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This compelling and timely book closely examines trends in economic, political, social, and cultural features of American life during the past 125 years. Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor who wrote the 2000 best-seller Bowling Alone, discovered that, during the last 3 decades of the 19th century, the United States “was startingly similar to today. Inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism prevailed” (p. 8). Thanks to the bipartisan Progressive movement, all those problems improved greatly over the next decades. However, following a bell-shaped curve, broad progress on many fronts peaked in the 1950s and early 1960s, but have steadily declined right back to where we were in the Gilded Age. Putnam explains that he “stumbled over an unexpected confluence of historical patterns” (p. 323), leading him to write this book. Putnam practices what he preaches about returning to a “We” orientation–his “Acknowledgments” credit the important contributions to this book by his former student Shaylyn Romney Garrett, a long list of research associates, and other friends and colleagues.
As psychoanalysts have increasingly engaged with the wider world in which we and our patients live, this is a fascinating and illuminating read for all of us. The Covid-19 pandemic has served as a painful wake-up call about the threat to everyone when too many Americans value their individual rights over the collective good, refusing to cooperate with needed public health measures, such as wearing facemasks. Excessive individualism, when not counterbalanced with one's obligations to the safety of others, can cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Countries such as Chile where facemasks did not become ideological statements have had lower death rates from the pandemic. Many of us were drawn to read this stunning book when laudatory reviews described it as marshalling data from many seemingly unrelated fields to describe an “I-We-I” shift in American society from the