In Depoliticizing Development John Harriss explores the origins of the idea of social capital and its diverse meanings in the work of James Coleman Pierre Bourdieu and more specifically Robert Putnam who is most responsible for the extraordinary rise of the idea of social capital through his work on Italy and the United States. Harriss asks why this notion should have taken off in the dramatic way that it has done and finds in its uses by the World Bank the attempt systematically to obscure clas