Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro

Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro


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can become mechanisms for tyranny and shakedown rackets’ (1984, 12). This is an insightful conjecture, which I will build on in Chapter 4.

      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.

      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.

      *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)

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