A good little one. Ilya Somin opined that in The Godfather Puzo agreed with sociologist Diego Gambetta "that the Sicilian Mafia flourished because it provided better “protection” against crime and violations of property and contract rights than did the official authorities, who generally protected only the politically powerful elite, but Henry thinks Somin is wrong on Gambetti.
Henry says that Gambetti says the mafia came before the state and that mafia origins are not simply born of the "economic functionalist" model "of how the state failed to protect non-elites." More specifically he wanted to know "why the Mafia – a group of autonomous providers of protection emerged to create a violent and nasty form of social order in" ONLY "certain parts of Sicily." That is, he’s interested in the failures of the old aristocratic order less because it created a gap in the market that ... entrepreneurs of violence could fill", but more "because it meant that the Mafia could emerge as autonomous providers of protection, rather than bravoes under the command of more traditional elites, as in other parts of Italy and Southern Europe", because "In all likelihood, by the time Italy was unified in 1860-61 the foundations of this peculiar industry were already firmly in place."
the state had "to fight to establish itself and its law as the legitimate authority
and as a credible guarantor in a region where no such authority had previously existed"
AS as i wander and wonder in this LITTLE GEM i find myself reading state and thinking ego-consciousness;
and reading Mafia and thinking unconscious. The battle of all battles, the war of all wars. UNCO
NEBULOUS AND EVIL VS CONSCI SPECIFIC AND MORE SOMETIMES gOOD???, rough, just a thought, there.
Each individual embryonic ego, say CONSCI "had to compete with a rival an entrenched and nebulous entity", say UNCO, "which had by then shaped the" COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS ("economic transactions as well as the skills, expectations and norms) of the native people."
So "arguments which blame the supposed weakness of the Italian state for the emergence of the mafia are unconvincing. The early Italian liberal state may have been confused … but it was neither significantly weaker nor demonstrably more repressive than any other liberal state of the period. [Gambetta: The Sicilian Mafia, pp. 97-98].
Henry, believes that Gambetti believes "the problem of the Mafia isn’t a problem stemming from state regulation. It’s a problem arising from the creation and persistence of an alternative means of social organization, which stems from a period before the creation of a proper state apparatus in Sicily."
"a problem for some flavors of libertarianism (probably not those that Somin espouses) –
a suggestion that in the absence of an effective state, and in the presence of certain conditions that Gambetta specifies, we’re likely to get the creation and persistence of Mafia type social organization."
THE PIE IS IN THE PUDDING AND NOT IN THE SKY.
Let the empire become the Sasquatch. Let the world again be america's friend.
Let the frauds and criminal's go to jail. Let the state again be the people's best friend.
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