obtain satisfactory remedies to local contingencies through a pattern of social organziation outside of the formal institutions. This pattern of social organization is the outlaw regime of mafia or what a sociologist policeman characterized as “primitive self-government”’ (1984, 95).
Through intensive fieldwork and, above all, the analysis of various documentary sources (including archival ones), Sabetti claims to identify in the career and doings of Mariano Ardena, the local mafia boss, an instance of a ‘profitable altruist’, i.e. ‘a villager who by helping others also helps himself’ (1984, 6). Clearly, people like Ardena were playing at the borders of legality, and it was easy for them to get involved in veritable outlaw societies along with more established and legalized ones, such as social clubs or cooperatives. A crucial insight in Sabetti’s reading of the mafia is that ‘[s]uch outlaw societies are confronted with all the problems of political organization, including the possibility that their rule-making and rule-enforcing mechanisms can become mechanisms for tyranny and shakedown rackets’ (1984, 12). This is an insightful conjecture, which I will build on in Chapter 4.
Sabetti’s contribution to mafia studies is controversial and has not exerted an appreciable impact on the field – its merits notwithstanding. His idea of ‘the mafia’ as a set of outlaw groups working to solve local problems of collective action is possibly too accommodating to mafiosi’s own self-representation as ‘men of goodwill’ to sound acceptable to readers and even scholars. But his interpretation of ‘mafia’ as an institutional arrangement capable of fulfilling political functions in certain social locations had analytical potentialities that later scholars eventually missed.4 In contrast, Raimondo Catanzaro’s book, published in Italian in 1988 and translated into English in 1992, is much more referenced than Sabetti’s. It has the merit of introducing a systematic historical, temporal dimension to mafia studies and a more balanced understanding of the political aspects of mafia groups with respect to economic ones. Key to a sociological understanding of the mafia is, for Catanzaro, the notion that the latter provides a ‘violent regulation of the market’ – a concept that permits the author to put together a sensitivity to political issues linked to the use of violence in social relationships and a focus on mafia’s involvement in economic activities.
Indeed, Gambetta has taken this kind of institutional analysis of mafia to the extreme. His 1993 book The Sicilian Mafia (published in Italian in 1992) acted as a watershed in mafia studies, introducing the notion of the Sicilian mafia as an instance of a more general type of economic organization, the ‘industry of private protection’. We will focus on this book in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that Gambetta proposed an economic theory of the mafia conceived as an ‘industry’ specialized in the provision of a special commodity, private protection, capitalizing on Franchetti’s early suggestion of mafia as an industry on its own (even though with a different objective) and, above all, on Thomas Schelling’s and Peter Reuter’s pioneering contributions to an economic analysis of organized crime. What Gambetta added to this mix was a massive documentation drawn from recent Italian trials against Cosa Nostra (the maxi processo organized by Judge Giovanni Falcone and the Palermo antimafia pool on the basis of Tommaso Buscetta’s testimony in 1984–7) and a rich sociological imagination, able to ‘translate’ economic insights into sophisticated understandings of mafia as both an economic organization and cultural reality – with the former accounting for the latter. Academic writings on mafias after 1992 may be divided according to their position with respect to this book and Gambetta’s more general approach to mafia (for followers, see, e.g., Varese 2001, 2010; for critics, see, e.g., Paoli 2003; Santoro 2007).
Attempting to review all the relevant production on Italian mafias since these pioneering empirical studies would require much more space than I have here. Instead of a review of texts and their authors (the most influential of which I will refer to in the following chapters, partly as sources and partly as targets of my critical readings), I will here propose a simple classification of approaches, each with some examples.
First, we can distinguish between perspectives that are economic in orientation (e.g., insisting on both material and rational dimensions of human conduct and life), and perspectives that put greater emphasis on nonmaterial and nonrational aspects – be they symbols or status positions or identities – or even power management and regulation. The first group includes approaches as different as rational action theory (RAT) and political economy, i.e. individualistic and holistic approaches. But the most important distinction relates to the identification of the mafia phenomenon: is the mafia something pertaining to economic life or to some other sphere/life order, such as politics or social solidarity (e.g., communal life)? Putting it bluntly, is the mafia an economic phenomenon or a political one? Is it business or government? To be sure, mafia seems to be precisely ‘the’ institutional order that makes such conceptual distinctions problematic: the distinction between spheres of life which comprises so many parts of modern society’s identity and structure looks less clear when seen through the prism of mafia and mafia-like phenomena.
I would say that what makes the mafia sociologically interesting is its resistance to being easily captured by the established categories of the social sciences – categories generated by the meeting of a certain gaze with a certain historical, and geographical, experience. This is more than the usual ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie 1956) syndrome that social scientists are well aware of. The problem is not that the concept of the mafia is a contested one, but that almost every sociological concept applied to it shows some weakness or inadequacy to capture its working. Letizia Paoli’s (2003) reference to the notion of ‘multifunctional brotherhoods’ tries to capture this lack of differentiation, of course. However, since scholars are eager to make sense of the mafia by translating its puzzling phenomenology into our common categories (which include the distinction between economics and politics, as well as between public and private), it is still possible and plausible to use these institutional distinctions as tools for distinguishing between theories of the mafia. Gambetta’s economic theory of the mafia as ‘an industry of private protection’ is the most explicit among current theories on this aspect. But it is relatively easy to classify other theories according to the same conceptual structure as well. So, it is apparent that Sabetti sees the mafia as belonging to the realm of government and politics more than to economics, and the same is true for scholars as different as Santino and Hess – the latter with his more recent (2011) identification of mafias as para-state organizations.
Things are more complex, however, because authors can change their dominant perspective over time: this is the case of the Schneiders, for example, who moved from a neo-Marxist political economy approach to an interpretation of mafia that is much more sensitive to both ‘culture and politics’ (e.g., Schneider and Schneider 2003; see also Tarrow 2006). Something similar could be said for Federico Varese, who moved towards the acceptance of a more blurred distinction between mafia as business and mafia as government (compare his 2001 and 2011 works). However, I suppose that the conceptual map offered in Figure 2.2 still roughly works.
Figure 2.2: Mafia studies, after 1970: a conceptual map (I)
*Includes political economy
Note: position in the cells is representative also of distance from other perspectives (e.g., Varese is less distant than Gambetta from an identification of the mafia as a ‘non-economic entity’, which means that Varese takes more distance from the notion of the mafia as a business or an industry than Gambetta)
This conceptual map would be incomplete, however, if not supplemented by a second one, built on the now traditional distinction between action, structure (e.g., social structure), and culture (e.g., cultural structure). Figure 2.3 shows how current
