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
