The London Sunday Times has called him ‘the most influential academic in the world today.’ In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, the world's highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2012, he received from President Obama the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities.

Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. America’s challenge today is to turn the corner and regain the spirit of reform of the first Progressive Era. As is well-known, over the last half century that broad trend from an “I” society to a “we” society has been interrupted and reversed. In the aftermath of the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th century, however, America became-unevenly, but steadily-more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous a society more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on narrower self-interest. In the late 1800s, during the last Gilded Age, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. America today is characterized by deep and accelerating inequality unprecedented political polarization vitriolic public discourse a fraying social fabric public and private narcissism-Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we’ve been here before.

Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam