1993, Robert Putnam published Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. “Social capital,” as Putnam explains, “refers to features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions.” Putnam’s social capital is asabiya for modern democratic societies, with an emphasis on its nonmilitary aspects. Along with a growing number of professional scientists and lay readers, I applaud Putnam’s work, but I prefer Ibn Khaldun’s term asabiya, acknowledging as it does the long history of this particular
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