The Argument
This book aims to offer a fresh perspective on mafias which, in many ways, is an alternative to what nowadays constitutes the mainstream in this research field. Taking the Sicilian case as its main reference point, the book develops the idea that what mafiosi do is better understood if framed not as ‘(organized) crime’, nor as ‘business’ or ‘economy’, as a widespread scholarly wisdom maintains,1 but as ‘politics’. Like feudalism, the city-state or the empire, what we call ‘mafia’ identifies first and foremost a way of organizing and managing human relationships among people who mutually recognize themselves as participants in the same collective identity: political relationships, in other words. This view resonates with, and qualifies, the description of mafia set forth by a renowned insider, Bill Bonanno, the son of Cosa Nostra godfather Joseph ‘Joe’ Bonanno: ‘[Mafia] is in the way one person connects to another. Mafioso is, first and last, about the nature of relationships’ (Bonanno 1999, xv).
That mafiosi also perform some politically relevant functions – e.g., they provide votes to politicians – is well known, but this book goes well beyond this simple and well-documented fact. It argues that the mafia is inherently a political institution, which may perform a number of different functions (as political parties do, for instance), but is especially well suited to performing political ones because the nature of social relationships in mafia life is eminently political.
To be sure, the mafia may be even more than politics: as this book maintains from the start, what we call ‘mafia’ is really a total social fact (as Marcel Mauss would say) wherein politics, economics, religion, sexuality, morality and many other social things converge and coexist. The book acknowledges this complexity but chooses to analytically emphasize the political side of this totality because of its centrality to the whole architecture. Politics is the pillar of that ‘total social fact’ called mafia. Seen from the vantage point of politics, it is argued, the mafia may be better captured in its genesis, its inner working mechanisms and its reproductive/expansive power.
Of course, how we conceive of ‘politics’ is essential to consider. If we narrowly define politics as the sphere of the (liberal, constitutional, maybe also democratic) state, the mafia falls out of this realm, by definition. It can thus be easily relegated to other – presumably less noble and less legitimate – institutional fields, such as economics, business and, obviously, crime. But if we adopt a wider and more historically sound concept of politics, and accept that there have been, and still are, various ways of organizing political life, including ways that have been and still are framed as ‘crime’ by the (liberal, constitutional, maybe also democratic) state, then a whole research field opens itself up to our investigations. That is the move made by this book, which could also be read as a book on politics and the ways of conceiving it in contemporary sociological terms.
But mafia is not simply ‘politics’ at large (as it is not simply ‘business’, even for those observers and scholars who adopt an economic perspective). If politics is, indeed, a very general category, mafia exhibits the features of only a certain kind of politics: more precisely, it accounts for a certain mode of political organization. The latter is at the centre of the book, which develops what I would call a political theory of the mafia, modelling the political aspect of mafia’s social totality, and putting it centre stage. A major claim of the book is that this political mode is deeply rooted in a popular reinterpretation of an ancient and diffused aristocratic culture2 and should be conceived as a mode of political expression of historically subaltern groups in their quest for status and power.
Put in other terms: I suggest that what we call ‘mafia’ could be conceived of as a sort of popular or folk politics that has gained some degree of local and even translocal hegemony by innovatively drawing on cultural models which are firmly opposed to bourgeois ones – ranging from aristocratic to subaltern modes of cultural expression. ‘Mafia’ is what may happen to ‘hidden transcripts’, James C. Scott’s (1990) famous formula for capturing subaltern infrapolitics,3 when their bearers become locally dominant while refusing to culturally transform into a fully-fledged dominant class imbued with bourgeois, middle-class values, i.e. the values at the core of the contemporary global social world. The warrior ethos of the old aristocratic classes (in Sicily, the baronial culture; in Japan, the samurai ethos) is the cultural horizon of mafiosi – not the spirit of capitalism, not a bourgeois civic culture (see Elias 1982 [1969]; on the samurai ethos, see Ikegami 1997; on the Sicilian baroni, see Pontieri 1943; Marino 1964). Instead of challenging the old hierarchies and eventually creating new ones – which is the aim of ‘progressive’ subaltern groups, according to modernist and socialist visions of politics – mafiosi have worked, and still work, hard in order to ‘achieve a superior rank while making no objection to the persistence of a hierarchical order’ (Gould 2003, 164). Out of utopia, and in purely analytical terms, there is no special reason to prefer the first (‘progressive’) option to the second (call it ‘conservative’). This analytical distinction is a crucial point for understanding the mafia in sociological terms – a distinction this book maintains in order to develop a non-normative, non-statist, and alternative understanding of the mafia as a global form.
At risk of being repetitive, a warning is necessary at this point in order to prevent possible objections and even misunderstandings – and the book elaborates on this, as it is a crucial theoretical element of the whole argument. Contrary to what our received wisdom might suggest, to say that mafia is of a political nature is not the same as advancing an equation between the mafia and the state – a common stance in the past, especially among lawyers and jurists. Indeed, this book argues that the mafia is very different from the state, even if they can both be placed in the sphere of politics. But the state, as a historical institution, has not monopolized politics, and politics may be organized in many other ways (see Masters 1989; Poggi 1991; Schmitt 1996 [1932]). To be sure, the equation of mafia with the state has been strongly criticized by many scholars in recent decades, including the promoters and supporters of an economic theory of the mafia who conceive of it as an industry for private protection. This book maintains that they are right in saying that the mafia is different from the state, but that they go too far when they infer from this that the mafia is ‘a specific economic enterprise’ (Gambetta 1993, 1).
Mafia may be an enterprise, but it is far from patently obvious that it is an economic enterprise. It is one thing to say that mafiosi ‘produce and promote’ something like protection, but it is quite another to say that they also sell what they produce and promote. Production is such a general category of social life that anything humans do can be subsumed under this rubric: from culture to deviance to space. Promotion is a communicative function that can work in any setting, from industry to social movements to family. On the contrary, selling is a much more specific activity, which presumes the existence of a market and the working of a commoditization process – something that has only occurred in certain places and times, and with reference to certain goods (e.g., Sassatelli 2007). As I will show, mafiosi do not sell; they simply give their ‘help’, they offer their ‘support’, while ritually emphasizing their disinterest; characteristically, they make gifts. And a gift is a totally different thing from a commodity (Mauss 1990 [1925]; Bourdieu 1980, 1996 [1992], 2017; Gregory 1982; Godbout and Caillé 1998; Godelier 1999; Silber 2009; Liebersohn 2011; Caillé 2020).
To insist that ‘mafia’ is not to be mistaken for the state does not mean that the state is irrelevant for the understanding of mafia. As the currently dominant, most legitimate mode of political organization worldwide, the (modern, originally European) state is clearly the necessary reference point for any understanding of the mafia – be this framed in political terms, as suggested here, or in criminological and/or economic terms, as maintained by current scholarship. What is crime and what belongs to economics instead of politics is contingent upon the state and its workings. A close look at the state as a historically grounded political institution should therefore be pivotal in any serious analysis of the mafia. However, this is an intellectual gambit that current scholarship on mafia rarely makes, preferring to move from implicit and normative ideas of the state. The consequence is that, even in the best literature, a sociology of the mafia is contrasted with a philosophy of the state – leaving the state, as it were, in the heaven of pure ideals and forms while firmly locating the mafia in the dirty, material ground. The absence of the state was normal in the social sciences in the 1950s to 1970s – the same period in which mafia studies developed (e.g., Hobsbawm 1959; Hess 1970; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Arlacchi 1983a; for partial exceptions, see Blok 1974; Sabetti 1984). It is less acceptable in current scholarship, after the ‘return of the state’ occurred in the 1980s (e.g., Almond 1988; Spruyt 2002). We could say that, in mafia studies, the state still needs to be brought back in (Evans et al. 2010 [1985]).
This book aims to facilitate this move, and argues for the adoption of a heuristic symmetry in the study of the mafia.4 What new light could be shed on the mafia if we put aside the normative claims of the (European, liberal, modern) state and look at both the mafia and the state in truly sociological, i.e. empirically disenchanted, terms? What new light could be shed on the mafia if we put the state, with its normative claims, in brackets and problematize our hopes for the advent of a never fully gained ‘modernity’? What light could we shed on the mafia if we consider the idea that politics includes the voices and actions of subalterns (Guha 1999 [1983]; Rancière 1998; Scott 1985, 1990), and accept that people coming from the subaltern classes may become dominant in certain conditions – not necessarily backed by the state’s laws and codes – while remaining faithful to their social and cultural background?
These are the questions from which this book springs. In replying, it argues that what we name ‘mafia’ may be conceived of as a special mode of political organization whose institutional logic can be identified through a comparison with other (equally historical) modes – such as the (territorial, sovereign, and originally European) state, the city-state, the city-league, various patrimonial forms of administration, and more primitive forms of political organization such as the chiefdom. While identifiable with none of those, the mafia draws elements, techniques and mechanisms from many of them, in an institutional synthesis that may really be considered as a masterwork of (collective and individual) social engineering.
The words ‘mafia’ and ‘mafiosi’
The origins of the name ‘mafia’ remain rather obscure. A number of hypotheses exist, some of them more persuasive than others. The confusion started in the very early days after Italian unification (1861), when suggestions about the original meaning and the linguistic roots of the word made their first appearance. Strange as it may seem, no written evidence of the word exists before Italian unification; indeed, dictionaries of the time did not hesitate to attribute the matrix of the name to northern Italian dialect – be it the Piedmontese or the Tuscan vernacular. At least on this point some agreement has been reached relatively quickly: no one would object anymore to the fact that ‘mafia’ is a Sicilian word that existed well before Italian unification – even if how much before is far from clear, given that the etymological roots of the word are not clear. The first documented occurrence of the term dates back to 1865, when the word was evoked in an official, but not public, report by a Piedmontese officer to account for everything against the new government that could be said to exist in Sicily – including anarchists and socialists. The first authoritative testimony about the word and its social uses in common speech dates back to 1889. According to the influential Sicilian folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), the adjective mafiusu (in Italian translated as ‘mafioso’) was in use in his Palermo neighbourhood when he was a child, with the meaning of ‘cute’, ‘smart’, ‘well done’ (Pitrè 1889, 2008). No immediate connection with crime existed at the time, according to this authoritative source. In fact, the source of the association with the criminal world of what was previously a word with aesthetic and maybe ethical connotations was a literary invention. In the early 1860s, a drama was written and performed in Palermo with the title of I mafiusi di la Vicaria, set in a prison (Vicaria was the traditional name of the prison building in Palermo) with a few prisoners as characters. This was a story of prison life and eventual redemption, in which a sort of local boss, after years spent in prison acting as the ‘provider of social order’, found a new civic consciousness once free. Originally staged in 1863 and performed in Sicilian theatres throughout that decade, the drama had some relevant success in the 1880s, even being represented in theatres in Rome. In sum, an event in the ongoing national public sphere was at the origin of an association – that of the nam...
