Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro

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Preface

      The political philosophers who taught me a generation ago were quite clear that whatever was to be called ‘political’ must have something to do with the State: if phrases like ‘University politics’ or ‘Church politics’ were used, then they meant that these institutions were playing a part in State politics: otherwise the phrases were simply metaphors. But political structures can be recognized at all levels and in all kinds of activities and can, when appropriate, be compared with one another.

      Bailey 2001 [1969], 12

Unlike Frederick Bailey, the political theorists who taught me (in the early 1980s in Italy) were well aware that politics can have a life of its own, quite distinct from the ‘state’. Moving from ideas originally proposed by scholars such as Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, and apparently, though not often explicitly, backed by scientists operating in the life sciences (e.g., Wilson 1975; de Waal 2007 [1982]), they were not afraid to recognize ‘political structures … at all levels and in all kinds of activities’ (to follow the words of Bailey). The so-called ‘mafia’ could easily fit these ideas. In the case of Mosca, this fitness was probably not incidental. As a Sicilian, Mosca was well aware of the limits of the state in monopolizing politics, even though, as a liberal scholar educated in law and committed to national unity, this awareness was not something he could so explicitly and publicly extend to the mafia. In fact, Mosca wrote intensively about the mafia, but never explicitly about it being a ‘political structure’. Weber came closer to this vision, referring to the camorra and the mafia as cases of ‘intermittent financing of political groups’ (1978 [1922], 195) – but it is far from clear whether he considered camorra and mafia as political groups in themselves or as channels for financing more established and acknowledged political groups. Schmitt never wrote a line about the mafia, but his seminal and much debated ‘concept of the political’ is capable of accommodating almost anything that might generate a certain degree of intensity in the relations among friends and enemies – a suggestion that could inspire a whole research programme about all those ‘social unities’ that are commonly labelled as ‘criminal organizations’, including not only mafias but also terrorist groups and even hybrid formations claiming to be states, such as ISIS.

      None of these research lines has been systematically pursued in mafia studies – a few attempts moving along these lines notwithstanding (e.g., Sabetti 1984; Calise 1988; Catanzaro 1992 [1988]; Santino 1994; Schneider and Schneider 2004; Collins 2011). In mafia studies, the assumption of an almost perfect and normatively backed equivalence between ‘state’ and politics has been dominant, and only rarely called into question. It is as if social scientists, when studying mafias, tend to believe in states and their claims much more than when they are studying states as such. In some way, this may be considered an indication of the success of criminology, the discipline that, in the words of an influential sociologist of deviance, ‘has managed the astonishing feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state’ (Cohen 1996, 4). Suspended between the mafia and the state, mafia scholars have little doubt about where to go. If mafia has to do with politics, says the common wisdom, this is only because it also has to do with the state – as an object of law enforcement and a potentially disruptive force within the state (with mafia being responsible for criminal activities such as corruption, collusion and even violence against representatives of the state). Mafias may at best have ‘policies’, but not ‘politics’ – because ‘politics’ is another thing. Or better: should be another thing.

The sense in which politics is intended in this book is rather different. Following a few established, albeit marginalized in mafia studies, traditions in political philosophy and anthropology (e.g., Leach 1954; Bailey 1971, 2001 [1969]; Geertz 1963; Freund 1965; Swartz et al. 1966; Swartz 1969; Thompson 1975; Scott 1985; Derrida 1988; Masters 1989; Rancière 1998), politics is here conceived of as different from the ‘state’. The concept of politics is wider than the concept of the state, and politics as a sphere of human action is larger than what the state, as a historically grounded institution, comprises. Politics exists before, besides and beyond the state. It is probably true that the state is the main protagonist СКАЧАТЬ