Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro
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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’.
Towards a Comparative Approach: Hobsbawm’s Pioneering Contribution and the Neglect of American Research on Organized Crime
In very general terms, and in a loosely sketched form, this is the history of mafia studies in Italy during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Rarely can you find references to other countries in this literature, or to other possible experiences of supposedly mafia-like phenomena. That similar phenomena or institutions could exist elsewhere – for instance, triads in China or yakuza in Japan – does not seem to have been noticed by any of these writers.
It is through Hobsbawm’s historical imagination (an author writing in English) that mafia – indeed, always written as ‘Mafia’ – moved from its narrow localization on an island in the Mediterranean Sea to its insertion in a comparative framework alongside other historical experiences deemed to be similar in certain ways. In his book Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959) – which happens to be his first book and one of the most influential books in social history ever written – the Marxist historian considered mafia as a primitive form of social movement. Building mainly on the texts published in Italy after unification, especially Colajanni and Alongi, plus some more recent contributions in political magazines, Hobsbawm offered a fully developed and consistent portrait of the mafia which is compatible with our common standards of academic scholarship – better, of mafias in the plural, as the Sicilian one was just an instance of a wider phenomenon for him. According to Hobsbawm, primitive rebels are those engaged in ‘pre-political’ forms of social mobilization; their politics are often ambiguous and perhaps even reformist,