Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro

Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro


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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]).

      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’

      There is a last hypothesis, authoritatively advanced by the Italian linguist Mario Alinei, a major scholar of Indo-European languages, who sees in the word ‘mafia’ a derivation from the Osco-Umbrian (ancient pre-Latin italic language) (a)mafla, whose meaning is ‘comparable’ to the Latin amicitia (friendship) with an immediate reference to the meaning of ‘political


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