permits us to distinguish, inter alia, between economic theories of the mafia as a political institution and economic theories of the mafia as an economic institution. After this narrative, I will try to reorganize the historical materials – at least the most recent ones, published since the 1970s, which comprise what we may call the modern scholarship on mafia – locating authors and works in a socio-intellectual space, or ‘field’ (Bourdieu), illuminating the main dimensions according to which mafia research (especially sociological mafia research, which is probably the leading discipline in the field) is currently produced, evaluated and reused.
In a sense, this chapter is a contribution to the sociology of mafia studies, or what we could call mafiology. A caveat is necessary at this point: I am not interested here in providing a history of ideas about mafias so as to reconstruct how something labelled as mafia or ‘the mafia’ has been constructed as an object of (social) research, in particular, as a sociological object. One of the main troubles of social research on the mafia is a sort of epistemological naïveté – not so different from what may happen in other research areas, to be sure, though with potentially more pernicious consequences. We can extend to mafia studies what Bourdieu noticed about social research in general:
[M]ost of the time, researchers take as objects of research the problems of social order and domestication posed by more or less arbitrarily defined populations, produced through the successive partitioning of an initial category that is itself pre-constructed: the ‘elderly’, the ‘young’, ‘immigrants’ … The first and most pressing scientific priority, in all such cases, would be to take as one’s object the social work of construction of the pre-constructed object. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 229)
In the case of the ‘mafia’, moving from ‘the problems of social order and domestication’ could be reasonable if the objective were to provide instructions useful for agents of social order (police forces and policymakers) in their law enforcement activities against supposed criminals. But it is much less so when the objective is knowledge and understanding, first and foremost – including knowledge of the social conditions that make it possible to identify something like the ‘mafia’.
‘Mafia’ is clearly a pre-constructed notion, a vernacular label, a folk-concept variously employed and manipulated by social agents that has not always been transferred into scholarly discourse with the necessary epistemological vigilance. The ‘construction of the object’ is ‘no doubt the most crucial research operation and yet the most completely ignored’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 225). There is no such ready thing as ‘the mafia’ in the world. Mafia exists if, when and where we are able to see it because of our mental maps. The problem is twofold: first, there are many ideas of mafia – and people debate about which is the sounder or more plausible, or at least the less fantastic, concept. Indeed, what mafia really is, is part and parcel of the now century-and-a-half-long debate on the mafia, in academia as well as the public sphere. Second, what the ‘other’ of mafia might be is far from clear. Is it ‘the state’ as such? Or is it a certain historical form of the state? Or is it an ideal state – a representation of what we would like the state to be but which we can never really see? ‘Seeing like a state’ is far from an easy accomplishment, and failure is a common outcome of grand utopian schemes, as James C. Scott (2010) has persuasively shown. So, what about ‘the mafia’? What does it mean to be ‘mafia-like’? What does ‘seeing something like a mafia’ – paraphrasing but also reversing Scott’s influential formula – mean, if indeed it has any meaning at all? This is what I will try to assess in this chapter.
An Archaeology of ‘Mafia Studies’, 1860–1900
It is a fact that the academic literature on mafia has been dominated by the social sciences and by sociology in particular. Also, for an almost perfect coincidence in timing – sociology as a positivist discipline started its rise in the same decades that the ‘mafia’ was discovered, if not ‘invented’, in Italy – sociology has been a hegemonic force of knowledge in the study of mafia since its inception. Of course, you do not find the names of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and the like in the list of authors directly contributing to what we would call ‘mafia studies’. Marx wrote on many things, including Native Americans and even mysterious tribunals of the Middle Ages such as the Vehmic courts (Feme), but he never wrote on mafia or camorra. Even though L’Année sociologique reviewed a few Italian texts on mafia and camorra in its early volumes (all authored by the jurist-sociologist Richard Gaston), it does not seem that Durkheim was aware of, or at least impressed by, the existence of forms of primordial solidarity organizing crime and persisting at the heart of modern society. Even more surprisingly, Georg Simmel wrote extensively about secret societies, but the terms ‘mafia’ and ‘camorra’ do not figure in his seminal text on the subject. This does not mean, though, that Marx and Durkheim and even Simmel are not used in research on mafia, nor that the ‘classics’ in the social sciences never contributed. In fact, at least one classic scholar did, the Italian Gaetano Mosca, author of the influential The Ruling Class, and there is evidence that Weber noticed the existence of both the ‘mafia’ and camorra – referring to it in a passage of his Economy and Society (1978 [1922]) about the informal funding sources of political groups. This relative neglect by classic sociological figures notwithstanding, mafia studies are one of the most enduring and lasting research streams in the social and human sciences, whose roots go back at least to the last three or four decades of the nineteenth century.
What we might call ‘mafia studies’ started in 1862 – at least, this may be a reasonably convenient date from which to depart in this review. In that year, the first book-length study on the camorra was published, and ‘camorra’ was at the time apparently the only word available to denote mafia-like behaviours and organizations. The author of the book, Marco Monnier, was a young Swiss writer living in Naples where his family managed a hotel. He was not an academic scholar, but a talented writer who had already published a book on brigandage. His definitions of the camorra are worth reading, as the continuities with mafia studies are as impressive as any conceptual or methodological breaks:
The Camorra could be defined as organized extortion: it is a secret society among the lower classes whose goal is evil … What the Camorra is, at least what it was not long ago, I will briefly state: it was an association of men of the common people, corrupt and violent, who used intimidation to obtain money from vicious and cowardly people. I strongly insist on these words: an association of men of the common people … Among the lower classes there is a very special sect, very local, highly organized, extending throughout the ancient Kingdom of the Two Sicilies … it reigns where the vicious and the cowardly gather, and especially in places where a sad necessity brings them together, that is, in prisons. (Monnier 2010 [1862], 7–8; my translation)
Monnier’s book continues with detailed and apparently first-hand descriptions of activities and situations, as well as customs and rules, of supposed members of this sect, distinguishing between the camorra as it works in prisons and the camorra as it appears in piazza (in the open), also focusing on its origins and the ‘social motives’ for its reproduction.
It has been noted (see Benigno 2015) that the literary imagination has provided much of the original imagery used to assemble this early conceptual representation of mafia – and a central contribution seems to have been offered by the French novelist and journalist Alexandre Dumas, author of the Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and many other successful novels, with his notes on the Neapolitan camorra written in 1862 while in Paris after a two-year period spent in Naples. Undoubtedly, the literary power of these exotically coloured descriptions is strong, and they impacted subsequent writing on the subject, even in Italy. But it is not clear what the point is here: whether it regards the reliability of these early representations (whose impact on following representations cannot be overestimated) or the fact that the literary imagination should be taken into account when assessing even self-claimed scientific or at least realistic representations – the kind of representations the social sciences aim to provide. Indeed, the circular relationship between literary imagination and sociological imagination is far from exceptional, and, as Wolfgang Lepenies (1988) has brilliantly shown, sociology has been, since its inception,