Commentary: Is capital the solution or the problem?

Simon Szreter of Cambridge University and Michael Woolcock of the World Bank and Harvard University have written an article, ‘Health by association? Social capital, social theory and the political economy of public health,’1 that is fairly representative of writings in the US and the UK on the fashionable concept of social capital. Their intent is to link the different uses made by public health researchers of the concept of social capital, in an attempt to synthesize the different interpretations and uses of that concept. Written in an unnecessarily cumbersome way (academic papers can and should be written in a less jargonistic fashion than they frequently are), the article promotes the concept of social capital (the authors’ own version, which builds on Robert Putnam’s) and stresses its policy implications. Szreter and Woolcock conclude, for example, that the Swedish welfare society provides greater social capital to its citizens than do other societies. It would seem from these observations that we should seriously consider the Swedish model a major point of reference, which should please those of us sympathetic to the social democratic tradition responsible for this model. The problems with Szreter and Woolcock’s analysis, however, are many. First, they begin with a highly questionable premise— that the concept of social capital is useful for understanding and changing our realities. In so doing, they ignore authors such as myself who have shown the uselessness (and even harm) of such a concept as defined by Putnam.2 While the authors do cite my work, they do so without engaging with the critical arguments I have made. Such lack of attention to my criticism may indicate that they have no reply to it. Second, the authors seem unaware of the enormous importance of politics and power relations in explaining why the concept of social capital first appeared in the US in the 1980s, and unaware of the purpose served by the promotion of this concept from the 1980s until today. The political unawareness of this reality is quite remarkable and speaks volumes about the current status of mainstream scholarship in the US and the political context in which it operates. Let me explain. If we look at the subjects of social science research in the area of health during the 1960s and 1970s in, say, Latin America, we see that most of that research, including health services research, focused on how class (and later race and gender) power relations were reproduced through the state and its institutions, including its medical institutions. Extremely creative research took place in those years, analysing how power was distributed in Latin America and through which institutions. The major research topics were the nature of capitalism and imperialism; how they are promoted and reproduced through international institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (heavily dominated by the US Department of the Treasury); and how they affect health. All this research activity, however, has now gone, and is replaced by research on social capital—a concept now promoted by the World Bank and by US and UK academic centres. In social capital discourse, the focus of research is communities and individuals; it uses an economic discourse that speaks of the need to increase the amount of capital (either individual or collective) by augmenting the number of social capitalists. Indeed, this objective appears explicitly in a chapter title in Putnam’s latest work: ‘Towards an Agenda for Social Capitalists’ (in Putnam, R. Bowling Alone). The term capital reflects the understanding that individuals need capital in order to compete or better survive in a competitive world. A similar history is evident in the US, although, given the heavy control of academia by federal funding and private foundations, the terms and concepts used in the 1960s and 1970s were less open, frequently camouflaged as more ‘neutral’ terminology. But, even if using a more moderate tone than in Latin America (or even Europe), issues of class, race, and gender power relations, based on exploitation and domination, were important areas of research in these decades (in particular in work published in the International Journal of Health Services). So, even though the academic visibility was lower than on other continents, due to the extreme conservatism of US academic institutions, the name of the game was power and how that power was reproduced in ideological, political, cultural, social, and economic institutions. But again, all these subjects have now been supplanted by a huge production of social capital research. The same has happened in Europe. Many researchers applying to the European Commission for research funds feel the need to use the term social capital as a trademark of respectability, a necessary condition for receiving funds. It seems to me that if Szreter and Woolcock had been more curious, they would have been interested in finding out how the concept of social capital (the Putnam version) came about in the US. The answer is simple. A major political change took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the US and the UK, with wide-ranging consequences for the world, including its academic institutions. The change was the expansion of neoliberalism, or to use Anglo-Saxon terms, Reaganism and Thatcherism, and the dominance by neoliberal economic discourse of all the social sciences. As stated by a past president of the US American Political Science Association, Theodore Lowi, in his 1991 presidential address, ‘economic language is the dominant language in social science discourse today.’3 In