Robert D.Putnam and this week's The Times Literary Supplement (April 16, 2021)

I bought the latest edition of the TLS yesterday and was intrigued to see that the first review was by Paul Collier on recent publications in the area of politics, notably on the most recent work of Robert D. Putnam. Collier focuses at the start on putnam's concept of "social capital", i.e. the idea that social relationships are productive in the senses that they can generate and enforce common purposes. Putnam first used this concept to explain the differences between northern and southern Italy by tracing their origins back to the associative relationships that developed between citizens in the towns of the north and contrasting these with the feudal relationships and autocratic rule established following the Norman conquests and settlements in the medieval period. I am interested in this idea if still puzzled about why it did not apply in England in the longer term as a consequence of the Norman conquest in 1066. But it hints at an idea I have been contemplating for several years, certainly since late in 2018, about the degree to which landowners' tenants, allies and relations may have constituted associative groups in the period up to and after the struggles of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. If, as I suspect, the position of the larger landowners strengthened in the pre-1640 period and was not severely damaged by the military outcomes of that period, this would offer the possibility of developing a rather different explanatory trajectory for the failure of the Long Parliament, the Commonwealth and Protectorate to consolidate their rule after 1646. No doubt, too, it would not be popular with those focused on the sects and proto-political groupings of that period.