Robert D. Putnam

Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, and Visiting Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and former president of the American Political Science Association. He was the 2006 recipient of the Skytte Prize, the most prestigious international award for scholarly achievement in political science. The London Sunday Times called him "the most influential academic in the world today".
He has written a dozen books, translated into twenty languages, including Capitale sociale e individualismo. Crisi e rinascita della cultura civica in America, Il Mulino (2004) and La tradizione civica nelle regioni italiane (with R. Leopardi e R.Y. Nanetti), Mondadori (1994). His Making Democracy Work, Academic Internet Publishers Incorporated (1994), was praised by the Economist as "a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber". Both Making Democracy Work and Capitale sociale e individualismo rank among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century.