italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
fyi
THE MAFIA AND ALL THAT:
THINKING THEORETICALLY AND COMPARATIVELY ABOUT
SICILIAN HISTORY
Filippo Sabetti
Department of Political Science
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec Canada
[Nota bene: a slightly different version is scheduled to come out in the
November issue of ITALIAN POLITICS & SOCIETY, the Review of the
Conference Group on Italian Politics & Society (CONGRIPS). For more
information about the review and about membership in CONGRIPS (everyone
is welcome!), List members are urged to contact its secretary Richard
Katz at Johns Hopkins University [log in to unmask], or its president
Filippo Sabetti, <[log in to unmask]]
James Fentress, Rebels and Mafiosi: Death in a Sicilian Landscape.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, pp. 297.
Lucy Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and
Local Power, 1859-1866. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 252.
The history of Sicily is no by means unique, but it constitutes a rich
laboratory for thinking theoretically and comparatively about politics
and a general puzzle in the social sciences: how individuals relate to
one another so as to realize their productive potentials in an
interdependent situation which characterizes public affairs. This is,
after all, why some of us became interested in Sicilian development. If
we cannot, for a variety of reasons, do our own archival research, we
can turn to the work of historians who provide us with a data base as
far back as the ancient world. To be sure, most historians do not use
the theoretical distinctions or language of social science but in their
own fashion they address critical issues in several topics dear to
comparativists: the architecture of choice (Jones 2001), and
constitutional political economy more generally (Buchanan and Tullock
1962; V. Ostrom [1982] 1999); collective-action dilemmas in
self-governance (E. Ostrom 1990); the challenge of understanding
passages to modernity “as seeing like a state” (Scott 1998); law and the
political basis of economic development (Berman 1983); dynamics of
contentious politics (McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly 2001); positive and dark
sides of social capital (Coleman 1990; Levi 1996; and Putnam 1993);
conditions under which citizens give, refuse, and withdraw their consent
to government (Levi 1997); what makes government (in)effective (Tendler
1997), and what leads people to work outside the law (De Soto 1989);
and, of course, the political economy of crimes and punishments
(Gambetta 1993; Varese 2001). In short, problematics and issues in
Sicilian history lie, in the words of Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman,
within the “ambitious scope of inquiry” of comparative politics. For,
“no political phenomenon is foreign to it; no level of analysis is
irrelevant, and no time period beyond its reach” (Lichbach and Zuckerman
1997, 4).
The works of James Fentress and Lucy Riall are cases in point. The
historical knowledge they each advance can be viewed in a complementary
fashion. Both offer much data to social scientists eager to uncover what
architecture of choice and logic of institutional change, if any, may be
at work in contentious political experiments and to understand success
and failure in the political economy of decisions and institutions. The
architecture of choice and institutional changes discussed in the two
works are, in turn, embedded in preceding rounds, and a central issue
remains: how far back do we need to go in order to trace the origins of
19th century issues and problems? A satisfactory answer depends on all
sorts of factors, some of them strictly disciplinary in nature. But a
brief look at what we now know about earlier changes (or lack of them)
helps to understand the historical context of what preoccupies Riall and
Fentress and why Sicilian history remains a laboratory for rewarding
social science explorations.
Economic historians like Stephan Epstein (1992) have shown what many
social scientists are still reluctant to acknowledge: that feudalism and
capitalism (and markets) coexisted with varying degrees of success in
Sicilian development before the eighteenth century. Despite the use of
seemingly ‘archaic’ tools (oxen and scratch ploughs), both yield ratios
and production for hectare in Sicily up to the eighteenth century were
equivalent to, or higher than, those in most advanced northern European
countries (England, Flanders, the Netherlands), and substantially better
than in northern Italy or the Baltic regions. In other words, the North
European model of agricultural work is not in itself an indicator of
progress: had it actually been adopted in Sicily, it would have caused
an economic disaster. This conclusion leads Epstein to warn us not to
project failings in Sicilian agriculture during the eighteenth-century
onto previous centuries.
From the eighteenth century, we can derive other lessons. By the 1770s,
a concern for the failings of the Sicilian political economy and the
consequences that these were having on Sicilian life was widespread
among members of the Sicilian baronial and intellectual classes (often
the same persons). So when the new Neapolitan viceroy, Domenico
Caracciolo, fresh from his long sojourn in France, went to Sicily in
1781, he could not have found a more favorable climate for reforms. Yet
it was not before long that he alienated even the very same people he
thought needed to be delivered from bondage. How was that possible,
given the widespread support for institutional changes? The answer is
familiar to those who study what Tocqueville in his book on the ancien
regime in France called “the literary view of politics.”
As soon as Caracciolo reached Sicily, he confounded in indiscriminate
hatred all things Sicilian – both the worst and what was best in
Sicilian political tradition. As a result, he missed the opportunities
for reform, transforming baronial opposition to some reforms into a
defense of the Sicilian nation. The barons, having acquired a new
awareness of their constitutional rights, proceeded in 1812 to press
ahead with their own reform: the abolition of feudalism sweeping away
baronial jurisdiction and feudal dues and privileges, and the creation
of a new parliamentary monarchy – the so-called Anglo-Sicilian
constitution. The problem was that the range of factors that impinged on
the ability of Sicilian leaders to govern was far greater than that
experienced by their British counterparts. By 1814, the constitutional
barons could neither make use of parliament nor manage public affairs
without it. What they needed was a long time span in order to work out
or solve the accumulation of governmental issues and problems generated
by the constitutional reform experiment; but time they did not have as a
result of the Congress of Vienna. Still, the chief problem for Sicily
was not the “Anglo-Sicilian” constitution of 1812 but rather its
suppression and the extension of absolutist rule in 1816 – the starting
point in both Fentress and Riall.
From the vantage point of preceding Sicilian history and from a concern
for self-governance, the creation of a legal-rational order à la Weber
in 1816 represents a breakdown and not the beginning of modernization in
Sicily.This is so, not because the legal-rational order à la Weber was
imposed from the outside (a fuorviante or misleading issue), but because
rather than facilitating individual and collective efforts on behalf of
common interests shared by islanders, centralized government and
administration created an antithesis of interests between rulers and
ruled, and between landowners and landless. The antithesis evolved into
successive revolts, culminating in the very collapse of the Kingdom of
Two Sicilies and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860-61. But
the iron law of oligarchy inherent in the forced creation of unity
through centralized government and administration remained, just as the
proprietary claims of great landowners continued to be determinants of
the human condition in most of the countryside.
The creators of Italian unification deliberately did not set out to
victimize people. Fentress and Riall found Italian leaders assumed or
took for granted that the reconstitution of agricultural and communal
activities as a function of their state making - what in other contexts
James C. Scott (1998) has more recently characterized as “seeing and
thinking like a State” - would have primarily beneficial effects. Why,
then, the gap between expectations and results?
The two authors find it useful to go back to the problem of
governability under the post-1816 Bourbons. They both emphasize the
challenges that centralized government and administration faced before
and after 1860 with respect to public order and local-central government
relations. Their narrative can be taken to suggest, correctly, that many
of the difficulties in government performance can be attributed to
institutional problems, including the issues how to create an
administrative class in a short-time span and, at the same time, secure
coordination and compliance through bureaucratic means from an unwilling
population. Riall is a careful historian, and she write insightfully. We
must be grateful that she has given so much of her skills and time to
the study of Sicily. On three points, however, I find Fentress’s
analysis more persuasive.
First, I find untenable Riall’s belief that a unification à la Gramsci
could have taken place if Cavour had somehow stopped being Cavour and
instead acted like a French Revolutionist; such if/then propositions
ignore the actual people and facts. Here is where historians can learn
from social scientists concerned with how it is possible for (liberal)
governments to secure compliance for their decisions without the consent
of the governed/ruled. Second, what might more realistically have
occurred and, if it had, would have given Cavour and his government
greater support, legitimacy, and consensus would be their having acted
on the political decentralization experiment suggested, among others by
Ferrara in his now famous 1860 memorandum to Cavour (not mentioned by
either Fentress or Riall), and, at the same time, ceased the
confiscation of church property in Sicily, where a majority of people
were strongly attached to the church (discussed by Fentress). These
possibilities are based on what we know about the people and facts, but
the rush of events militated against them. Third, if Riall had looked
more closely at the identification and aspirations of Sicilian democrats
from the 1840s to the revolt of 1866, she would have found what Fentress
presents: that most Sicilian democrats were not Jacobins, or “Gramscian”
ante litteram. Most, if not all, were political and not social
democrats. They wanted self-government, with independence or autonomy
for Sicily based on a revised version of the 1812 constitution. Many of
them also wanted to resurrect the symbols of the Sicilian nation,
including its flag, coat of arms and parliament, suppressed in 1816.
(The issue of the Sicilian language, a written language since the twelth
century, with its own dictionary since the sixteenth is more
complicated. Suffice it to say that Sicilian-Italian dictionaries
continued to be published after 1866 and to this very day. In March
2002, the Feltrinelli, Dante and Flaccovio bookstores in dowtown Palermo
each offered one book-shelf of reprinted and new dictionaries. The last
volume of a projected five-volume comprehensive dictionary started in
the 1970s is scheduled to appear by 2004.) Most Sicilian democrats
anticipated that a free labor market together with communal government
and parliament recast on the principles of self-government would
seriously diminish the ability of large landowners to determine living
conditions for those in the countryside. But, the very reiteration of
centralized government and administration in 1860 prevented that to
happen. There is much force in Raymond Grew’s well known conclusion that
the rush of unexpected success spoiled the Risorgimento.
Thus, most Sicilian peasants – and especially those living in the
interior where large estates predominated - found themselves locked in a
many-person analogue to the prisoner’s dilemma of modern game theory.
Sidney Sonnino (1876) referred to this as “the iron circle.” On the one
hand, labor contracts were imposed on workers by a monopoly of large
landowners or their agents and supported by the arms of the state; on
the other, the same villagers bore the cost of government, without
having any voice in its decisions and while deriving little benefit from
its actions. Most Sicilians were thus left without legal remedies while
the central government would not tolerate any kind of illegal remedy. A
logic of mutually destructive relationships came to dominate work and
community life. How did people cope with, or extricate themselves from,
this situation?
Sicilians sought in several ways to restructure a game of life rigged
against them. Riall ends her narrative with the revolt against the
central government in 1866. Fentress suggests why Sicily and Piedmont
cannot be quite compared in the way that Riall does, for they “were two
mismatched pieces of a political puzzle. When Piedmont tried to force
Sicily into a political and institutional straightjacket, the
influential and authoritative citizens of Palermo, seeing that their
power and local autonomy was under threat, renewed their alliance with
segments of the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary parties, as well
as with the dangerous classes that both sides of the combat had tried to
recruit.” (p. 254).
Fentress continues the narrative beyond 1866. His archival research on
the Sicilian interior and coastal towns uncovers new and fresh evidence
about the origins of the mafia. The story of what happened is far more
interesting, more unexpected, than any sociological and anthropological
theorizing of the 1960s and 1970s led us to believe.
Fentress argues – convincingly, in my view - that the story of the mafia
must be understood against the background of the uprisings of 1820,
1848, 1860 and 1866 and, more generally, Sicily’s struggle for freedom
in the first half of the nineteenth century. In fact, many of the social
and political modes of behavior that have evolved, and often become ways
of life, in Sicily must be understood as responses to strictly political
phenomena. Fentress places in sharp relief the political basis of
agrarian problems and the different types of property rights and
economies that could be found in coastal plains and in the interior. His
study stresses the importance of these differences – climatic,
geographic, agricultural, and institutional, including property rights –
for a proper understanding of the emergence of the mafia. Variations in
the historical and institutional context matter. Just as I found that
the mafia of Villalba, in the Sicilian interior, developed out of a
civic, self-help tradition (Sabetti 2002), Fentress has found that the
mafia of Misilmeri and other coastal towns without large estates
developed out of a revolutionary tradition. Our respective studies are
complementary not contradictory. Fentress’s finding will also challenge
those who have come to attach a particular leftist (=positive) meaning
to revolution and brotherhood.
A chief value of Fentress’s work is that it transforms into a variable
what is often viewed as a constant: the emergence of mafia groups as
illicit, criminal enterprises. Like my own work, Fentress does not
challenge the empirical validity of the received wisdom (espoused by
Riall) where it is relevant but rather its generalizability to the
entire Western Sicily across time and space since the 1860s. After all,
how much do we really know about the history of the more than three
hundred villages and towns of Western Sicily? That the mafia was – as
Riall suggests - some kind of privatized Leviathan is doubtful, unless
of course she is not using the term Leviathan as Hobbes intended.
Conclusions about the origins of the mafia and how mafia groups worked
in practice are far from settled, for several complicating reasons.
First, given our empiricist epistemology, many social scientists have
increasingly adopted a positivist, unproblematic view of the monopoly of
state powers and seldom raised the problem, noted by Michael Taylor
(1982), of when states have possessed an actual monopoly on the use of
force. We have thus neglected to appreciate what Sonnino emphasized and
other studies beyond Sicily have found (such as De Soto, Ostrom and
Scott) - that is, we have tended to ignore the fact that people, in some
basic sense, build their own social and political realities and
opportunities and that what officialdom in the formal regime may do is
only part of the story. If some concepts or institutions do not work, or
work against them, people will make their own adaptations, which may
become extreme forms of illegal problem-solving when officialdom
continues to think it can govern but people are actually going their own
way.
Second, Fentress is quite good in reminding us that the crimes that
mafia groups are usually associated with are older than the mafia
itself; it is not always easy to distinguish which crimes are the
mafia’s and which are not. In addition, those who wish to argue that
mafia brotherhoods did evil deeds just for the sake of doing evil or
violence are on shaky grounds (p.219). Like other analysts (Gambetta;
Sabetti; Varese), Fentress has found that violence is a means, not an
end. An outlaw regime can gain legitimacy through the protection
services it offers and then exploit the position it has acquired,
recreating the problems of political organization that plague the lawful
regime. Consider the Mugnai della Posa in the Palermo area (due-paying
millers). By 1874, they had managed to transform themselves into a
protection racket as a way to enforce their fixed prices and excluding
outsiders (p.165). Does this happen only in Sicily? No need to call up
evidence from biblical times. Recall the work of the Family Compact of
Upper and Lower Canada in the 1830s. Federterra used similar practices
in Tuscany and other parts of North Italy to control the supply of labor
and employment during the Biennio Rosso. Fentress makes us appreciate
why many unions in the United States have been bastions of organized
crime, and why some Sicilian antimafia groups after 1918 and 1945 had
difficulties in not becoming mirror images of what they sought to
destroy.
Third, mafia groups as outlaw regimes enjoyed the support of many, if
not most, common people who stood to profit from them and who did not
regard state laws as the final determinant of what was criminal or
illegal. Short of exiting Sicily, other alternatives available to local
people were, if not worse than what was done by the mafia, not always
desirable. Fentress lends empirical support to Margaret Levi’s analysis
of under what conditions citizens give, refuse and withdraw their
consent to government, legal and illegal.
Fourth, the conventional wisdom has fostered much misunderstanding about
why Sicily’s own ruling group seems to have made no attempt to curb the
growth of the mafia. Fentress draws attention to two new, and more
plausible, explanations. The first is that Sicily’s ruling group stood
in ambiguous relation to the state; the revolutionaries and followers of
Mazzini, shut out after 1866, allied themselves with the extralegal
structure of power, making different mafia groups clients of the
revolutionary party. The other reason why Sicily’s ruling group made no
real attempt to confront local mafia groups is that by the 1890s the old
ruling, revolutionary, group had its back to the wall (pp. 250-52). If
Fentress is correct, we need to recast much of our knowledge of the
workers’s leagues of the 1890s and the very history of Corleone.
Fifth, the polemical use of the term mafia in public discourse and the
dynamics of contention have often clouded points one, two, three and
four. The mafia as piovra has a long and rueful history in polemical
writings about Sicilian criminality. The world of Sicilian criminals and
that of the myths and half-truths that surround their activities
overlap, making the task of distinguishing fact from fantasy exceedingly
difficult. Against this backdrop, the Caso Notarbartolo as recounted by
Fentress becomes persuasive. Still, it is not clear how Fentress could
have incorrectly identified Giovanni Giolitti, the prime minister of
Liberal Italy, as Antonio Giolitti.
The work of Lucy Riall reminds us that there is more to Sicily’s
political experience than violence and corruption. The work of James
Fentress answers the question that Giovanni Falcone (1991), the Sicilian
antimafia magistrate, raised before he was killed in 1992: “Why is it
that men, some even endowed with real intellectual abilities, are
compelled to devise for themselves a criminal career in order to survive
with dignity?” Falcone’s concern is not that far off from the central
puzzle in the social sciences mentioned at the outset. Both works excel
in showing that it is possible to do historical research about the mafia
in terms that transcend the particularities of Sicily, allowing us to
think theoretically and comparatively about collective-action dilemmas
across time and space.
References Cited
Berman, Harold 1983. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western
Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Buchanan, James M. and Gordon Tullock 1962. The Calculus of Consent. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
Coleman, James S. 1990. The Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press
De Soto, Hernando 1989. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the
Third World. New York: Harper & Row
Epstein, Stephan R. 1992. An Island for Itself: Economic Development and
Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Falcone, Giovanni 1991. Cose di Cosa Nostra, in collaborazione con
Marcelle Padovani. Milan: Rizzoli
Gambetta, Diego 1993. The Sicilian Mafia. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press
Jones, Bryan D. 2001. Politics and the Architecture of Choice: Bounded
Rationality and Governance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Levi, Margaret 1996. “Social and Unsocial Capital.” Politics & Society
24 (March):45-55
-------- 1997. Consent, Dissent and Patriotism. New York: Cambridge
University Press
Lichback, Mark I. and Alan S. Zuckerman eds. 1997. Comparative Politics:
Rationality, Cutlure and Structure. New York: Cambridge University Press
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly 2001. Dynamics of Contention.
New York: Cambridge University Press
Ostrom, Elinor 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press
Ostrom, Vincent [1982] 1999. “A Forgotten Tradition: The Constitutional
Level of Analysis. Pp.151-165. In Polycentric Governance and Development
ed. Michael D. McGinnis. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
Sabetti, Filippo 2002. Village Politics and the Mafia in Sicily.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven: Yale University
Press
Sonnino, Sidney [1876] 1974. I Contadini di Sicilia. Florence: Vallecchi
Editore
Taylor, Michael 1982. Community, Anarchy and Liberty. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982
Tendler, Judith 1997. Good Government in the Tropics.Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press
Varese, Federico 2001. The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New
Market Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join italian-studies YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave italian-studies
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/italian-studies.html
|
