quakers’s consensus-based decision-making process on present-day civic life
(social capital!), traces the influence of Philadelphia-area Quakerism on the civil rights move-
ment, picks up E. Digby Baltzell’s concern that the city’s Quaker heritage led to a dearth of
public engagement and leadership in the city (before concluding that this at least saved it from
“some of the worst excesses of urban ‘renewal’ in the 1950s and 1960s” [p. 62]), and concludes
that despite periodic outbreaks of thuggishness in politics and at sporting events, glimpses of
Penn’s vision still remain. This is a typical chapter structure.
For the most part, Conn’s approach works, although inevitably, some segments are more suc-
cessful than others. The chapter about how the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers “both transect
the region and tie it together” is a model blending of environmental, cultural, and social history.
The chapter that precedes it, however, offers an exaggerated argument that the Philadelphia
region created a national model for middle-class life; historians of New York, Boston, Chicago,
and even the West would surely point to contributions from their cities and regions if they did
not dismiss such a regionally determined model of class formation altogether. Similarly, Conn
would have added another layer to the book had he applied his capable analytical tools to
Philadelphia’s recent political life, namely, its shift from elite liberal reformism in the 1950s
to the racially divisive law-and-order populism of Frank Rizzo in the 1970s and then back to a

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716 Journal of Urban History 36(5)

persistent tension between reform and organization politics. African American life in the city and
region receives inadequate analysis. These limitations aside, Metropolitan Philadelphia accom-
plishes something that less sweeping historical scholarship rarely even contemplates: it offers an
almost visceral definition of what the region is, what the nature of the place has been and pres-
ently is, and above all, what it means to say that one is “from Philadelphia” (p. 27). The book
deserves a wide readership for this alone.
In some respects, Metropolitan Philadelphia is about social capital without using the term.
Conn explores the regional and place-based networks that have emerged around ideas, culture,
religion, the rivers, and even the city’s sports teams. His meditation on Quakerism’s ongoing
struggle to be “in the world but not of it,” for example, can be read as an assessment of the social
gains and losses created by a group’s investment in bonding social capital. Certainly, the theory
could perhaps have been applied usefully in this and other sections of Metropolitan Philadel-
phia. The book as a whole, though, would hardly have been enhanced by such engagement.
Most of the insights that could have been gained through direct social capital analysis are
already drawn out through Conn’s regional analysis. Here, perhaps, is why historians have not
rushed to embrace social capital theory. Like Steven Conn, most historians are already deeply
attuned to networks, coalitions, and the dynamics of interaction between and among groups.
Social capital theory would thus add descriptive power to their work but little in the way of
analytical rigor.
This conclusion suggests a clear choice among three possible explanations for historians’
disinterest in social capital theory. One possibility might be that historians are largely disen-
gaged from recent social science theory. Since the decline of the “New Social History,” social
science methods have increasingly fallen from historical fashion. Yet historians have returned to
the social sciences when they found useful ideas. The basis for the recent growth of interest in
U.S. political history, for example, has been in part the theoretical frameworks developed by
political scientists working in the field of American political development. Disengagement from
colleagues in the social sciences thus seems at best a partial and unsatisfactory answer.
A second explanation might be that historians tend to focus heavily on transformative events
and groups. Social capital theory, by contrast, tends to focus on small-scale change. U.S. histo-
rians in recent years have certainly devoted extensive attention to transformative, rather than
narrow change agents; the historiography on the Communist Party of the United States, the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.), and the Black Power movement, among many
other topics, is rich. This explanation falters as well, however, as recent works have also chroni-
cled voluntary associations, fraternal societies, suburban political groups, advocates for and
against school busing, and many other groups engaged in important but nontransformative action.
This leaves a third and more convincing option: historians have not found social capital
theory especially helpful in advancing their research or analysis. Most historians see such con-
cepts as bonding and bridging capital as so inherent to their subjects that they do not need the
definition that the theory provides. The level of depth at which they are engaged in their subjects
transcends the comparatively straightforward conceptual frame provided by the theory. This
might suggest an implicit critique of social capital theory: an entire discipline, which works on
subjects that could be subjected to social capital analysis, has found that it offers more descrip-
tion than substantive analysis. Such a critique might seem applicable in the case of deeply
empirical projects such as The Other Philadelphia Story, in which social capital theory provides
an informative frame for an effort at close description. Yet it also understates the value of the
best contributions to Social Capital in the City, which use social capital theory to inform analy-
sis of social and economic relations in areas such as the Kensington neighborhood of Philadel-
phia. Such work shows that while historians need not plunge into studies devoted to testing
social capital theory, they might nonetheless benefit from its judicious application when its

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Review Essays 717

framework matches the questions they ask. This is particularly true for urban historians, given
their broad focus on communities. Historians need not join the social capital bowling league, but
they might still want to partake in the occasional trip to the bowling alley.

Notes
1. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000).
2. For critiques of social capital theory, see Sheri Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar
Republic,” World Politics 49, no. 3 (1997): 401-29; Michael W. Foley and Bob Edwards, “Is It Time to
Disinvest in Social Capital,” Journal of Public Policy 19, no. 2 (1999): 141-73; Irene Taviss Thomson,
“The Theory That Won’t Die: From Mass Society to the Decline of Social Capital,” Sociological Forum
20, no. 3 (September 2005): 421-48. For a historian’s assessment of Bowling Alone, see Robyn Muncy,
“Disconnecting: Social and Civic Life in America since 1965,” Reviews in American History 29, no. 1
(March 2001): 141-49.
3. Exceptions include Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan
New England (New York, 1995); David T. Beito, “To Advance The ‘Practice of Thrift and Economy’:
Fraternal Societies and Social Capital, 1890-1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4
(1999): 585-612.
4. Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, 2d ed. (Philadel-
phia, 1987).
5. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore,
1984); Terence J. McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socio-economic Change and
Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860-1906 (Berkeley, 1986); Philip J. Ethington, The Public City:
The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (New York, 1994); Robin L.
Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago, 1991); Sven Beckert,
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-
1896 (New York, 2001); Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City
during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1997).
6. For use and exchange values, see John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political
Economy of Place (Berkeley, 1987).
7. Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
8. Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity (New York, 1998).
9. Although its origins lie in Quakerism, Bryn Mawr shifted to a secular orientation far earlier than ei-
ther Swarthmore or Haverford. For Lyons on the Old Left, see Paul Lyons, Philadelphia Communists,
1936-1956 (Philadelphia, 1982).

Bio
Guian McKee is an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He
is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (University
of Chicago Press, 2008). He is currently completing a history of the war on poverty for the Johns Hopkins
University Press, along with a study of urban poverty and public health care.

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