In the late 19th century, the nascent science of criminology had settled on two principles. One was that criminals, by definition, were degenerates – people from the margins with inherited vices. The other principle was that civil society was upheld by the bourgeois virtues. If you have degenerates, you must have a norm. The bourgeoisie was it. What Max Weber would later call the protestant ethic was theorized, by the classic liberal, as the material product of capitalism. Honesty, hard work, savings, were not simply norms, but functioned as the basis for a market-based economy.
This set of ideas were in the minds of the two young Italian sociologists who went out from Northern Italy, in 1876, to visit Southern Italy. Specifically Sicily, Italy’s “orient”. There was already a genre of stories about Sicily’s crimeridden society. The word mafia began to be used. And surely this was a form of banditism that had escaped from a neo-feudal society – a revolt by those below. The peasants.
The sociologists – Leopardo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino – have been aptly compared to Tocqueville and Beaumont by the French writer Jacques de Saint Victor in his study of “mafias” and democratic society. Sonnino is the lesser known of the duo – although he did go on to become president of Italy. Franchetti’s career, for a long time, was associated with his attempts to organize the colonization of Eritrea. But his part of the book they wrote - Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia – came into notice in the late 1980s, when Falcone, the judge who was at the center of the maxi-trials of the Mafia in 1986 and 1987, told people that Franchetti understood the mafia much better than anyone else since.
Franchetti came to a realization in Sicily that inverted the assumptions of classical liberalism. The role of the bourgeoisie in civil society, it turned out, was not integral to the formation of the bourgeoisie. In Sicily, the mafia, far from being a symptom of the revolt of the peasantry, was a tool of the Sicilian bourgeoisie. The had a thoroughly utilitarian attitude towards violence. The “industrialization of violence” and the systematic violation of civil society norms was upheld not by the degenerates and the marginals, but by those at the center, the richest and most powerful. And those richest and most powerful were not isolated – instead, they were plugged in to the system of worldwide trade in the most advanced and exemplary fashion.
In an article in Droit (2019), Saint Victor condensed his conclusions, a la Franchetti, about the “dark face” of globalization.
Since the end of the 1990s, and especially since the crisis of 2008, laws have followed laws that attempt to trace dirty money from all the trafficing (drugs, arms, human beings, etc.) and the most powerful mafias have seemed to prefer « licit affairs » (BTP, the health system, the ecological sector etc.) at least on paper (mafia pulita)… The historian of the Camorra, Francesco Barbagallo, has stated that the mafia question is passing into the stage where it becomes « an essential part of the history of power» ; and it is under this title that it should retain the attention of legal historians. In a recent essay, the general commissioner Jean-François Gayraud, a specialist of financial crime, confirmed that evolution, noting that organized crime can no longer be analyzed in terms of social marginality, but as a central element of the black facet of globalisation, with the sociology of contemporary elites being found to be amply transformed. We see, in France as elsewhere, the establishment of real bourgeois criminality. Thus, from this meeting of scrupulous elites and mafias becoming normalized, there appears, little by little, the new figure of the ambiguous actor of globalization, which Italian criminologist call the « mafia-esque bourgeoisie ».
Myself, I think one of the side effects – of, from a sociological perspective, the main effect – of the release of Epstein materials is to clarify the extent and temper of the mafia-esque bourgeoisie. We’ve all been spectators of the open corruption of the Trump regime. We were all spectators, under Biden, of the open corruption of the system of justice, which held back from what would formerly be judicially organized investigations and prosecutions, notably of Trump and of the Supreme Court Justices found taking bribes. Biden’s clan-like pardons that ended his regime were of a piece with what went before. And of course this built on the refusal, under Obama, to prosecute torturers, banksters, and in the massive system of mortgage fraud. It is not surprising that the same engineers of impunity under Obama were very much friends of Jeffrey Epstein. That friendliness and its tone, in email after email, shows how the culture of the criminal bourgeoisie regards itself. Gone, gone is the Protestant ethic – except for the hard work part. That hard work, however, is in service to the dark side of Globalisation. Work and perks – a recipe that is far from the formulas of Horatio Alger or the various business self help books that still find a massive readership.
The seven habits of highly corrupt people. This is where we are.
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