Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro
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moving force of historical dynamics. The first basis of this force is undoubtedly in nature, in the sense that ’asabiyya, in its most common form, is derived from tribal (male) consanguinity. The inconvenience of this ‘racial’ conception was already overcome in Arab antiquity by the inclusion of the institutions of affiliation and spiritual kinship, to which Ibn Khaldūn accords great importance in the formation of an effective ’asabiyya. Most important, ’asabiyya is grounded on personal leadership and loyalty more than impersonal, objective institutions – a point contemporary scholars tend to undervalue even though it is crucial for understanding Ibn Khaldūn’s theory as embedded in its time and culture (Rosen 2005). Whether based on blood ties or on some other feeling, ’asabiyya is, for Ibn Khaldūn, the force which impels groups of human beings to assert themselves, to struggle for primacy, to establish hegemonies, dynasties and empires. It is a main tenet of Khaldūn’s theory that, once power has been seized, the dominant group tends to lose the ’asabiyya on which it was originally based and substitute other forces for it, which sets the ground for a relaxation of customs and a general weakening of moral life. This makes room for the rise to power of a newly emerging social group endowed with a stronger, more genuine and sanguine ’asabiyya. We can suggest that something very similar to ’asabiyya is what empowers mafia groups, providing them with that social cohesion and strong inner solidarity that is the main resource of mafiosi and that mafia institutions are supposed to cultivate and reproduce. In a sense, we could even suggest that ‘mafia’ is a manifestation of ’asabiyya, that the latter is what the term really means. How this principle of solidarity works inside the mafia and what consequences this has for both mafiosi and the wider social life constitute a central topic of this book.
As mentioned above, this book also capitalizes on recent scholarship on the European state. As many scholars of international relations argue these days, the sovereign state has always been far from that omnipotent, omniscient and norm-inspired institution that political theorists, politicians and even sociologists have argued and still claim it to be (Ruggie 1993; Spruyt 1994; Thompson 1994). If the practice of the state is very different from the image of the state transmitted by its theory, the theory of the mafia has often been predicated on a fallacious and highly ideological view of the state as a true monopolist of legitimate force. This book tries to restore the balance, moving from a realistic understanding of the state as a limited, ambivalent and contradictory qua historical institutional form.
The persistence and global spread of mafia-like arrangements is indeed living proof of how the state has historically encountered serious problems in establishing itself as an autonomous system of rules faithful to its formally enacted charters and its ideal, if not ideological, claims of purely legal rule (e.g., Mitchell 1988, 1991; Scott 1998; Migdal 2001). What makes a modern state is the principle of territorial sovereignty, i.e. territorial exclusivity and centralization. The adoption of this principle was the critical turn in the political organization of Western history (e.g., Strayer 1970; Poggi 1978, 1991; Mann 1986a, 1986b; Ruggie 1993). We often take the present system of sovereign states for granted and move from the assumption that this development was inevitable. But it was not, and the history of mafias is there to confirm this. There would be no mafia if the state did not exist – because we would not be able to see mafia without the spectacles, and the alternative model, of the state. But we should also add that there would be no mafia if the state were such a powerful institution as political philosophers and their sociologist followers usually maintain. In a sense, we could say that, while the sovereign state has won against the city-state, the city-league and the empire (Spruyt 1994), it has still yet to win against the mafia. And there are many signs suggesting the victory is not as close as we would hope.
Finally, I would like to emphasize the anarchist moment – the third point of my list – given that one major point of the book is the plea for an understanding of mafia structures and functions independently from any concession to the state as a political ideal and an institutional model. I want to examine and assess the mafia from a radically nonstate-centric, and non-Westernized, point of view – a move that follows recent suggestions coming from anthropological theory (Graeber 2004; Scott 2012) but whose roots date back at least to the now classic Mutual Aid by the Russian anarchist prince Piotr Kropotkin (1902; see also Kinna 1995), who possibly knew nothing about the mafia and other outlaw societies in southern Italy, but whose ideas about cooperation and communal associations resonate subtly and strongly with the core of mafia ideology and social structure. This emphasis on anarchism is not only a theoretical move, but a return to what I see as a major historical spur to mafia development all over the world, including Italy. Contrary to Crawford’s claim (which lacked the historical knowledge we have today), anarchism and the mafia – at least in Sicily and the US – ran parallel for a while (see Lupo 2009), and this book tries to capitalize on this historical connection as well.
We are again getting close to the central thrust of the book: the mafia is a historically grounded and culturally informed manifestation of a way of organizing political relationships and political life that is different, and alternative, to the modern European state as grounded on the rule of law. This may be apparent in the case of Asian mafias, like yakuza and triads, but it has to be recognized in Western cases like the Italian mafias as well. As a Mediterranean institution focused on personal ties and obligations among selected males, the Sicilian mafia asks to be understood not as a failure of the modern Western state (and its companion, ‘civil society’), nor as an industry (whose conditions of existence are rooted in the failure of the state to provide generalized trust), but as a different, typically Southern, institutional arrangement of social life with strong political implications.
As a long, though not mainstream, tradition of scholarship – call it the political-realist tradition, not by chance strongly embedded in Italian intellectual life at least since Machiavelli (see Levine 1995), and in modern times advanced and promoted by a Sicilian scholar like Mosca (1939 [1896]) – holds, politics as human activity occurs in every situation where a group of people organizes itself and works for improving their well-being by trying to persuade others of their legitimacy and justification as power-holders, even in spite of their arbitrariness and violent enforcement of their rule (Mouffe 2005; see also Miglio 2011). There is nothing intrinsically good in the political field, apart from the desired well-being of its most powerful and successful agents, especially when seen from their particular point of view. Like many effective political actors, mafia groups usually succeed in presenting themselves – not only to their members, but to other constituencies as well – as legitimate guarantors of social order and efficacious providers of collective opportunities. This is what makes mafia associations different from common criminal groups or gangs, and makes them potentially relevant actors in the same political field in which the state (with its many elements and fragments) acts as the legitimate and legal provider of order, while being only one of the main actors in concrete situations. This grassroots legitimacy – which is empirically documented in many instances of mafia history – has to be accounted for in any sociological understanding of the mafia. This asks for a culturally sensitive approach to mafia, open to accepting the ‘natives’ point of view’ as well as the effectiveness of its working as a social organization in local conditions. Only from this standpoint can we hope to grasp the meaningful structures through which mafiosi interact and really construct their social world, making it understandable and meaningful to both them and their social constituencies – including interested partners.
Culture is indeed a crucial aspect of the mafia, as of every other social thing, as a focus on its articulated symbolism and its communicative features immediately shows. This has long been recognized, of course, but has been incredibly forgotten or minimized in the most recent literature – probably because of an awareness of the traps that the concept of culture may convey.6 But the discussion of culture, the concept of culture and cultural analysis has not stopped with Talcott Parsons and 1950s American functionalism, as many mafia scholars seem to believe. Fortunately, recent developments in cultural sociology (e.g., Alexander et al. 2011; Inglis and Almila 2016) offer tools and concepts useful for penetrating the symbolism and cultural structures of the mafia way of life without falling either into the reductionism of rational action theory (RAT) and the ethological model of communication analysis (such as signalling theory: see Gambetta 2009), or into the weaknesses