Sharing the great American dream

ROBERT PUTNAM is an American intellectual institution. His books, from Bowling Alone (2000) on the decline of community to Our Kids (2015) on the diminishing promise of equal opportunity, are committed social science at its best, and they stimulated big academic debates and national political soul-searching.

His latest, with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, will have a similarly big impact but it is more a work of macro-history than social science. And in providing an optimistic, progressive reading of the cycles of twentieth-century American politics to coincide with this month’s election, it also abandons any pretence of political neutrality.

The basic thesis is simple enough: the Gilded Age at the end of the nineteenth century was a period of polarisation, inequality and often violent upheaval which gave way at the start of the twentieth century to the progressive era and, after a Great Depression blip, the New Deal in which Americans came together, reduced inequality and created a more cooperative society,