Figure 1.1: The ‘modern description of Europe’, by Sebastian Münster (‘Europa das ein Drittheil der Erden nach Gelegenheit unsern Zeiten’, 1578).

Where Is the ‘Politics’ in Mafia Politics?

As stated previously, this book argues that in looking for core characteristics of mafia(s), we are better placed if we focus our research on the political sphere, on the realm of political institutions and political life. The main tenet of the book is that ‘the political’, as a relatively autonomous sphere of action (e.g., Schmitt 1996 [1932]; Freund 1965; Pizzorno 1986; Meier 1990; Mouffe 2005) that is different from ‘the economic’ or ‘the criminal’ (whatever this means) as such, is at the heart of the mafia. As protection is generally recognized to be one of the central activities – if not the central activity – of the political sphere, and the typical object of political obligation (Tilly 1985; Miglio 2011; see also White 2009; Ferris 2011), we may expect to find mafiosi dealing, like active political actors, mostly (albeit not exclusively) with protection. The historical evidence, in fact, says that mafiosi – in Sicily as elsewhere – typically present themselves as protectors, and that protection is possibly the central, though not unique, function they perform, together with mediation and enforcement, functions that in any case are implicated in the provision of protection.

      How they deal with this general activity/object is far from clear, however. It is the main task of this book to throw light on this issue, which lies at the core of mafia studies, restoring to the political meaning of protection its fullness as both a social function and the content of human obligations (see also Ferris 2011). An emphasis on the political nature of the mafia is not totally unprecedented. We can find seeds and fragments of this vision, albeit often hidden between the lines, in authors as diverse as Max Weber (1978 [1922]), Eric Hobsbawm (1959), Charles Tilly (1974, 1985), Anton Blok (1974), Filippo Sabetti (1984), Raimondo Catanzaro (1992 [1988]), Umberto Santino (1994), Vadim Volkov (2002), Jane and Peter Schneider (2004) and, more recently, Randall Collins (2011). Never either explicitly or openly discussed, the equation between mafia and politics (or political rule) was already apparent in Gaetano Mosca’s foundational text on political science (originally published in 1896), as the following excerpt attests:

      Psychological and intellectual isolation on the part of the lower classes, as well as too noticeable differences in beliefs and education between the various social classes, give rise to social phenomena that are very interesting to the student of the political sciences, dangerous as they may be to the societies in which they occur. In the first place, as a consequence of their isolation within the lower classes, another ruling class, or directing minority, necessarily forms, and often this new class is antagonistic to the class that holds possession of the legal government. When this class of plebeian leaders is well organized it may seriously embarrass an Official government. In many Catholic countries the clergy is still the only authority that exerts any moral influence over the peasantry, and the peasants extend to the parish priest all the confidence that they withhold from the government official. In other countries, where the people look upon the public functionary and the nobleman if not exactly as enemies certainly as utter strangers, the more resolute and aggressive of the plebeians sometimes succeed in organizing widespread and fairly permanent associations, which levy assessments, administer a special justice of their own and have their own hierarchies of officials, their own leaders, their own recognized institutions. So a real State within the State comes into being, a government that is clandestine but often more feared, better obeyed, and if not better loved certainly better understood, than the legal government. (1939 [1896], 116–17; emphasis added)

      Never named, the mafia’s phenomenology was clearly in the author’s mind and local knowledge, having been born in Palermo and politically engaged as a deputy representative of a mandate near Palermo, and well known in mafia chronicles. We can easily infer from this excerpt that Mosca believed the ‘social phenomenon’ of the mafia was as ‘dangerous to the society in which it occurs’ as it was ‘very interesting to the student of the political sciences’. Indeed, it was a real, true government – ‘clandestine’ but often ‘better obeyed’ and even ‘better understood’: this is how the political sociologist Mosca conceptualized the mafia. However, these intellectual concerns and sociological insights never developed into a comprehensive research programme in his writings (see, e.g., Mosca 1980 [1900]; 1933). Indeed, to find the first clear assertion about the political nature of a mafia-like social phenomenon (called by its name, this time), you have to look not to a strictly academic work, but to an article written and published in the Political Science Quarterly (official journal of the the Academy of Political Science founded in 1880) by the Neapolitan anarchist lawyer Francesco Saverio Merlino, who, for political motives, had emigrated to the US in 1891. After having presented the character of ‘the Camorrist’, a figure he admits he had ‘frequent opportunities, professional and other, to become acquainted with’, Merlino continues, asking ‘Who, then, was the Camorrist? And who gave him the authority for his acts?’ What follows is enlightening:

      The answer is that he was a member of a secret association, and that the power he wielded was conferred by nobody, but was merely assumed. Yet he was not necessarily a criminal. He might, strictly speaking, commit no action for which he would be amenable to punishment; and whatever illegality there was in the fact itself of the existence of the Camorra, was practically obviated by custom and by the acquiescence of the government. The Camorra was, indeed, almost a branch of the government. Yet the government at times persecuted it, and ultimately has nearly destroyed it. At the height of its glory, the Camorra acted quite independently of the government, and rather as its rival. The society then was, in fact, a lesser government established on the margin of the greater. (1894, 466–7)

To find something along these lines with respect to the Sicilian mafia, you probably have to go to a now-forgotten semi-historical essay by the American writer Francis Marion Crawford, who, in his two-volume book The Rulers of the South. Sicily, Calabria, Malta, offers this enlightening, if pessimistic, assessment:

      [Mafia] is a complete and highly efficient form of self-government, which exists, and will continue to exist, in defiance of the constitutional monarchy under which it is supposed to live. An ancient tyrant would have destroyed it by the brutal process of massacring half the population and transplanting the rest to the mainland, but no civilized method of producing the same result seems to have occurred to statesmen. The Bourbons employed the Mafia to keep order, the present government tolerates it because it cannot be crushed; when the Mafia joined Garibaldi, the Bourbons fell, and it remains to be seen what will happen in the south when the Mafia turns against the monarchy it has called in. It is to be hoped that such a catastrophe is far removed from present possibility, and it is at least a somewhat reassuring fact that the Mafia is the very reverse of anarchic, or even socialistic; it is, indeed, one of the most highly conservative systems in the world. (1901, ii, 373; emphasis added)

Interestingly, Crawford set forth this ‘political’ definition of the mafia as a counterpart to the reading of the phenomenon advanced by Antonino Cutrera in his La mafia e i mafiosi (1900), a study in criminal sociology considered a landmark text in mafia studies to this day (see Chapter