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, if not conservative; and they are more often rural and poor, coming on the scene on the cusp of dramatic socioeconomic transformations (see also Hobsbawm 1973; Shanin 1971). The social bandit is their archetypical outlaw form:
Social banditry, a universal and virtually unchanging phenomenon, is little more than endemic peasant protest against oppression and poverty: a cry for vengeance on the rich and oppressors, a vague dream of some curb upon them, a righting of individual wrongs. Its ambitions are modest … Social banditry has next to no organization or ideology, and is totally inadaptable to modern social movements. (1959, 5)
In his book, Hobsbawm tests his argument against a series of case studies: social bandits, mafia, millenarian movements (Italian Lazzaretti, Spanish anarchists, the Sicilian peasant leagues), the city mob, labour sects. His main claim is that these forms of social protest emerge in the absence of what he considers the ‘modern’ forms of political organization (parties, unions, etc.): ‘The bandit is a pre-political phenomenon, and his strength is in inverse proportion to that of organized agrarian revolutionism and Socialism or Communism’ (1959, 23). The chapter on mafia is the longest and possibly the most interesting of the book. Hobsbawm notes three meanings of mafia: (1) a general sceptical and dismissive attitude towards the state and state law; (2) a highly mediated and decentralized form of power and patronage; (3) the control of a community’s social life by a secret – or officially unrecognized – system of gangs. In his own words:
Mafia (in all three senses of the word) provided a parallel machine of law and organized power; indeed, so far as the citizen in the areas under its influence was concerned, the only effective law and power … The apparatus of coercion of the ‘parallel system’ was as shapeless and decentralized as its political and legal structure, but it fulfilled its purpose of securing internal quiet and external power. (1959, 35, 38)
Hobsbawm’s understanding of the mafia has not been very influential in mafia studies – at least not compared to the influence his thesis on social banditry has had on sociohistorical research. This is a pity, as there was much to recommend in his first book, including the suggestions of reading mafia as a (pre-)political phenomenon and pursuing its study in a comparative perspective. In this early book, and even more explicitly in a later one (1969), Hobsbawm makes passing references to other countries, including China, Colombia and Japan. Indeed, even though it is not evoked directly, this was an expansion of the comparative framework for reading mafia (in addition to social banditry) that would only be furthered in later years with the explicit comparison of Italian mafias to other similar social formations such as triads, yakuza and, since the 1970s, Colombian cartels.
Of course, all these subjects have their own intellectual histories, historians and social analysts. The problem is that, too often, they remain almost unknown to Western scholars writing and researching on mafias – and are difficult to locate even in available books on the history and sociology of these forms of ‘organized crime’ (but see sources referred to in Ownby and Heidhues 1993; Betancourt and García 1994; Wang 2017). Indeed, you cannot expect to find sociological analysis of the triads and yakuza until the post-Second World War period or even later, when the social sciences – and sociology among them – eventually had the opportunity to enter these Eastern countries and their academic systems. However, official reports, and even a few books on these foreign forms, have been written by Western observers since the nineteenth century, as well as on other exotic criminal institutions – such as the Thuggee phenomenon and other so-called ‘criminal tribes’ in India, the subject of a rich literature produced by British colonial officers or ethnographers as well as indigenous observers well before the arrival of colonial rule (see Wagner 2007; Piliavsky 2015; see also Benigno 2011).
The publication since the 1930s of the fifteen-volume Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences was a major achievement in the history of these sciences, including sociology. For mafia studies, it was the occasion to see its object recognized as a social phenomenon worthy of attention on its own and therefore of an autonomous entry, authored by the same Mosca whose name and ideas, in the meantime, had been travelling beyond Italy and Europe (in 1939, the English translation of his Elementi di scienza politica would be issued in the US as The Ruling Class). The only novelty with respect to his previous writings on the subject was a political acknowledgment of the fascist regime – presented as able, like no previous one, to defeat the mafia (Mosca 1933). Unfortunately, this was simply not true. Fascism fought the mafia, it is true, but the lower branches of it rather than its highest ranks, so that the mafia persisted behind the scenes, sometimes well camouflaged within the same fascist ruling class (on mafia during fascism, see Duggan 1989).
Meanwhile, ‘mafia’ was becoming the name of a major social problem in the US, where it emigrated together with millions of Italians in search of luck and a new life across the Atlantic. This is not the place to tell the story of the transplantation of ‘mafia’ from Italy to the US and elsewhere (see Anderson 1965; Lupo 2008; Lombardo 2013). Suffice to say that the research on gangs and organized crime that started at Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., Thrasher 1927; Landesco 1968 [1929]; Whyte 1943) had almost no impact on the Italian debate on the mafia. Social and criminological research on organized criminal activities in the US were conducted in those years under labels such as ‘racketeers’, ‘mobsters’, ‘gangsters’ and the like. Rarely, if ever, was ‘mafia’ a common name for these activities and the people in charge of them. What in the United States was becoming a major political issue – with the institution of committees especially devoted to its study and investigation – was considered in Italy a legacy of history to be overcome with modernization, a folkloric appendix, or simply not an issue at all. Based on research conducted in his capacity as a consultant for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1966 and 1967, sociologist and criminologist Donald Cressey was able to write a whole treatise on so-called ‘Cosa Nostra’, as the Sicilian mafia was named in the US according to Joe Valachi’s witness (see Maas 1968), with the suggestive title Theft of the Nation (1969), and later the smaller Criminal Organization (1972a), in which he extended his conceptualization of organized crime to include criminal groups other than Cosa Nostra. Both the government and Cressey viewed the mafia – as embodied in ‘Cosa Nostra’ – as a secret society with rituals and a highly bureaucratic structure that included ‘bosses’, ‘underbosses’ and ‘soldiers’.
After Cressey’s influential 1969 study, many other social scientists entered the fray. Some challenged Cressey directly, arguing anew that the mafia did not exist (Hawkins 1969; Smith 1990 [1975]), that it was not nearly as organized and sinister as he had implied (Albini 1971; Chambliss 1978; Reuter 1983), or that organized crime was more ethnically than organizationally based (Ianni 1972, 1975). Others used Cressey’s framework to study a specific example of organized crime (Anderson 1979). All these studies recognized the centrality of Cressey’s study and took it as their point of departure (cf. Colomy 1988; Akers and Matsueda 1989), but they also revealed that, rather than using rituals and being bureaucratic in structure, their group structure was based upon network models otherwise known as forms of patron–client relationships. Among these revisionist scholars were Joseph Albini and Dwight Smith (sociologists), Francis Ianni and Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni (anthropologists), Peter Reuter (economist) and Mark Haller and Alan Block (historians). These revisionist authors helped lead the way in challenging the governmental (or bureaucratic) model of organized crime that viewed the mafia as the top criminal organization that had a monopoly on rackets in the US and around the globe (see Albini and McIllwain 2012, 4–5).
The Modern Wisdom (or Mafia Studies since 1970)
