Path dependency and civic culture: Some lessons from Italy about interpreting social experiments

Politics and Society

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 19-44

  Sabetti, Filippo ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0030306710     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329296024001004     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. With Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
2. Joseph LaPalombara, review of Making Democracy Work, by Robert Putnam, Political Science Quarterly 108, no. 3 (fall 1993): 550.
3. Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, La pianta e le radici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985).
4. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 7, emphasis added.
5. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 5-6. Putnam says of Bari: "Like visiting researchers, ordinary Pugliesi must first locate the nondescript regional headquarters beyond the railroad yards" (5). The regional headquarters may have been nondescript and hard to locate in 1970, but not so at least since the second half of the 1970s. Street signs in the area point to it; the building is clearly marked. Moreover, the regional headquarters is not located beyond the railroad yards but on the backside of the Bari main railway station in downtown (centro) Bari. The railroad yards are more than four kilometres away. Putnam does not stop long enough in Bari to tell us why the building which houses the regional government is still rented from private sources. As for Bologna, Putnam refers to its central piazza, "famous for its nightly debates among constantly shifting groups of citizens and political activists, and those impassioned discussions about issues of the day are echoed in the chambers of the regional council" (6). What he describes here is not unique to Bologna's central piazza and applies equally well to the central piazzas of the other regional capitals and of almost all the towns and villages in the south, Pietrapertosa included. It is also very likely that, among the constantly shifting groups of citizens and political activists that can be observed pacing up and down the Bologna piazza, can be found transplanted southerners continuing there a civic tradition of their natal villages and towns.
6. E.g., Geoffrey M. Hodgson, "Economic Evolution: Intervention Contra Pangloss," Journal of Economic Issues 25 (June 1991): 519-34.
7. Carlo Cattaneo, "La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie italiane," in Scritti storici e geografici, ed. G. Salvemini and Ernesto Sestan (Florence: Le Monnier, 1957), 2:383-437.
8. Carlo Cattaneo, "Su la 'Scienza Nuova' di Vico," in Scritti Filosofici, ed. Norberto Bobbio (Florence: Le Monnier, 1960), 1:95-142.
9. Cattaneo, "La città," 431.
10. E.g., Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 162, 163.
11. I owe this point especially to Tommaso Astarita's insightful study The Continuity of Feudal Power. The Caracciolo di Brienza in Spanish Naples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); see also, Giuseppe Galasso, Napoli spagnola dopo Masaniello, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1982).
12. I owe this point especially to Tommaso Astarita's insightful study The Continuity of Feudal Power. The Caracciolo di Brienza in Spanish Naples (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); see also, Giuseppe Galasso, Napoli spagnola dopo Masaniello, 2 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1982).
13. For the mainland south, see Astarita, The Continuity of Feudal Power, 108-58.
14. Robert G. Murray, "Un inedito di Cattaneo sull'Inghilterra,"Rivista storica italiana 71 (1959): 611-52.
15. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
16. Ibid., 114.
17. Ibid., 10.
18. Ibid., 111.
19. The right of selected common people in the south to bear arms was, especially after Unification, the source of much misunderstanding as national leaders sought to suppress or strictly regulate it.
20. In fact, one would never know it from reading almost all the English-language text on the "Southern Question." In fairness, one would know of it even by reading Benedetto Croce's classic Italian text, The History of the Kingdom of Naples, ed. H. Stuart (University of Chicago Press, 1970).
21. Paolo Grossi, An Alternative to Private Property: Collective Property in the Juridical Consciousness of the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), originally published in Italian in 1977. Equally worth reading is Grossi's more recent collection of essays entitled Il Dominio e le cose. Percezioni medievali e moderne dei diritti reali (Milan: Giuffre, 1992).
22. Paolo Grossi, An Alternative to Private Property: Collective Property in the Juridical Consciousness of the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), originally published in Italian in 1977. Equally worth reading is Grossi's more recent collection of essays entitled Il Dominio e le cose. Percezioni medievali e moderne dei diritti reali (Milan: Giuffre, 1992).
23. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 132.
24. Nicoló Machiavelli, Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker (London: Penguin, 1970), 246.
25. Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
26. I am drawing here on the conceptual elaboration and empirical application in Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
27. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House Modern Library Edition, 1965), 886.
28. Francesco Ferrara, "Brevi note sulla Sicilia," reprinted in Camillo Cavour. La Liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la formazione del Regno d'Italia (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1949), 1/2:300.
29. On the strength of the 1901 census figures supported by other sources of the time: see, e.g., Frank Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy. Apulia 1900-1922 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 10, 20-2.
30. Sidney Sonnino, I contadini in Sicilia, vol. 2 (1877), quoted in Filippo Sabetti, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 48.
31. Sidney Sonnino, I contadini in Sicilia, vol. 2 (1877), quoted in Filippo Sabetti, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 48.
32. Giunta per l'inchiesta sulle condizioni della Sicilia (R. Bonfadini, Rapporteur), Relazione 1876. Reprinted in L'inchiesta sulle condizioni sociali ed economiche della Sicilia 1875-1876, ed. Salvatore Carbone and Renato Grispo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1969), 2:1077.
33. Giunta per l'inchiesta sulle condizioni della Sicilia (R. Bonfadini, Rapporteur), Relazione 1876. Reprinted in L'inchiesta sulle condizioni sociali ed economiche della Sicilia 1875-1876, ed. Salvatore Carbone and Renato Grispo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1969), 2:1077.
34. See, Sabetti, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village, 111-217;
35. and F. Sabetti, "The Mafia and the Antimafia: Moments in the Struggle for Justice and Self-Governance in Sicily," in Italian Politics: A Review, ed. Raffaella Y. Nanetti and Raimondo Catanzaro (London: Pinter, 1990), 4:174-95.
36. This paragraph draws heavily on Sabetti, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village, 174.
37. Antonio De Viti De Marco, "La politica commerciale e l'interesse dei lavoratori," in Nuova antologia della questione meridionale, ed. Bruno Caizzi (Milan: Comunità, 1962), 249. The essay by De Viti De Marco was originally published in 1903.
38. Grossi, An Alternative to Private Property.
39. For a more developed argument than I can present here, see Carlo Trigilia, Sviluppo senza autonomia. Effetti perversi delle politiche nel Mezzogiorno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), and his "Economia e società nel Mezzogiorno contemporaneo" (paper presented at the "Convegno Strutture e metodi del consenso nell'Italia repubblicana," Pisa, 29 March - 1 April 1995).
40. For a more developed argument than I can present here, see Carlo Trigilia, Sviluppo senza autonomia. Effetti perversi delle politiche nel Mezzogiorno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), and his "Economia e società nel Mezzogiorno contemporaneo" (paper presented at the "Convegno Strutture e metodi del consenso nell'Italia repubblicana," Pisa, 29 March - 1 April 1995).
41. See note 26 above.
42. See Sabetti, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village, 6, for supporting sources, and, among others, Anna Caroleo, Le banche cattoliche dalla prima guerra mondiale al fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), 45-78 passim, 175. A useful source of other evidentiary material is the Bollettino dell'Archivio per la storia del movimento sociale cattolico in Italia, edited and published at the Catholic University in Milan.
43. See Sabetti, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village, 6, for supporting sources, and, among others, Anna Caroleo, Le banche cattoliche dalla prima guerra mondiale al fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), 45-78 passim, 175. A useful source of other evidentiary material is the Bollettino dell'Archivio per la storia del movimento sociale cattolico in Italia, edited and published at the Catholic University in Milan.
44. Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy. There is also a rich Italian-language literature on the subject, some of it cited by Snowden.
45. Ibid., 100.
46. Ibid., 190-1.
47. See also, Anthony L. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism: The Province of Bologna 1901-1926 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 364-408, for how and why the very organizational success of the Bolognese Federterra among the agricultural proletariat "depended on the unhampered authority of the league leaders and their ability to enforce strictly all rules and regulations" (365).
48. Snowden, Violence and the Great Estates in the South of Italy, 190; and Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism, especially chaps. 7 and 8.
49. Snowden, Violence and the Great Estates in the South of Italy, 190; and Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism, especially chaps. 7 and 8.
50. Pasquale quoted in Piero Bevilacqua, "Uomini, terre, economie," in Calabria, ed. Piero Bevilacqua and Augusto Placanica (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 296. Putnam cites from this source.
51. Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 34-35, quoted in Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 143.
52. Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 34-35, quoted in Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 143.
53. Some "Montegranesi" now suggest that Banfield seriously misunderstood what he observed, and that what he observed among villagers did not even get at the basic structures of village life in 1954-1955. (Interviews by author with three leading villagers, including the Left-wing mayor of Chiaromonte - "Montegrano," - August 8, 1994.) The villagers' view about the unreliability of Banfield's fieldwork in 1954-1955 is impossible to verify. A cursory look at the historical record of Chiaromonte - before and after the period Banfield spent in the village - suggests that Banfield's description and explanation of village life may not be empirically grounded, as Putnam and others have imagined. Chiaromonte seems to have had the panoply of community organizations - ranging from mutual aid societies, lay congregations of men and women, and wheat banks before Fascism, to more recent forms such as farm workers' organizations and cooperatives, as well as the many ad hoc joint efforts among friends and neighbors - that characterizes local life in much of the south. For a more extended discussion, see report of work in progress in replicating Banfield's study: Filippo Sabetti, "A Different Way of Knowing: A Research Note on the Real 'Montegrano,' " Italian Politics & Society, no. 44 (Fall 1995): 18-25.
54. He noted a capacity among ordinary Sicilians for changing the constraints, and breaking out, of their iron circle. He reported on cases he observed of tenant farmers seeking to impose limits on the rights of large landowners in some Western Sicilian towns and villages in the 1875-1876 sowing season, even though the tenant associations and the strikes they proclaimed were illegal and were put down by the arms of the state. I have examined in some detail how one such agrarian association developed, the role that the social capital accruing from participation in church confraternities played in overcoming the logic of collective inaction among peasants - a point that Sonnino also seemed to be aware of - and how the association was forcibly put down. See Sabetti, Political Authority in a Sicilian Village, 86-8, 90-1.
55. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 130.
56. It is generally not well known that Catholic lay congregations of women were the first self-organized and self-governed collective women's groups throughout Italian society and the only ones until the second half of the nineteenth century. For an initial elaboration of this point in a comparative context, see Maurizio Ridolfi, Il circolo virtuoso. Sociabilità democratica, associazionismo e rappresentanza politica nell'Ottocento (Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 1990).
57. There is a huge and growing literature on the topic. Most of the research is being done by historians and include the following: Enrica Delle Donne, Chiesa e potere nel Mezzogiorno. Istituzioni ed economia 1741-1815 (Salerno: Edisud, 1990); Giuseppe Galasso and Carla Russo, eds., Per la storia sociale e religiosa del Mezzogiorno d'Italia (Naples: Guida, 1980); and Francesco Volpe, ed., Studi di storia del Mezzogiorno offerti ad Antonio Cestaro da cotteghi ed allievi (Venosa: Edizioni Osanna, 1993). Most of these works have been deeply influenced by the historical research of Gabriele De Rosa, cited therein. By nonhistorians, see the extracts from John Chetwode Eustace, A Tour through Italy (1815) in Naples: A Travellers' Companion, ed. Desmond Seward (New York: Atheneum, 1986).
58. There is a huge and growing literature on the topic. Most of the research is being done by historians and include the following: Enrica Delle Donne, Chiesa e potere nel Mezzogiorno. Istituzioni ed economia 1741-1815 (Salerno: Edisud, 1990); Giuseppe Galasso and Carla Russo, eds., Per la storia sociale e religiosa del Mezzogiorno d'Italia (Naples: Guida, 1980); and Francesco Volpe, ed., Studi di storia del Mezzogiorno offerti ad Antonio Cestaro da cotteghi ed allievi (Venosa: Edizioni Osanna, 1993). Most of these works have been deeply influenced by the historical research of Gabriele De Rosa, cited therein. By nonhistorians, see the extracts from John Chetwode Eustace, A Tour through Italy (1815) in Naples: A Travellers' Companion, ed. Desmond Seward (New York: Atheneum, 1986).
59. There is a huge and growing literature on the topic. Most of the research is being done by historians and include the following: Enrica Delle Donne, Chiesa e potere nel Mezzogiorno. Istituzioni ed economia 1741-1815 (Salerno: Edisud, 1990); Giuseppe Galasso and Carla Russo, eds., Per la storia sociale e religiosa del Mezzogiorno d'Italia (Naples: Guida, 1980); and Francesco Volpe, ed., Studi di storia del Mezzogiorno offerti ad Antonio Cestaro da cotteghi ed allievi (Venosa: Edizioni Osanna, 1993). Most of these works have been deeply influenced by the historical research of Gabriele De Rosa, cited therein. By nonhistorians, see the extracts from John Chetwode Eustace, A Tour through Italy (1815) in Naples: A Travellers' Companion, ed. Desmond Seward (New York: Atheneum, 1986).
60. There is a huge and growing literature on the topic. Most of the research is being done by historians and include the following: Enrica Delle Donne, Chiesa e potere nel Mezzogiorno. Istituzioni ed economia 1741-1815 (Salerno: Edisud, 1990); Giuseppe Galasso and Carla Russo, eds., Per la storia sociale e religiosa del Mezzogiorno d'Italia (Naples: Guida, 1980); and Francesco Volpe, ed., Studi di storia del Mezzogiorno offerti ad Antonio Cestaro da cotteghi ed allievi (Venosa: Edizioni Osanna, 1993). Most of these works have been deeply influenced by the historical research of Gabriele De Rosa, cited therein. By nonhistorians, see the extracts from John Chetwode Eustace, A Tour through Italy (1815) in Naples: A Travellers' Companion, ed. Desmond Seward (New York: Atheneum, 1986).
61. R. M. Johnston, The Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy and the Rise of Secret Societies (London: Macmillan, 1904), 1:13.
62. Sonnino, I contadini di Sicilia, 145, quoted in Sabetti, Political Authority in A Sicilian Village, 90.
63. Sonnino, I contadini di Sicilia, 145, quoted in Sabetti, Political Authority in A Sicilian Village, 90.
64. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 107.
65. Ibid., 109.
66. Ibid., 214, n. 52, where one would have equally liked to see some caution in accepting at face value what seem to be the results of a 1982 survey showing that fully half of the citizens of Sicily and Sardinia claimed to have heard nothing at all about their own regional governments, by then more than thirty-five years old.
67. E.g., CENSIS, Il raccolto della solidarietà. Chiesa impegno nella società e sostegno economico (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994); Pierpaolo Donati, "Carità e solidarietà nella società post-moderna," Acta philosophica 2 (1993): 233-60; and Franco De Leo, "Volontariato e cooperative di solidarietà sociale in Basilicata," Sociologia 25 (1991): 237-59.
68. E.g., CENSIS, Il raccolto della solidarietà. Chiesa impegno nella società e sostegno economico (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994); Pierpaolo Donati, "Carità e solidarietà nella società post-moderna," Acta philosophica 2 (1993): 233-60; and Franco De Leo, "Volontariato e cooperative di solidarietà sociale in Basilicata," Sociologia 25 (1991): 237-59.
69. E.g., CENSIS, Il raccolto della solidarietà. Chiesa impegno nella società e sostegno economico (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994); Pierpaolo Donati, "Carità e solidarietà nella società post-moderna," Acta philosophica 2 (1993): 233-60; and Franco De Leo, "Volontariato e cooperative di solidarietà sociale in Basilicata," Sociologia 25 (1991): 237-59.
70. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 5.
71. The "contado" of Molise emerged in modern times as a jurisdisdictional and administrative unit only around 1806. It was created by the French-inspired Neapolitan government as a kind of buffer zone or "Switzerland" where Campania, the Abruzzi, and the Apulian Capitanata meet. Molise ceased to be such a unit after 1860; the Italian government, rather than returning the Molise territory to the different areas from which it had been taken, simply incorporated Molise into the larger Abruzzi administrative system. See, e.g., Luigi Picardi, "Il Molise centrifugo," Nord e Sud 14, no. 94 (October 1967): 84-95.
72. Historically, the people of Apulian Capitanata have had, by almost all measures, more ties with the inhabitants of Molise than with the other two Apulian parts to which now Capitanata is administratively and politically joined. Since the consolidation of the Calabrias into one regional government, the Crotonose area has succeeded to gaining recognition as a new political and administrative entity, the province of Crotone, within Calabria, as have people of Isernia in Molise.
73. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 76-81.
74. Ibid., 54, where Putnam says: "For many southerners . . . being ruled from Bari or Reggio Calabria is not much better than being ruled from Rome."
75. See, e.g., Giuliano Amato, Sabino Cassese, Enzo Cheli, Stefano Rodotà, and Donatello Serrani, "Materiali per una discussione sullo state dell'attuazione delle regioni," in AA. VV., Dalla parte delle regioni. Bilancio di una legislatura (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1975), 41.
76. See, e.g., Massimo Ganci, Da Crispi a Rudinì: la polemica regionalista, 1894-1896 (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1973); Roberto Ruffilli, La questione regionale dall'unificazione alla dittatura, 1862-1942 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1971).
77. See, e.g., Massimo Ganci, Da Crispi a Rudinì: la polemica regionalista, 1894-1896 (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1973); Roberto Ruffilli, La questione regionale dall'unificazione alla dittatura, 1862-1942 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1971).