Читать книгу Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro - Страница 19

It is a fact that the academic literature on mafia has been dominated by the social sciences and by sociology in particular. Also, for an almost perfect coincidence in timing – sociology as a positivist discipline started its rise in the same decades that the ‘mafia’ was discovered, if not ‘invented’, in Italy – sociology has been a hegemonic force of knowledge in the study of mafia since its inception. Of course, you do not find the names of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and the like in the list of authors directly contributing to what we would call ‘mafia studies’. Marx wrote on many things, including Native Americans and even mysterious tribunals of the Middle Ages such as the Vehmic courts (Feme), but he never wrote on mafia or camorra. Even though L’Année sociologique reviewed a few Italian texts on mafia and camorra in its early volumes (all authored by the jurist-sociologist Richard Gaston), it does not seem that Durkheim was aware of, or at least impressed by, the existence of forms of primordial solidarity organizing crime and persisting at the heart of modern society. Even more surprisingly, Georg Simmel wrote extensively about secret societies, but the terms ‘mafia’ and ‘camorra’ do not figure in his seminal text on the subject. This does not mean, though, that Marx and Durkheim and even Simmel are not used in research on mafia, nor that the ‘classics’ in the social sciences never contributed. In fact, at least one classic scholar did, the Italian Gaetano Mosca, author of the influential The Ruling Class, and there is evidence that Weber noticed the existence of both the ‘mafia’ and camorra – referring to it in a passage of his Economy and Society (1978 [1922]) about the informal funding sources of political groups. This relative neglect by classic sociological figures notwithstanding, mafia studies are one of the most enduring and lasting research streams in the social and human sciences, whose roots go back at least to the last three or four decades of the nineteenth century.

What we might call ‘mafia studies’ started in 1862 – at least, this may be a reasonably convenient date from which to depart in this review. In that year, the first book-length study on the camorra was published, and ‘camorra’ was at the time apparently the only word available to denote mafia-like behaviours and organizations. The author of the book, Marco Monnier, was a young Swiss writer living in Naples where his family managed a hotel. He was not an academic scholar, but a talented writer who had already published a book on brigandage. His definitions of the camorra are worth reading, as the continuities with mafia studies are as impressive as any conceptual or methodological breaks:

The Camorra could be defined as organized extortion: it is a secret society among the lower classes whose goal is evil … What the Camorra is, at least what it was not long ago, I will briefly state: it was an association of men of the common people, corrupt and violent, who used intimidation to obtain money from vicious and cowardly people. I strongly insist on these words: an association of men of the common people … Among the lower classes there is a very special sect, very local, highly organized, extending throughout the ancient Kingdom of the Two Sicilies … it reigns where the vicious and the cowardly gather, and especially in places where a sad necessity brings them together, that is, in prisons. (Monnier 2010 [1862], 7–8; my translation)

Monnier’s book continues with detailed and apparently first-hand descriptions of activities and situations, as well as customs and rules, of supposed members of this sect, distinguishing between the camorra as it works in prisons and the camorra as it appears in piazza (in the open), also focusing on its origins and the ‘social motives’ for its reproduction.

It has been noted (see Benigno 2015) that the literary imagination has provided much of the original imagery used to assemble this early conceptual representation of mafia – and a central contribution seems to have been offered by the French novelist and journalist Alexandre Dumas, author of the Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and many other successful novels, with his notes on the Neapolitan camorra written in 1862 while in Paris after a two-year period spent in Naples. Undoubtedly, the literary power of these exotically coloured descriptions is strong, and they impacted subsequent writing on the subject, even in Italy. But it is not clear what the point is here: whether it regards the reliability of these early representations (whose impact on following representations cannot be overestimated) or the fact that the literary imagination should be taken into account when assessing even self-claimed scientific or at least realistic representations – the kind of representations the social sciences aim to provide. Indeed, the circular relationship between literary imagination and sociological imagination is far from exceptional, and, as Wolfgang Lepenies (1988) has brilliantly shown, sociology has been, since its inception, suspended between ‘literature and science’. What mafia offers is just another case in point, an especially enlightening one as the diffusion of the words ‘mafia’ and ‘mafiosi’ to identify what had until then been called ‘camorra’ and ‘camorristi’ is a consequence of a literary creation and its apparent success in the decades after unification.

In other words, we are dealing in the case of mafia, as in many others, with the mutual contamination, collaboration and cooperation, but also conflict and competition, between two different genres of discourse and writing, two different ways of telling the truth about social life, or two different claims to cultural authority: one rooted in the human capacity to create worlds of fiction, the other in the human capacity for logical reasoning and systematic observation. As Lepenies has shown, the confrontation between literature and sociology was very intense precisely at the beginnings of sociology – the same period that saw the ‘discovery’ of first the camorra and later the mafia. To see the world also through the eyes of a novelist is far from being anomalous, as a giant of sociology like Erving Goffman observed and, above all, practised (see, e.g., Goffman 1961). As Bourdieu admitted too, novels can ‘say more, even about the social realm, than many writings with scientific pretensions’ (Bourdieu 1996 [1992]: 32) – something that resonates well with the declaration that ‘some of the best sociology is in novels’ (Ruff 1974, 368) and those who see novels as approaching a form of social inquiry, as does Boltanski (2014).

How much literary imagination and how much empirical social observation generated the first true classic in mafia studies is not easy to assess. Surely, the two volumes comprising La Sicilia nel 1876 are the fruit of several months of travelling across Sicily looking for witnesses to and evidence of the social and economic conditions of the island. Not surprisingly, the ‘mafia’ looms large in these pages, written by a then young Jewish intellectual, Baron Leopoldo Franchetti, who arrived from Tuscany with the specific objective of documenting and establishing some firm bases upon which to build efficacious policies for helping the southern regions of Italy to meet the standards of social and civic life of the northern regions. Franchetti was born in 1847 in Livorno into a family of good social standing – who had come to Italy from Tunisia in the final decades of the eighteenth century to engage in trade, eventually becoming one of the most important families of the local Jewish community. The young Franchetti was strongly influenced by the ideas of John Stuart Mill, which made him a convinced liberal. This was the mind set with which he observed and then wrote his influential book on public life in Sicily, published in 1877, together with the book of his friend and co-researcher Sidney Sonnino (a future Prime Minister of Italy), on the working conditions of Sicilian peasants. Franchetti’s half of the report, Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, was an analysis of the mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered authoritative today, much quoted and utilized by contemporary scholars. As historian John Dickie says, Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the mafia more than anyone else more than a century later, and Le condizioni is the first convincing explanation of how the mafia came to be (see Dickie 2004, 43–54). Most influential nowadays is Franchetti’s suggestion that we see in the mafia something like an ‘industry of violence’, a suggestion that would become the cornerstone of the economic theory of the mafia – the subject of my next chapter.

Given its impact on current research, it is worth noting here how Franchetti arrives at this suggestion and how he elaborates on this conceptualization. The following quotation is helpful in this endeavour:

The complete fact of which only one phenomenon is covered by the common meaning of the word [‘crime’], is the way of being of a given society and the individuals comprising it. As a consequence, to speak efficiently and in a way that makes the idea clear, it is better to express it with an adjective and not a name. The Sicilian usage, competent judge in this matter, expresses it precisely with the adjective ‘mafioso’, which does not mean a man devoted to crime, but a man who is able to make his rights respected, independently from the means he uses for this objective. And, as in the social context we have tried to describe, violence is often the best means he has to make himself respected, so it was natural that the word used in an immediately derivative sense ended up meaning a man devoted to blood. Thus the term mafia found a class of violent criminals ready and waiting for a name to define them, and, given their special character and importance in Sicilian society, they had the right to a different name from the one defining vulgar criminals in other countries. The importance gained by this social class of independent thugs (facinorosi) had the effect of assuring them of the moral authority enjoyed by every private force able to become superior in Sicily for the reasons above. As a consequence, on the island, this class of thugs has a very special status, which has nothing to do with that of delinquents in other countries, as much as they may be numerous, smart and well organized, and you can almost say that here it is a social institution … a class with industry and interests of its own, an independent social force. (1993 [1877]; my translation, emphasis added)

As this quotation makes clear, Franchetti’s vision of the mafia was much wider and deeper than the one for which he is nowadays recalled – the ‘industry of violence’ may be just one aspect of the ‘complete fact’ that manifests itself in the ‘way of being of a given society and the individuals comprising it’. In addition, industry was used by Franchetti not as the name for a sector in the production of goods or related services within an economy (as in the modern English use), but in the old Italian sense of operosità and attività, i.e. industriousness and productivity. We will elaborate on this point in the next chapter. What has to be emphasized at this point is that Franchetti’s analysis is only apparently focused exclusively on Sicily and the mafia. Indeed, what he is continually doing while describing and making sense of social and cultural features is a comparison between what he observes, what he listens to, what he reads (in local newspapers, for example) and what he considers the model of modern political and social organization, i.e. the rule of law, as he could see – along with many of his contemporaries with liberal attitudes and beliefs – in the British constitutional system. The image of mafia we find in Franchetti’s pages is an image depicted in contrast with the image of a liberal, market-oriented society based on the rule of law.

Not surprisingly, Franchetti’s analysis was attacked, disbelieved and labelled as ‘fiction’ by a host of Sicilian intellectuals and politicians (for a contemporary account, see Alongi 1977 [1887]; for an example of a pamphlet against Franchetti, see Conti 1877; see also Capuana, 1898). Today, the same text is considered one of the most coherent and comprehensive accounts of the Sicilian mafia and its social causes. Indeed, there is much to be praised in that book. But this should not make us blind to the positioning of the author and the bias that his political objectives and, above all, his mind set could have produced in his analysis. Franchetti’s interpretation of the mafia is embedded in a cultural frame in which the state – in its liberal, constitutional form – is assumed to be a sort of universal institution, an incarnation of reason, freedom and modernity. The same is true for the ‘rule of law’ – an ideological pillar of the whole edifice that sets the standard for the assessment of any institution.

The parameters of the debate on mafia, camorra and the like in the last decades of the nineteenth century were, however, less a legacy of Franchetti than of an eclectic scientist, one of the most influential scholars of the time, indeed – whose scientific standards, according to the current vision, were so flexible as to make his work more interesting nowadays as evidence of human fantasy than for its research results. It is difficult to imagine today just how influential Cesare Lombroso, the author of scientific bestsellers such as L’uomo delinquente (1876) and L’uomo di genio (1893), could have been in those decades, in Italy and elsewhere. The number of pages Lombroso devoted to southern peculiarities and mafias in his numerous publications is not that large (even though he started to devote himself to these issues very early, see Lombroso 1863), but we could say that much of what was written on mafias in the latter decades of the nineteenth century was in some way related to him and his ideas. This is the case of Giuseppe Alongi’s La maffia (1887) and La camorra (1890), both published in a book series edited by Lombroso, as well as Abele De Blasio’s Usi e costume dei camorristi (1897), with a preface by Lombroso, and Antonino Cutrera’s La mafia e i mafiosi: origini e manifestazioni. Studio di sociologia criminale (1900). Alongi and Cutrera were not academics but policemen, attracted to the social sciences thanks to the new discipline Lombroso had founded: criminal anthropology. A physician by education, De Blasio was a follower of the Lombroso School and one of the early academic practitioners of anthropology in Italy as well as the author of dozens of articles and books on phrenology, prehistory and the sociology of deviant behaviour. While influenced by Lombroso’s idea of the ‘born criminal’ and other aspects of his biological theory of crime, neither these writers, nor Lombroso himself, were so blind, or so consistent, as not to notice other causal factors linked to history and social context. All in all, the Lombrosian legacy had a massive impact on the social study of the so-called ‘dangerous classes’ in fin de siècle Italy.

This is also the case of Napoleone Colajanni’s Nel regno della mafia (1900), a booklet whose contents are maybe less interesting than its author. A participant in the Risorgimento as a young man, Colajanni would become a socialist leader and an accomplished social scientist – a professor of statistics, demography and even sociology at the University of Naples, and author of many pioneering books in these disciplines. Today his name is especially remembered for his intellectual conflict with Lombroso (a socialist himself) and his School: whereas the latter insisted on the biological foundations of social and cultural divides (such as the one between northern and southern Italians, or between normal and criminal men/women) captured by the category of ‘race’, Colajanni was firmly against any form of biological determinism and a strong supporter of the argument that social inequalities and institutions are the unique real determinants of criminal conduct (Colajanni 1890). He published extensively on the divide between northern and southern Italy on poverty, on backwardness and deviant behaviour, especially in Sicily (e.g., Colajanni 1895). His pamphlet on the mafia adds a special sensitivity to political issues to his usual arguments, claiming that it is the Italian state – its ruling class, i.e. its government – that is primarily responsible for the mafia’s existence and persistence, thanks to the diffuse practices of corruption and their general acceptance as ways of governance (Colajanni 1900).

Whereas the socialist Colajanni could point his finger at the Italian national state, the liberal Mosca was at more pain to specify exactly the political agents behind the mafia. As an insider of the ‘ruling class’, he himself had theorized in his sociological writings (he started his career as an officer in the Parliament, then, while pursuing his academic career, he also spent time as a deputy; in the new century, he also became a member of the government in charge of colonies), but Mosca was less interested in looking for who or what was responsible than he was in providing descriptions and possible explanations – historical and sociological – for the existence of this strange phenomenon called mafia – ‘strange’ at least to people foreign to Sicily, as Sicilians knew very well what mafia was, according to Mosca. The intellectual strategy that Mosca, a founding father of modern political science and political sociology, used for conceptualizing the mafia is worth quoting at length:

First of all, we need to eliminate a certain lack of precision in our spoken language. It should be noted that with the word Mafia, the Sicilians intend to express two things, two social phenomena, that can be analyzed in separate ways even though they are closely related. The Mafia, or rather the spirit of the Mafia, is a way of thinking that requires a certain line of conduct such as maintaining one’s pride or even bullying in a given situation. On the other hand, the same word in Sicily can also indicate, not a special organization, but the combination of many small organizations, that pursue various goals, in the course of which its members almost always do things which are basically illegal and sometimes even criminal. (Mosca 1980 [1900], 3)

Moving from the mafia as a ‘spirit’, a set of perceptual schemas and dispositions towards acting in certain ways (that is, of habits), Mosca was able to derive the social organization which the second meaning of the word intends to capture. He focuses the major part of his essay on this second meaning, making it clear that only the combination of a way of thinking that is not unique to Sicily and certain features of Sicilian social and political structure could generate the mafia as a special, and criminal, institution. This is possibly the clearest and most profitable definition of the word in terms that are fruitful for social research. Mosca’s (short) writings on mafia are possibly the last relevant contribution of Italian social science to mafia studies before the demise of positivist sociology in the early twentieth century. Indeed, mafia never emerged as a legitimate subject in this early sociology – no article esplicitly devoted to mafia was printed in the Rivista Italiana di Sociologia, the first professional journal in sociology published in Italy from 1897 to 1921. In the fascist period, sociology did not disapper, but reduced its public role – becoming a strictly academic discipline taught in the newly founded Faculty of Statistics as a disciplinary sideline of demography. While in Italy mafia more or less disappeared as an object of social research (leaving space to literature and even cinema), scholars in the US were busy discovering a new research object.

However, there is another research stream worthy of notice: folklore studies. Due to a coincidence that probably was not really a coincidence, folklore studies developed in Italy mainly as a Sicilian specialty thanks to the impressive collection and published work of physician-turned-ethnologist Giuseppe Pitrè. His name is famous in mafia studies because of his early description of the mafioso as a psychological type and of omertà as a cultural code (of silence) (see the etymology of ‘mafia’ in Chapter 1, pp. 5–7; also see Chapter 4). Located in a chapter in one of Pitrè’s many published books, these descriptions would probably have remained known only to a few experts and scholars interested in folklore if not for a political scandal that occurred in Sicily at the end of the nineteenth century. With the assassination of the banker Emanuele Notarbartolo in 1893, and the subsequent indictment of a deputy from Palermo, Raffaele Palizzolo, as the instigator of that homicide, the ‘mafia’ surged to national notoriety, with Notarbartolo as the mafia’s first eminent victim. Mosca’s most influential work, ‘Cosa è la mafia?’ (What is mafia?), was written as a contribution to this public debate in the mass media of the time. A ‘Committee in defence of Sicily’ – and of Palizzolo – was founded in Palermo. Pitrè, the dean of Italian folklore studies, used his persona and his speech to act as the ideological weapon of the committee, casting a long, dark shadow on the reliability of his opinions on and knowledge of the subject. However, he was among the few who could claim insider knowledge of the rich social phenomenology referred to by the name ‘mafia’.