ABSTRACT
The fascination with ‘social capital’ shows no sign of abating, as this volume itself attests. The fascination is attended by a continuing outpouring of definitions and meanings. Most discussions of social capital begin with or take note of the work of three seminal theorists – Pierre Bourdieu, James Coleman, and Robert Putnam (e.g. Barandiaran and Korta 2011: 23–53). Of the three, Putnam proved to be the most self-conscious about the term itself, including uses preceding his. He acknowledged four other ‘social capitalists’ besides Bourdieu and Coleman who preceded him. Three were mid-twentieth century social scientists: Jane Jacobs, Glenn Loury, and Bourdieu’s co-author, Ekkehart Schlicht. The fourth, moreover, set the clock much farther back, to 1916. Putnam had the good fortune to have, as he put it, a sharp-eyed research assistant in Brad Clarke who came across Lyda J. Hanifan’s use of ‘social capital’ (1916a: 130–132) amidst the literature of the Progressive Era. Hanifan then played a brief but striking part in Bowling Alone (2000: 19, 20, 21, 395, 398, 445). Putnam thus piqued the historical curiosity of several scholars (e.g. Rae 2002; Christoforou 2013); and he put down a temporal marker. ‘As far as credit for inventing the term,’ he posted on the internet, ‘Hanifan’s is the claim to beat.’
