The social capital idea vanished after 1916 until independent rediscoveries began in the 1950s.

Evidence

Hanifan’s account of social capital anticipated virtually all the crucial elements in later interpretations, but his conceptual invention apparently attracted no notice from other social commentators and disappeared without a trace. But like sunken treasure recurrently revealed by shifting sands and tides, the same idea was independently rediscovered in the 1950s by Canadian sociologists to characterize the club memberships of arriviste suburbanites, in the 1960s by urbanist Jane Jacobs to laud neighborliness in the modern metropolis, in the 1970s by economist Glenn Loury to analyze the social legacy of slavery, and in the 1980s by French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and by German economist Ekkehart Schlicht to underline the social and economic resources embodied in social networks. Sociologist James S. Coleman put the term firmly and finally on the intellectual agenda in the late 1980s, using it (as Hanifan had originally done) to highlight the social context of education. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 37

Categorization

• XREF: The repeated independent reinvention of social capital parallels the independent invention pattern noted in earlier social-capital literature (e.g., Milgrom, Coleman) the reader has covered. — connects to: Social capital as an idea was independently reinvented six times across the twentieth century. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 35