Collective identity inside and out: Particularism through the looking glass

ABSTRACT

This article analyses literary sources that have influenced interpretations of the Italian collective identity, focusing on the conceptual pairing ‘familism-particularism’. In 1958 Edward Banfield coined the term ‘amoral familism’, generating an intense, persistent debate among Italian and foreign scholars. However, by expanding the analytical focus, similar explanations for Italian social, economic and political ‘backwardness’ can be traced much further back: to Alberti’s ‘land of self-interest’ or Guicciardini’s particulare. Representations of the cultural absence of civicness in Italy developed over the centuries, stemming initially from Italians’ own recognition of their self-image. It was only later, through the diaries of travellers on the Grand Tour, that this image was incorporated into the hetero-recognition of Italians by Northern Europeans and North Americans. When an identity feature maintains this ‘dual recognition’ for such a long historical period, it becomes a recurrent cardinal point in individual and collective representation of a people. Attempts to sustain theories conflicting with Banfield’s are confronted by other obstacles: the absence of comparable ethnographic studies translated into English and the rhetorical force of the expression ‘amoral familism’. The symbolic power of Banfield’s interpretation, which might be considered a stereotype, goes beyond its (in)ability to reflect social reality.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective identity
• culture
• particularism
• familism
• stereotype
• Italy

1. Introduction: Familism-particularism and collective identity

In this article, extending our hermeneutic gaze beyond the field of sociology, I analyse influential literary sources and their interpretations of Italian collective identity, constructed through the twentieth-century conceptual pairing ‘familism-particularism’. This interpretation of Italian social, economic and political backwardness can be traced much further back in time. The start of this hermeneutic ‘story’ certainly does not coincide with Banfield’s arrival in the little town of Montegrano (in Basilicata, southern Italy) in 1955 or with his book’s publication in 1958, as the vast majority of scholars explicitly or implicitly affirm. Nor does it coincide with the first translation in 1961 under the anodyne title Una comunità nel mezzogiorno (A Community in Southern Italy), or the second in 1967 under the title (literally translated), The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. The story does not begin with pre-existing academic interest in the so-called ‘Questione Meridionale’ (Southern Question) such as Gramsci’s philosophical observations (1952), or with the season of studies on Southern Italy initiated by other American sociologists (Douglas, 1915; Friedmann, 1954). In terms of literary narratives, nor does the story begin with Carlo Levi’s memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945/1947).

The familist-particularist conviction has historical origins dating to long before Banfield’s study, even before pre-unified Italy. It is not an image merely imposed by American or northern European scholars, but a belief constructed by prominent and influential Italians intellectuals over time. This story began centuries ago, between 1433 and 1441, when the Florentine Leon Battista Alberti, considered the epitome of Renaissance humanism, wrote a treatise called I libri della famiglia (1433–1441/1972). The narration continued with the particulare of another Florentine, Francesco Guicciardini (1530/1933, 1576) – who introduced the modern usage of the term particularism. Thus, the representation of Italy as a ‘land of self-interest’ stemmed initially from Italians’ own recognition of their self-image. Only later, partly through travellers’ accounts on the Grand Tour, was the particularist-familist concept incorporated into foreigners’ hetero-recognition of Italians. Clearly, the interpretative battle over Italian cultural/structural backwardness that has persisted for over half a century cannot be restricted to Banfield’s work or to the ‘Questione Meridionale’.

This article explains why Banfield’s amoral familism, along with particularism, became such a tough hermeneutic challenge. When an identity feature such as ‘familism-particularism’ maintains dual recognition (by Italians and by foreigners) over a long historical period and in relevant literary sources, it becomes a topos, a pivotal point in the individual and collective representation of a people. In this sense, scholars (for or against the familist-particularist interpretation) must take into account not just the academic accuracy of what could be considered a stereotype, but also the fact that belief in such a picture has tangible social and cultural consequences, culminating in a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1949): ‘If men define things as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas, 1923, p. 42). This corresponds to the central tenet of Banfield’s interpretation ‘Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise’ (Banfield, 1958, p. 85, emphasis added). The cultural driver lies precisely in ‘assume that all others will do likewise’.

Thus, the symbolic power of Banfield’s theory goes beyond its ability to reveal or conceal how social reality ‘really is’. Internal and external ideas and beliefs permeating a culture can become exceptionally persistent. As social constructionism anticipates, ‘Groups are real if people think they are: they then behave in ways that assume that groups are real and, in so doing, construct that reality.…Groups may be imagined, but this does not mean that they are imaginary’ (Jenkins, 2008, pp. 11–12). An ethnos is constituted by a configuration¹ of social and cultural dimensions, which includes a common epos (the narration of a collective past, the historic memory): the script familism-particularism is part of this story and contributes to shaping how the Italian community is staged or ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1983).

This is not necessarily to consider stereotypes as obstacles to be cleared from the analytical panorama.² Even if familism-particularism is judged in many ways an inaccurate representation of Italian cultural identity, it has nevertheless influenced the way Northern Europeans and North Americans think about Italians, and how Italians think about themselves.

Two further interrelated arguments concern the rhetorical power of the expression ‘amoral familism’ and the absence of comparable, in-depth ethnographic studies carried out by Italian scholars and translated into English in their entirety. ‘Amoral familism’ is a catchy expression resonant with equivalent images from other influential literary portraits of the past and with later North European and North American scientific representations, such as ‘parochialism’ (Almond & Verba, 1963), ‘clientelism’ (La Palombara, 1964) ‘new patronage’ and ‘horizontal clienteles’ (Tarrow, 1967). These rhetorically efficacious expressions became influential inside and outside the academic community. Scholars challenging Banfield’s interpretations therefore need to devise alternative synthetic and striking interpretations.

In fact, well-designed, well-conducted and extensive ethnographic and narrative studies have been carried out by ‘natives’ since Banfield’s fieldwork, but were never translated into English. This simple but unacknowledged fact is only apparently a trivial consideration. It has profound repercussions on the circulation and academic influence of investigations challenging Banfield’s work. I shall support this interpretation with a simple indicator: the presence of books in University libraries. Foreign scholars who cannot read Italian – as was the case for Banfield – cannot be fully informed about field investigations, simply because they cannot read studies challenging Banfield from start to finish. They can rely only on synthetic critiques in international journals.

In this connection, surveys or questionnaires may have little capacity to overthrow narrative devices constructed through the observations of a researcher working at length in the field to produce a realistic and comparable portrait. They are not, so to speak, playing on the same hermeneutic pitch, and so far have not been able to challenge the rhetorical power of Banfield’s study.

For these reasons, I shall reconstruct the long literary history of familism-particularism and some of its main critiques, then review scientific expressions coined by North American/European scholars in which one can see a continuity with Banfield, such as parochialism and clientelism. I shall then explore a constructivist approach to the notion of ‘stereotype’ and ‘culture’, before making critical connections between familism-particularism in the social sciences and the North–South dichotomy and romantic myth of Italy, both constructed by Grand Tour literature. This will enable me to reflect on the difficulty of other ethnographic studies in challenging the familist-particularist cultural paradigm, due to impinging ideological frameworks and the lack of dual Italian-English linguistic status.

1.2. Context and approach

This contribution, with its historical perspective and non-‘presentist’ slant (Inglis, 2014), can be located within the discussion on the construction of a European post-national sense of collective identity, or identity mix linked with national identities (Kohli, 2000, p. 131). Here, identity is treated as a construction of – and through – the individual and collective memory framework (Halbwachs, 1952/1980).

Identity is the human capacity – rooted in language – to know ‘who’s who’ (and hence ‘what’s what’). This involves knowing who we are, knowing who others are, them knowing who we are, us knowing who they think we are, and so on: a multi-dimensional classification or mapping of the human world and our places in it, as individuals and as members of collectivities (Jenkins, 2008, p. 5).

Using ‘identity’ and ‘collective identity’ as heuristic concepts is to partially disagree with those who, like Brubaker and Cooper (Brubaker, 2004; Brubaker & Cooper, 2000), make the distinction between non-existent groups and real ‘groupness’. As we have seen, for scholars such as Jenkins, this distinction fails because being social constructions does not make groups illusions. ‘It is the distinction that Brubaker draws between groups and “groupness” that is an illusion, and it does not help us to understand the local realities of the human world’ (Jenkins, 2008, p. 12).

My intention here can be only to use literature to trace the historical origins of ‘familism-particularism’ and the Italians’ own recognition of their self-image as such. There is no space for considerating contra-narrative points of view, highlighting Italian attitudes and behaviour in terms of civicness, illustrating non-particularist attitudes. For the same reason, I do not consider examples of the alternative category of ‘moral familism’ (Turnaturi, 1991).

Instead I hightlight the role of Alberti, considered the embodiment of Florentine Renaissance humanism. Alberti used the conceptual pair familism-particularism to describe Renaissance society, over five hundred years ago and, significantly, in central Italy, without indicating a North–South cleavage. Guicciardini is almost mandatory, since he is the first intellectual to use ‘particularism’ in the modern sense: a point that, to the best of my knowledge, does not appear within sociological contributions to the particularist-familist debate.

Leopardi is a prominent and influential Italian poet who directly addresses themes connected to the particular-familist paradigm, and is in dialogue-conflict with the Grand Tourer approach. Selecting influential contributions from the Grand Tour literature is motivated by the role it played in shaping the modern and contemporary image of Italy both outside and inside the country: a powerful cultural influence that led to a hegemonic narrative of Italy and Italians. These Grand Tour themes, linked to the conceptual pair particularism-familism, were kept alive and accentuated by later novels and film adaptations such as The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James; film adaptation by Jane Campion, 1996) and A Room with a View (Edward Forster; film adaptation by James Ivory, 1985). The creation and maintenance of certain images about Italy paved a narrative highway that allowed later academic interpretations, such as Banfield’s, to resonate with a clear and identifiable corpus of images or cultural repertoire, for both foreigners and Italians. The skeleton of the Grand Tour narrative – with all its ramifications and appendices directly or indirectly reinforcing the story, such as movie adaptations and tourist guides – can be considered a global cultural script. In other words, the story, told and retold for centuries, is now part of world culture: a popular global-scale ‘social imagery’.³

However, in this contribution I am not following a historical and chronological perspective, reconstructing the literary contribution prior to the Risorgimento and following Italian unification, as in Bollati’s L’Italiano (1996) or De Francesco’s multidisciplinary interpretation of The Antiquity of the Italian Nation (2013). The hermeneutic path also contrasts with studies on Italian nationhood and modernity that reconstruct the historic and literary premises of the Risorgimento leading to Italian unification, along with the creation of the narrative for a national foundation myth. These works generally pursue the concept of nationhood through the two World Wars and fascism, from the beginning of the Italian Republic up to the present, and within the North–South Italy debate encapsulated in the expression ‘Questione Meridionale’. (Thus Forlenza and Thomassen, in Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (2016), highlight the continuous re-reading by intellectuals of the Risorgimento Italian foundational myth within different collectivist models of society – liberal, Catholic, socialist/communist, fascist – constructing versions of Italian modernity within different ideological frameworks.) The focus of this work is not even to verify the existence and extent of familist-particularist attitudes within Italian society in comparison to the work of Banfield and other international studies, nor intended as a systematic review of all contributions supporting or challenging Banfield’s thesis. Many others have already reviewed the methodological and theoretical critiques of Banfield’s study and suggested ways to overcome his shortcomings – see Ferragina (2009) for such a review in English.

What I am introducing here is a literary, historical, cultural and semiotic ‘third way’: both positions (pro/con Banfield) fail to take into account the longer history of the conceptual duo familism-particularism, extending their analysis beyond social science texts. And to a degree, if we espouse the semiotic approach of Geertz (1973, p. 89), who considers ‘culture’ as ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols’, scholars both for and against Banfield misrepresent what collective identity is from a cultural perspective.

2. Familism and particularism: Extending the hermeneutic and narrative gaze

The publication of Edward Banfield’s study The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) aroused heated debate among in the community of Italian and foreign sociologists which continues to this day. This debate is circumscribed within a specific historical period, and within the ambit of sociology, in its various forms, and of politics. By expanding and extending the hermeneutic gaze, we can identify why – as Bagnasco writes in his preface to the fourth Italian edition of the book (2006)⁴ – it is not easy to sweep Banfield under the carpet.

In 1768 Giuseppe Baretti wrote An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy; with Observations on the Mistakes of Some Travelers, with Regard to that Country. This is a piqued reply to the description of appalling backwardness in the economic, moral and civil conditions of Italy (especially the south) offered by the surgeon Samuel Sharp in Letters from Italy (1767). Baretti’s complete incipit states:

Mr. Sharp has said, that the Italians place all their young ladies in convents, and leave them there until they marry or take the veil; and the same thing has been repeatedly asserted by several protestant travelers.…But why do these folks take so much pains to circulate this falsehood in their respective countries? Is it ignorance, or is it malice? I will suppose that they mean nothing else, but to make their young country-women in love with their several reformations, which allow of no convents, and keep them as much as possible from taking the left turn towards popery (Baretti, 1768, Vol. 2, Ch. VIII).

In a letter to a friend, Baretti explains:

I want to reply to a thing by a certain Samuello Sharp, that is, a journey that he has published in which he grossly mistreats Italy, painting all our men as fanatic and ignorant cuckolds and all our women as whorish and superstitious.⁵

Without venturing into an analysis of Baretti’s response to the English Protestant, we move straight on to exploring the North European Bildungsfahrt in the eighteenth century. From this time on, through most of the nineteenth century, the education of the European social elite was completed by the Grand Tour: an immersion in Italian culture, both high and low.⁶ Italy was (is?) an exciting, ‘different’ country: the northern Europeans’ gaze inevitably lighted on exotic aspects of contemporary Italian life, as it continues to do. In these educational journeys the visit to Santa Croce was often combined with an introduction to a throbbing marketplace or an easy-living tavern. In this way travel diaries were filled with notes about the customs of the time and about the Italian ‘national character’. Italy was a species of open-air workshop, heralding the sui generis ethnographic studies that, over time, became the foundation of modern cultural anthropology.

The travel schedule,⁷ constructed around the search for European cultural roots, classicism and the lively post-Renaissance ambience, was swiftly transformed into a contemporary observation of the Italian people: les sauvages de l’Europe. Thus the image of the primitive Italian was sketched by travellers on the Grand Tour too. From the eighteenth century, the gaze of the North European homo fictus, the future fully-fledged modern citizen, was focused on the southern homo naturalis. This developed into the myth of the Italian resistant to any law, anarchic rather than free, vital but also hot-blooded and bloodthirsty, prey to permanent moral, legal and behavioural laissez-faire (Squillaci, 2000). The Romantic ideal of passionate, rebellious and decadent Italy fuelled the writings of Stendhal in the Chroniques italiennes (1826/1973) or of Madame de Staël in Corinne ou l’Italie (1807/1999); this latter novel launched the myth of Italy and the Italians in Europe.

Walter Lippmann in his work on public opinion tells us, ‘We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception’ (Lippmann, 1922/1965, p. 59). Thus ‘national images in their function as commonplaces refer primarily not to the nation in question but to the currency of other, previous images about that nation’ (Leerssen, 2000, p. 280). Within ‘imagology’, a branch of literary studies developed mainly in France and Germany, national characterisation is studied within the interpretative field delimited by aspects of their commonplace nature: intertextuality, recognisability, and vraisemblance.

Rather than study Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne as to its fidelity to a ‘real’ Germany (to which access could be gained only by way of other mediations and representations), imagologists have opted for the more promising approach of studying such a text historically and intertextually against a whole tradition of texts dealing with Germany, starting with Tacitus’s Germania and subsequently leading to the germanophilia of French Romantics like Gérard de Nerval. It is from this intertext that the functional effectiveness of Mme de Staël’s text can be assessed (Leerssen, 2000, p. 281, emphasis mine).

Leopardi’s Discourse on the Present State of the Customs of the Italians (1824/1995, my translations) indeed has Corinne as its implicit interlocutor. It was through this dialogue at a distance that the phrase ‘national character’, coined in the French literary milieu from Montesquieu and Voltaire to Madame de Staël, first penetrated Italy. The key variable for understanding moral – now cultural – attributes was the geographical-climatic element: Northern man and Southern man. According to Leopardi, their temperate climate led Italians to conduct a prevalently social life (in the square and in the street), hence to concentrate on visible aspects of identity. He believed that this overbalance towards the exterior tended to undermine the cultivation of interior life. The Italian of the time had difficulty in constructing a profound self, detached from interaction and cultivated in the solitude of the home; this difficulty in constructing an interior dialogue led to a similar difficulty of conversation with the Other tout court. Surprisingly, Leopardi also anticipated the crucial key to the sociological interpretation of Italian society: the absence of a ruling class conscious of its own historical role.

Leopardi noted the absence in Italy of a class driving the process of modernisation, an enlightened bourgeoisie capable of imposing an ethos on the whole of society and taking responsibility for articulating rules which, although unwritten, were socially convincing and shared: the moral bases that constitute the ‘tone’ of an entire nation. Leopardi saw this moral basis as the cultural humus for developing the social control and self-control crucial to constructing a modern society. These foundations would nurture a sort of universalism designed to curb the opposite approach, the particularism which – and this is the first essential point I wish to make – had already been clearly identified and named towards the end of the Renaissance, long before Banfield and the Grand Tour travel diaries.

Substituting the term ‘amoral familism’ with the more austere and general ‘particularism’ can, combined with other analyses and conclusions, make it possible to emerge from the shallows where this sociological debate been aground for over half a century.

Leopardi’s invective against those who have their own ‘tone and manner’ following ‘their own habit and practice’ – maximising their own interest, and that of their family or ‘guild’, regardless of the collective good – is startlingly akin to the interpretations of Banfield. Thus, on the one hand the socio-cultural interpretation of Italy which was neatly summarised by Guicciardini’s ‘particulare’ (1530/1933, 1576) is deeply rooted over time, while on the other hand – and this is the second essential point to make here – it is an indigenous attribution, one that Italians pinned on themselves. The idea of a structural lack of civic sense is primarily linked to the moment of self-recognition. Only later was this image adopted in the hetero-recognition of Italy by Northern Europeans and, much later, by North Americans.⁸ Analyses proper to philosophical, psychological and anthropological literature clearly demonstrate that when an identity trait obtains such ‘dual recognition’ it becomes a topos, a cardinal point in the individual and collective representation of a people, contributing to the construction of an Italian Weltanschauung (ancient and modern).

Here I wish to introduce the third point for reflection: the expression ‘amoral familism’, as well as having the historic force already mentioned, is also evocatively effective. The scholar wishing to posit alternative theories must address the rhetorical power of this notorious tag and leverage their sociological imagination to coin similarly trenchant expressions.

However, the work of scholars who have carried out long ethnographic and community studies, including Piselli (1981), Gribaudi (1990) and Costabile (1996), has never been entirely translated into English, the lingua franca of late modernity, and in particular of the social sciences. As we shall see, these books are available in Italian in a limited number of libraries worldwide. If academic career advancement is based on articles published in international peer-reviewed journals, in social science and the humanities profound scholarly understanding is still based on books. This is even truer for non-standard, or qualitative, research. Qualitative sociologists generally share many basic assumptions, concepts and terms, but this does not mean that the research path can be easily understood and replicated. Research phases and choices must be described in detail, woven through theories, interpretations and research in the field, to help the reader reconstruct the research itinerary (Birindelli, 2014).

3. More on the historic weight of the concept of particularism

To paraphrase a convincing proposal in an essay by Mastropaolo (2009): in the beginning was the word, and the word was not with Banfield. Between 1433 and 1441 Leon Battista Alberti, the Florentine architect, considered the supreme and complete embodiment of Renaissance humanism, wrote a treatise called I libri della famiglia (Alberti, 1433–1441/1972). Here he used the word ‘masserizia’ for the art of managing the household – a place of both instrumental and sentimental significance – as if it were a business. Families – which are sustained by ‘goods’, friends and good relations with the authorities – can never constitute a civitas; as for politics, ‘In the work of Leon Battista Alberti you never, ever find a handful of families that succeed in forming a civitas, a society’ (Tullio-Altan, 1986, p. 23, my translation).

Leopardi’s Discourse attributes substance and weight to culture, to customs, to the North–South opposition, and above all to the family as sketched by Leon Battista Alberti and to the ‘land of the personal advantage’ which Francesco Guicciardini (1576) calls the particulare. It was indeed Guicciardini who first opened the semantic umbrella of the term ‘particulare’ in this direction – a mode of behaviour guided by the defence of one’s own personal interests – introducing the meanings connected with ‘particularist’ understood in the modern sense.⁹

The human beings sketched by Guicciardini – who adopts an ante litteram Weberian approach – are inclined to the particular in two senses: both economic and in terms of ‘fame and reputation’ (class and status). The Florentine historian considers this ‘spirit of the time’, rather than other forms of ‘idealism’ or ‘universalism’, as the true pillar for the construction of a social and civil life headed towards modernity. Guicciardini’s analysis concentrates on the ‘appropriate’ behaviour, frequently linked to a ‘strategy of appearance’, necessary to inhabit a social and political reality perceived as mutable and unstable. Wealth and ‘reputation’ are basic indicators of status for the family, and friendship (the modern ‘social capital’) is understood in a strictly utilitarian sense, depending on the demands of social positioning. Averse to pronouncing on the ‘rules’ of human behaviour, Guicciardini suggests ‘discretion’ (the capacity for discernment) as the only compass for finding one’s way in a precarious, fragmentary and variable social reality. Discretion is the instrument that permits human beings to adapt to ‘fortune’: thus, Guicciardini is also a fatalist. Like Machiavelli, the author of the Ricordi recognises the value of dissimulation for the statesman, but not in order to achieve political planning that evades the here and now of the particular: Guicciardini does not believe in the superior value of the State. In a world that was post-modern before its time, that is, fragmented and unpredictable – or as we might now say, ‘liquid’ – Guicciardini considers that one should restrict oneself to defining one’s own particular. His moral consists in the quest for universal utility solely through that particular.

Leopardi praises Guicciardini’s ‘pragmatism’ and his capacity to act ‘on this side’ of a political science separated from man. But in the end the poet parts ways with a j’accuse: ‘In Italy the practices and customs generally come down to this: that each man, whoever he may be, follows his own practice and custom’ (1824/1995, p. 67, my translation). Leopardi’s indigenous self-recognition echoes Pierre-Jean Grosley’s (1764) allogenous hetero-recognition: ‘L’Italie est le pays où le mot “furbo” est éloge.’

4. From Banfield to today: Over half a century of debate

In 1958, after a lengthy study of a town called Chiaromonte in the Basilicata region of Italy, Edward Banfield published The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. According to him, the political culture of post-war Italy fostered the perpetuation of traditionalist practices rather than promoting the stability and efficiency of modern democratic institutions. This was a particularist culture that sustained local and personal interests, and where trust was restricted to the family circle. It was this aspect that led Banfield to coin the ultra-cited expression ‘amoral familism’. People displaying this mental-cultural trait follow the rule: ‘Maximise the material short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise’ (Banfield, 1958, p. 85). As a result, the amoral familist does not cultivate or develop community-oriented behaviour but nurtures a profound mistrust for the community and does not cooperate with others – except where personal advantage is involved. Civicness, or a civic sense, is therefore the antithesis of amoral familism.

Sociological studies have suggested three main objections to Banfield. The first is methodological: his questions are a procedural trap (Colombis, 1976) since the only choice is between familism and non-familism, without any intermediate position; this also means that we cannot take Banfield’s work to be representative of Southern Italy. (Geertz would say that the question is badly constructed or, more specifically, useless, at least for the purposes of cultural anthropology.)¹⁰ The second is historical: given the structural, economic and institutional situation, it was perfectly reasonable for the inhabitants of Chiaromonte to behave this way (Pizzorno, 1967). The third objection is political: there is nothing amoral about being familist, since the family could actually represent an effective form of mediation between the State and the citizen (Miller, 1974).

Pizzorno argued that, in conditions of poverty, of historic and social marginality, it is reasonable to seek sure and immediate advantages rather than investing efforts in the construction of a common good that is yet to come: public investment is destined to certain failure. Pointing out the limitations of a rigid functionalist approach in studying the processes of modernisation, Pizzorno saw familism as a variable dependent on class relations. He also warned of the danger in studying the dynamics of southern Italy in an excessively localised manner: the phenomenology of the South can be defined only in relation to a broader system. It was Italian history that defined the specificity of a small town in Basilicata.

Banfield was not alone in underscoring the importance of cultural factors in determining the good or bad functioning of democracy. In The Civic Culture (1963)¹¹ Almond and Verba argued that the varying degrees of efficiency of five nations (the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Mexico) depended on what they define as their ‘cultural software’. These scholars’ basic theory is that every political system emerges and develops in line with a given society’s shared set of values and beliefs. Through processes of socialisation and learning mediated by family, school and other agents such as the media, the culture of a social system makes a major contribution to building subjects’ personality and, therefore, to determining underlying attitudes and inclinations to behave in certain ways.

The Civic Culture confirms Banfield’s interpretations and supplements them with another efficacious expression: parochialism. The last chapter addresses another crucial problem of modern democracies: the relation between government capacity and responsiveness to the public. To favour such a balance, a virtuous circle must be triggered, essentially guaranteed by the society’s political culture, making citizens sufficiently civic-minded.¹² Unfortunately, this quality appears to have been in abeyance in the Belpaese of the time, which Almond and Verba see as a realm of parochialism, political alienation, social isolation and distrust. With little national pride, Italians show little confidence in the social environment and rarely feel obliged to participate in local community affairs or choose social forms of leisure activity.

Pursuing Mastropaolo’s reconstruction, after familism and parochialism comes clientelism. In 1964 La Palombara published Interest Groups in Italian Politics, a study of relations between Azione Cattolica, Confindustria and Public Sector employees. In the 1967 Italian translation the title became the more negative Clientela e parentela (Clients and Kin). Thus the term ‘clientelism’ entered the language of political sociology, with a certain semantic weight, rhetorical force, pregnancy and topicality. At about the same time, in Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (1967), Sidney Tarrow juxtaposed the term clientelism with another evocative word, patronage, which was to become common in sociological vocabulary to describe relations between family, politics and power. It is interesting that Tarrow deviates from the representation of a South homogeneously backward and with little hope of future change. According to him, the Christian Democrats had succeeded in a strategy of garnering consent with the middle and lower classes. Tarrow calls this strategy ‘new patronage’ or ‘horizontal clienteles’, translated into the Italian expression ‘clientelismo organizzativo’ (institutionalised clientelism) (Mastropaolo, 2009, p. 324).

Tarrow does not interpret this new patronage as a symptom of cultural and political backwardness but, like Pizzorno, as the Southern (and, according to Guicciardini, Florentine) path towards the modernisation process. This new clientelism is seen as a form of enrichment and social mobility for the few, with little spillover for local prosperity and development: in practice, the redistribution of state resources can apparently follow no other channel but that of clientelism. Nevertheless, it was Tarrow too who, in a 1977 article, ‘The Italian Party System Between Crisis and Transition’, wondered why a ‘constituency for universalism’ was lacking (is lacking, I would say). As Tarrow sees it, the answer resides in the weakness of the national bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of the North, the Centre and the South.

Finally, Putnam’s (1993) more recent analyses tend to revive the validity of the concept of amoral familism and of the North/South divide: briefly, civic spirit is lacking in the South. Using a vast empirical base, Putnam indicates how greatly the productivity of Italian regional administrations is influenced by different civic traditions. This American scholar’s contribution too has been the target of numerous criticisms, one being that by adopting a culturalist perspective, Putnam falls into a sort of historic determinism that occludes the possibility of glimpsing positive changes for a process of modernisation guided by an enlightened political class (Trigilia, 2001). If the concept of social capital is understood in more neutral, less culturally impregnated terms – as a network of relations that can potentially open up to political action aimed at socio-economic development – it is even possible to imagine a political class that improves the situation from above.¹³ Consequently, the network of family relations in a backward society cannot be conceived solely as an obstacle to the process of development. Appropriate social policies could set in motion a virtuous process for augmenting a social capital favourable to development. The major obstacle is the appropriation of public resources by the local cartels (politicians, businessmen, bureaucrats) typical of predatory states (Evans, 1995). Hence the path to be followed is a modernisation of the political class in a universalist direction. The problematic point is that Italians demonstrate a ‘generalized distrust toward the leadership class as a whole. They regard warily both the political and economic elites’ (Cavalli, 2001, p. 131). Cavalli’s thesis on this distrust seems to suggest both cultural determinism (where distrust causes inadequate institutional functioning) and institutional determinism (where it is the inadequate functioning of institutions that produces distrust) as simultaneously cause and effect, representing a typical ‘vicious circle’ (2001, p. 131).

A relevant question concerns the appropriate educational background of this modern and late modern ruling class. It is not clear who this new enlightened ruling class was, is or ought to be – since examples from the Anglophone world or that north of the Alps do not fit the Italian reality – nor where it is to come from or how it is to be educated. Recent developments in Italian politics could suggest that this is a legitimate issue for consideration.

Putnam claimed that reforming public institutions or economic development cannot, in themselves, guarantee the health of Italian democracy. In the same period his words were echoed by Carlo Tullio-Altan: ‘Institutional engineering is not enough. The most important thing of all is the growth of civic conscience, a change in the collective sensitivity, above all in the new generations that are bewildered and indifferent to everything around them’ (Tullio-Altan, 1995, p. 54, my translation). Reform of institutions and economic development – at the level of declarations of intent – are the only points at the hub of the recent and current Italian political debate. Again, Leopardi in the Discourse argued that society relies solely on the restraints and deterrents of laws and the forces of law and order, which fail to curb evil and provide no incentive for good. Laws without customs are not enough, but customs are largely determined, founded and guaranteed by opinions.

For the correct functioning of institutions, Putnam argues, the decisive factor is the degree of civicness: the groundwork of intimately connected rules, norms and values of the local associative fabric that can foster cooperation and the expansion of trust beyond the family circle and, I would add, class, social group or ‘guild’.

The historian Lupo (1993) criticises Putnam’s study for its immutable North–South divide and reifyied hyper-dualism ‘civic vs. uncivic’, and convincingly challenges his historical explanation. Lupo sees Putnam’s hermeneutic as an attempt to reinforce the dichotomy recalling a distant past, the Middle Ages, when the North paved its civic way through centuries thanks to the experience of the Municipalities, whereas the South took the uncivic direction due to the pressure of ‘Feudalism’ and ‘autocracy’. Lupo’s point in a nutshell: ‘Not all central-northern Italy can be identified as municipal, nor all southern Italy as feudal’ (Lupo, 1993, p. 157, my translation).

At the end of this short excursus we find the work of Inglehart (1990, 1996), which confirms one outstanding empirical result: in the most stable democracies 35% of the population express high levels of interpersonal trust, which the author considers the principal indicator of a country’s civic culture.

According to Cavalli, in transnational and international data (Eurobarometer, International Social Survey, World Values Surveys) Italy is growing closer to other European countries on many indicators, but ‘What remains specifically Italian is a conspicuous gap between interpersonal trust, which has strengthened over time, and trust in institutions, which has remained quite low’ (Cavalli, 2001, p. 128). This is seen as indicating a socio-cultural dimension positively correlated with familism-particularism.

The assumption is

that anyone holding a position of power has achieved this in a shady way, that the exercise of power places particular interests before general ones, and that we should not trust in promises and commitments since these will not be kept (Cavalli, 2001, p. 132).

This leads Italian people to see themselves as victims of a dishonest and incompetent leadership class, and thus to justify immoral and illegal behaviour. Cavalli continues his reflection in a direction similar to the one I have constructed here.

It does not matter whether this assumption is true or not – the effects are perverse in either case. When ordinary people assume that those who govern behave immorally and illegally, ordinary people develop a lack of respect for the rules (Cavalli, 2001, p. 133, emphasis added).

5. Types and stereotypes: Cultural obstacles or aids

If the analyses proposed by the culturalist strand are imprecise, superficial or entirely wrong, why are they adopted as representations that fit Italy so closely? Why does this stigma continue to be employed by foreigners and by Italians themselves (Bagnasco, 2006)?

In his research, Carlo Tullio-Altan dwells on the ‘Alberti morality’ mentioned above. He sees the Italians’ familism-particularism as a sort of metaphysics of habit – proper to the mental-cultural heritage of the Italians of yesterday and today – which guides behaviour in precise directions: gaining advantage for oneself, for one’s family (group or ‘guild’) at the expense of collective interests. ‘The aspirations of the young towards a more authentic sociality encounter a major obstacle in the cultural model, absorbed from the social environment and from the family in particular, that sees Otherness as an instrumental or negative aspect’ (Tullio-Altan, 1995, p. 35, my translation).

Loredana Sciolla (1997, 2004) reaches different conclusions from the ‘culturalist’ scholars mentioned above.¹⁴ She sees amoral familism as a stereotype. The question to be asked is simple, the answer somewhat less so: is the ‘amoral familism’ type (the more general ‘particularism’) a stereotype? Does it help us, or is it an obstacle to understanding Italian society?

Benedetto Croce was one of the first Italian scholars to criticise all forms of typing, and in particular those relating to the concept of national character. According to Croce, placing the emphasis on character prevents one from grasping the implications of a profound historical narrative, falling into the trap of separating a people from its history: representing first the character, and only subsequently exploring how it acted and reacted to events, that is, its history. But, Croce argued, if the character is posited as already fully-fledged there can be no historical narration (Croce, 1922).

Anglo-Saxon scholars of anthropological history did not view either typing or stereotyping negatively. The stereotype is not an obstacle, but an aid in the process of reconstructing a culture. Peter Burke sees the very term ‘stereotype’ as a disparaging way of referring to what sociologists and anthropologists call a model: a simplification helping us understand the complexity of social reality, as in feudalism, capitalism, the culture of shame, or the performance society; even adjectives such as ‘English’ or ‘Italian’ when used with reference to styles or behaviour (Burke, 1987).

Burke is not addressing the scientific status of a stereotype strictu sensu, which is, especially adopting a positivist approach, simply a false or pre-scientific representation of social reality. Pickering (2001), among others, underlines how the presence of a stereotype bars the processing of new or unexpected information, but at the same time he refers to Lippmann’s Dilemma: stereotypes are both necessary and undesirable modes of representation in modern societies (Lippmann, 1922/1965). The vastness of social and cultural relations demands short-cuts in discourse and representation to process an otherwise overwhelming amount of data. However, the fixed nature of widely-accepted stereotypes can diminish or blur our understanding of other social groups and categories.

Burke’s point is that a stereotype at once blocks and reveals cultural meanings; in particular, a stereotype might disclose beliefs of a people and about a people. We might recall Durkheim’s thesis that opinion is eminently a social fact and, as such, is a source of authority (Durkheim, 1912/2008).

The authority of science¹⁵ derives from scientists’ ability to provide unbiased and trustworthy knowledge, on the ‘standard view of science’ (Bijker, 2001). Public and popular discourse considers science universal, disinterested and value-free. Foucault, among others, stresses in contrast how scientific knowledge can become instrumental to the advancement of particular interests of certain social groups. Categories of thought initiated by scientific discourse can shape the government of people’s lives and individuals’ understanding of themselves (Foucault, 1980). If we interpret a stereotype through constructionist lenses (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), the conceptual pair familism-particularism can be considered what certain groups of people hold to be ‘real’ or an adequate representation of the social reality. The beliefs springing from a stereotype contribute to shape the cultural image and sense of identity of a collectivity.

Here stereotypes can be considered as myths, as stories. The conceptual pair familism-particularism can thus be seen as an archetypical¹⁶ narrative persisting through centuries which still has an iron grip on the interpretation of Italian culture: the self-perpetuating myth becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1949). The familist-particularist story has been increasingly standardised, conventionalised and abstracted, until it has finally been reduced to a deeply encoded and resonant set of symbols, icons, clichés or stereotypes (Slotkin, 1986). Hence, regardless of its ‘scientific’ adherence to social reality, the familist-particularist script has become a fundamental story for the indigenous and allogenous (lay and scientific) interpretations of Italian culture.

These reflections make even more sense in terms of Clifford Geertz’s semiotic approach,¹⁷ envisaging culture as: ‘An historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 89, emphasis mine). It is precisely a thick anthropological interpretation that is proposed by Carlo Tullio-Altan (1986, p. 29) when he emphasises the importance of what can be referred to as ‘mentality’, shaped by a historic combination of economic, social, political and specifically cultural factors, attuned to the needs that this combination expresses. These constructs stem from the furrows of history but in the long term may become causal factors there too. The mentality in question can survive the conditions that generated it and in its turn affect economic, social and political events: a viscous and resistant cultural reality.

According to Cavalli the label ‘Italian national character’ can be used to group together negative traits normally used to define the Italian (both at home and abroad) – such as individualism, familism, particularism, localism, clientelism, fatalism and scepticism about institutions – knowing that it is an ideal type: ‘A tool for interpreting reality that should not be mistaken for reality itself.’

Each Italian embodies only some traits of the ideal type, and there are probably some Italian citizens that do not possess any of them. Understood properly, the concept of a national character nevertheless has heuristic value (Cavalli, 2001, p. 125, emphasis mine).

Thus the ‘Italian national character’ can be seen as an ideology, and ‘Like all ideologies, the negative image of the “Italian national character” is neither all true nor all false, but represents a distorted representation of reality’ (Cavalli, 2001, p. 127).

6. Particularism-familism, romantic myth and modernity the southern way

However, opinions diverge regarding the interpretative value of particularism-familism vis-à-vis the (southern) Italian identity: other Italian sociologists consider the ‘amoral familism’ type/stereotype a hermeneutic obstacle. According to Mutti (1998), Banfield, and the other scholars who interpret Italian social reality in a similar manner, have contributed to constructing a negative stereotype of Italianness at international level, simultaneously fuelling within Italy the ‘failure syndrome’ characteristic of the Meridionalist debate of the last 50 years.¹⁸

Once the Southern Question is introduced into the debate on particularism-familism and modernisation (or, if you prefer, the other way around), comparative problems arise: what is the term of comparison for the backward South? There is a space-dimension and geographical comparative issue: with which North is the South compared? And a time-dimension and historical problem: with which past is the backward South compared? Lupo (2015) sheds critical light on the issue through his expression ‘Great Dualistic Metaphor’. Referring only to economic growth, he states that in one hundred and fifty years the South remained behind (compared to the North), but at the same time progressed (compared to its past). The first point conceals the latter and almost always hides it. The explanation resides in the fascination of the ‘Great Dualistic Metaphor’ that lies behind and under the Southern question: progress vs. backwardness, modernity vs. archaism, civilisation vs. barbarism – A, against B, North against South (Lupo, 2015, VIII).¹⁹ According to Lupo this dualism has always triumphed in public and also in historiographical discussion, generating a mainstream debate aimed primarily at setting the North and South of Italy at loggerheads. The great dualistic metaphor North–South delineates a norm modelled on northern parameters, and an anomaly modelled on southern parameters.

Here we can find a parallel with North–South Europe dualism. The common subtext of Grand Tour literature is pure dichotomy. The Romantic myth of Italy and Southern Europe that persists to the present is constructed upon a polar meta-narrative, a sort of grand-dichotomy: rational and progressive cultures of North Europe (where the modern homo fictus lives), versus the irrational, backward society of the south (Italy), inhabited by the southerner homo naturalis. The modern, rational, civilised, ‘cold’ New World (or northern Europe) versus the irrational, uncivilised but passionate and romantic Old World: Italy.

In his essays Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth (2002) the literary critic Luzzi analyses, among others, J.W. Goethe’s Italienische Reise (1786/1982) and Germaine de Staël’s (Madame de Staël) Corinne ou l’Italie (1807/1999), articulating the Grand Tour ‘Modern North / Ancient South’ meta-narrative in four main themes. First, Italy’s majestic cultural derivation from Antiquity and the Renaissance overwhelms any signs of cultural (social, political) activity in modern Italy; secondly, Italy and its people are effeminate, and this gender characteristic explains their aptitude in the imaginative sphere, in creative fields; thirdly, Italians are primitive and violent people, though this primitive nature contributes to their creative accomplishments; fourthly, Italian society and public order do not exist.

The sociologist Cassano confirms the need to think differently about the south, to stop seeing its ailments merely as the consequence of defective modernity: ‘We have to change our attitude and start thinking that, in the south of Italy, modernity is not extraneous to the ailments for which so many continue to believe that it is the cure’ (Cassano, 1996, p. 3, my translation). Cassano also considers the modernisation of the south as the only possible modernisation, precisely because it is the one that exists.

Neo-communitarian thought (Etzioni, 1995) also suggests a third path. Inclusive communities can develop a supportive and altruistic morality between subjects bound by special relations and establish bonds of cooperation and trust with the other. In short, traces of a third approach to modernisation for Southern Italy have been identified, starting from a family that is not closed in on itself but is capable of developing forms of solidarity that go beyond the bonds of kin and clientele (Fantozzi, 1993; Gribaudi, 1980). Piselli (1981), in her study of Altopiano, a small community in the Calabria Region, finds solidarity networks beyond the nuclear family. In the words of Costabile and Coco: ‘While Banfield’s work implies an opposition between tradition and modernity, Piselli’s research demonstrates the mutual interpermeation between forms of continuity and forms of change’ (2017, p. 84).

That is, a society centred on the particular family does not in itself necessarily signify lower levels of civic sense. For instance, Turnaturi (1991) proposes the alternative category of ‘moral familism’: Italian families joining forces to seek justice for dead loved ones, victims of neo-fascist terroristic attacks between the Sixties and Eighties. Starting from families, this is transformed into a universalistic claim for the entire country.

Even according to Sciolla, familism is not negatively correlated with civicness. Her book La sfida dei valori (2004) supports this viewpoint from cross-national surveys (including the World Value Survey). The Italians emerge better from the comparison with other four countries (United States, Great Britain, France and Spain); specifically, an improvement in democratic interest and participation is noted from the 1990s on. However, this remains survey data; and the fact that it shows Caltanisetta, a Sicilian municipality of around 60,000 inhabitants, as more civic than Milan and Turin raises certain doubts. The point has already been made: you need to get into the field to paint a lifelike portrait.

7. Studies, ideologies and communication

The historian Gribaudi, among others, worked in the field for 10 years. Her book A Eboli can be considered one of the most valid studies contesting Banfield’s interpretations. She plays in his field: a long (much longer than Banfield’s) ethnographic, narrative qualitative study, conducted in a sophisticated and rigorous manner. Her work was reviewed for the international academic community by Ginsborg, a British historian based in Florence: ‘A Eboli is a work of great subtlety, the fruit of ten years of research, and of a strongly interdisciplinary approach. Gribaudi’s aim is to reveal the polyphony and profundity of an extremely complex society’ (1992, p. 335). Yet the fact that this highly subtle work was never translated into English diminishes its communicative impact within the international academic community.

According to Gribaudi, the theme of the southern family and its role in society and the economy is insidious and marked by an ideological approach (Gribaudi, 1993, p. 13). Discussing the southern family academically is complicated by the symbolic meaning attributed to it: questions and arguments are dictated by the political agenda, sustained by party opinions necessarily dominated by simplified or stereotypical interpretations. Through the category of familism, a crucial role is ascribed to the family in fuelling the vicious circle of southern backwardness. The Southern family (whatever its form), and the exclusive sentiments it instils in its members, is held responsible for failure to develop a civil society, accountable for institutional weakness, lack of organisational structures and sense of collective identity. Gribaudi argues that ‘amoral familism’ has essentially become a symbolic ‘all-round’ label in public debate and in less informed sociological studies. Familism is thus placed at the root of the economic and political distortions of southern society, though the expression signifyies the most varied phenomena, from the hierarchical structure of the mafia clan to the small mononuclear groups of the artisan, the blue and white collar workers.

Here two entwined stereotypical images are marching hermeneutically together and feeding each other: the familist-particularist stereotype and the more general ‘Southern Question’. Lupo states that the Southern question has been a key theme in Italian public debate for over a century and a half, a debate never limited to mere empirical or intellectual reflection of reality. Italian culture itself has gradually given shape and depth to the question in different historical phases, in line with often contradictory political purposes and including a number of heterogeneous – economic, civil, cultural – phenomena, loading the debate with multiple symbolisms²⁰ (Lupo, 2015, VII).

We might suggest that too much weight and responsibility has been bestowed on Banfield’s ‘amoral familism’, rendering him a straw-man easy to knock down, but later making him a ghost because he would not remain dead underground but magically reappears. Or perhaps this was another kind of ghost. Gribaudi and several other scholars severely and thoroughly criticised Banfield’s study from an academic standpoint. But in other cases, Banfield was recruited for political and ideological reasons beyond the bounds of his own study. Gribaudi writes: ‘It is extremely instructive to retrace the chain of reasoning which led the paradigm of amoral familism to become so firmly established because it provides a close-up view of how a stereotype gets constructed’ (Gribaudi, 1996, p. 83). Gribaudi is aware of the constructionist perspective at the heart of this phenomenon, but without drawing its extreme implications: a corpus of beliefs can come to constitute social reality, establishing a correspondence between reality as ‘it is’ and ‘how it is believed to be’.

Gribaudi opens up another interesting interpretative direction that evades the idea of a ‘territorial familism’ and invites us to abandon the North–South cleavage and imagine an Italian familism. Familism-particularism could be interpreted in terms of the paucity of responses by the Italian state tout court (North-Centre-South) to the emerging petite bourgeoisie. We can hypothesise that, throughout the whole country, the strength of family sentiments and loyalties have compensated for the institutional weaknesses inherent in the formation process of the Italian state. This appears to be an Italian specificity. Italian institutions were unable or did not wish to transform the demands and aspirations of the middle class into demands for civic life: ‘Instead of providing public answers, they were driven back again inside the families.…And it is here, and not in other archaic phenomena, that – if one has a mind to – one should seek the origin of an Italian familism’ (Gribaudi, 1993, p. 42, my tranlsation).

As I read it, Gribaudi implicates the historic responsibilities of the Italian haute bourgeoisie: we are not far from Leopardi’s interpretations. And here the North–South division is again transcended by a national society and culture whose specific mixture of ‘idealism and Marxism’ – with two distinct but ultimately complementary concepts of ruling and subordinate classes – led to neglecting study of the intermediate classes or relegating them to a negatively-connoted symbolism and a derogatory definition such as ‘petty-bourgeois’ (Gribaudi, 1993, p. 42).

When Italian scholars conducted long ethnographic studies, as we have seen, Banfield’s interpretations were challenged, criticised and confined. But these studies also had the effect of stimulating contrary reflections.

In a long community study in Cosenza (Calabria Region) Costabile (1996, 2009) challenged the idea of the immobilism and segregation of the nuclear family, showing how it can transform and adapt to changing social reality. Costabile’s interpretations in my view go beyond Banfield’s familism towards a culture characterised by family-based particularism. Costabile argues that the family system in Cosenza was able to influence politics and institutions, especially during transitional periods, through the injections of ‘particularistic meaning’, so that in post-liminal phases politics and public institutions were profoundly characterised by family membership. Family networks thus became predominant, persistent structural elements determining the life of local politics and public institutions, shaped by an ‘unusual dialectic between private values and roles and public principles and rules’ (Costabile, 1996, p. 163, my translation). In this dialectical relationship, the regulatory criteria, the elites’ strategies and the overall legitimation of public and political life was always shaped by a ‘particular culture’.

As these examples show, ethnographic studies capable of challenging, enriching or articulating ‘familism-particularism’ have been carried out over the years. Despite this, Banfield’s interpretation retained its hegemony over a large part of the academic audience and in the wider arena of public opinion.

Here an apparently banal point needs to be made. Salvatore Lupo wrote an important book on the stereotypes of southern Italy: La Questione: Come liberare la storia del Mezzogiorno dagli stereotipi. But will we ever get a chance to read The Issue: How to Rid the History of Southern Italy of Stereotypes? The same holds for books by Gribaudi, Piselli and Costabile. The international scholar unfamiliar with Italian never had the opportunity to read in their entireties some of the most challenging studies of Banfield’s interpretations. English is the ‘lingua franca’ of a globalised world rooted in Western modernisation the ‘Nordic way’. The primacy of the English language in the social sciences (not only there), along with the global leadership of UK or US publishers, is indisputable if sometimes regretted (Edmondson & Luhtakallio, 2016). The English language and the Anglophone international academic publishing market are two elements that cannot be easily dismissed.

Banfield’s book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society can be found in 994 libraries across the world in English (54 editions) while the Italian version is available in 57 libraries (20 editions).²¹ The dual linguistic status English-Italian is an element that must be considered in understanding the auto- and hetero-recognition of Italian identity around the conceptual pair familism-particularism. Similar considerations apply to Putnam’s Making Democracy Work, available in 734 libraries in English, whereas the Italian translation ‘La pianta e le radici’ can be found in 47 libraries.

It is hard to find an Italian language book that can compete in this sense of effective academic reach. Gribaudi’s A Eboli (7 editions) – positively acclaimed by the Italian academic community – is available in 56 libraries. Another book based on a long ethnographic study, Piselli’s Parentela e immigrazione (8 editions), can be found in 47 libraries. Using another indicator of academic popularity, Banfield’s book registers 5,670 Google Scholar citations (November 2018) for the English version and 322 for the Italian. Putnam’s book has 42,051 citations, 72 in Italian. Gribaudi and Piselli’s books have respectively 49 and 79 Google Scholar citations. This is a pity. But one of the key criteria for ‘science’ is precisely being ‘public’, ‘available’. English is the master key for boosting availability.

8. Conclusions: Conceptual tool, cultural paradigm and neurotic repression

This article argues that the ‘familist-particularist’ idea of Italy has distant origins and belongs inextricably to both the moment of self-recognition and that of hetero-recognition. Moreover, the other strength of the familism-particularism category lies precisely in the implicit or explicit premise of criticisms of Banfield: Merton’s (1949) self-fulfilling prophecy based on Thomas’ theorem (1923). This is precisely the central tenet of Banfield’s interpretation, which is worth citing again: ‘Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.’ Starting from this observation, interpretations developed in opposition to the culturalist approach – however convincing in abstract or in particular situations – enter deep water. This may correspond to Ferragina’s observations when he argues that the success of Banfield’s book goes beyond its actual description of the rural context and reasons for the underdevelopment of southern Italy. He provides a simple, straightforward explanation for a problem that has interested generations of writers, philosophers and social scientists. ‘It has been said that, “Theories that won’t die are those that confirm our most basic assumptions” (Thomson, 2005, p. 446). Amoral familism doubtless belongs to this category of theories’ (Ferragina, 2009, p. 142, emphasis mine).

Lupo (2015) soundly and thoroughly criticises both Banfield and Putnam, adding that insisting on negative aspects, along with lack of interest in analysis highlighting positive social and cultural features of southern Italy, is polemical and tendentious. He also suggests how Banfield (and Putnam) could fall into a sort of ‘orientalist’²² misconception (Said, 2003). They are both foreign scholars, and only those who look at things from the outside (or from the vantage-point of some Occident) dare to enclose the millenary civilisation of entire peoples in fundamentalist formulas. Lupo also stresses two of the main themes of this article: the rhetorical power of the particularist-familist narrative and its dual status (heterochthonous and autochthonous):

Here I do not wish to deny that the basic concepts of these two books, respectively amoral familism and uncivic spirit, have their attraction, their descriptive power – which explains their enduring success within the public discourse.…However, it is a fact that in this case heterodefinition comes together with autodefinition (Lupo, 2015, XXIII, my translation and emphasis).

So, what ‘type’ do critics of the particularist, familist image propose? To date no antagonist type, concept or an emblematic expression, seems yet to have been constructed. Beyond the substance, one of the problems encountered in theories opposing ‘familism-particularism’ is that the scholars in question have not coined key expressions to sum up their criticisms, without which, rightly or wrongly, they cannot compete: form has its importance. The importance of eloquent expressions and catchphrases (‘disenchantment’, ‘iron cage’ or the more recent ‘liquid society’) in encapsulating the pith of one’s research is undeniable.

Turnaturi’s efforts to offer an alternative category provides an illustration of this problem. Amoral familism becomes ‘moral familism’ (1991), in rhetorical terms constituting a linguistic reversal in which the centrality of the family is confirmed. Furthermore, in conceptual terms the implicit/explicit critique of Banfield’s analysis – that of being moral-ideological, partial and not sufficiently ‘scientific’ – can be applied to Turnaturi’s interpretation too.

The historic sedimentation of ‘cultural’ interpretations of Italian social and political reality is so weighty and so deep that it by now constitutes a corpus of solidified images.²³ Moreover, in the face of a small autochthonous group who criticise the proto- and post-Banfield analyses (generally in Italian), there is an army of analysts who consider particularism and familism a useful tool for interpreting Italian social, political and economic reality. This army is composed of Italians, northern Europeans and North Americans: a sort of Foreign Legion. It will take more thoroughgoing qualitative studies translated into English to wage war on such visions of Italian society. If field investigations are not matched by further community studies with dual English-Italian linguistic status, like Banfield’s, making the gamut of ethnographic work available to the international academic community, the risk is that criticism rhetorically remains nothing but criticism.

In the preface to the latest Italian edition of The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Bagnasco confirms how hard it is to dispense with Banfield:

I have the suspicion that even in many of the most heated criticisms there lurks the sensation of dealing with a sort of ghost that is hidden in some part of the house, ready to pop out again when and where we least expect it (Bagnasco, 2006, p. 9; italics mine, my translation).

It is hard to get rid of a ghost precisely because it is a ghost, as Tullio-Altan remarks. In his La nostra Italia (1986) he notes among Italian academics a sort of ‘neurotic repression’ when addressing familism, particularism and backwardness. If he is right, Banfield’s ghost may be the return of the repressed in the form of condensation or conversion (Freud, 1915/1957).

Is this the ghost of ‘cultural determinism’? Cavalli, echoing Bagnasco, writes:

Given the criticisms it has received since the 1960s, the persistence of the ‘familistic-particularistic’ paradigm is surprising. One feature common to these interpretations is a sort of ‘cultural determinism,’ which implies the impossibility of social change. Features such as familism require long periods of time to take root in a culture; they are passed on from generation to generation and, once having taken hold, require even longer periods of time to die out. From the perspective of a cultural determinist, they are historical flaws, regarded almost as if they were anomalies in the genetic code (Cavalli, 2001, p. 121, emphasis added).

But I would not place Tullio-Altan or other culturalist perspectives in the category of ‘determinism’. Rather than citing the ‘impossibility of social change’ Tullio-Altan (along with many others, Leopardi included) argues that culture is a ‘tenacious reality’. Social change cannot take place quickly and easily without a culture supporting it, so that an enlightened elite, combined with institutional reforms, may not be sufficient. From a cultural perspective social change takes a long time, acting not least through the educational and self-cultivation of young people: a Bildung.

Furthermore, highlighting the conceptual pairing ‘familism-particularism’ among Renaissance humanists such as Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco Guicciardini, we implicitly reinforce the idea of a tool (or ideal type) rather than a scientific paradigm. Considering the literary ‘incrustation’ constructed and disseminated by Grand Tour literature and the ideological use of the conceptual pair pointed out by Lupo and other scholars, we might see particularism-familism as a ‘cultural paradigm’, not only a heuristic concept but also a cultural construct. Particularist-familism would then become part of a larger, historically-grounded interpretive system that not merely reflects social reality but grows with it: ‘What might start as an epistemological construct slowly becomes an element in the construction of social reality itself’ (Arditi, 1994, p. 604).

I end by coming full circle to Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807/1999), one of the most influential pieces of literature shaping the collective image of Italian society. The lack of a public sphere and moral regulatory principles in Italy are clearly indicated by de Staël: ‘Since society does not set itself up as a judge of anything, it allows everything’ (vi.2). The Italian poet Ugo Foscolo, in Lettere scritte dall’Inghilterra (1817), tries to reorient foreigners’ gaze on Italy, uncovering features of Italian society and culture that have been hidden from view by the Grand Tour narrative: the Italian language, the social customs of the Italians themselves, the historical events that shaped the Italian nation. The attempt had little success according to Luzzi (2002); Romantic generalisations about a premodern Italy whose present cannot escape the burden of its past were to be repeated by English Victorian novelists, and later writers who would travel to the Peninsula in search of that same Italian-less Italy. When we extend the hermeneutic gaze over the centuries and beyond the social sciences we see that there is much more than Banfield to take into account. If we fail to extend this gaze, we conduct a séance rather than an academic exploration. Insistently summoned, Banfield’s ghost is sure to appear again: a revenant!

Acknowledgements

I thank Keijo Rahkonen and Aelmuire Cleary for their support and suggestions. I also thank editor Ricca Edmondson and two anonymous reviewers for their observations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Pierluca Birindelli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8599-1119

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions [grant number 702531].

Notes

1. See among others Tullio-Altan (1986). Along with epos the other cultural and social dimensions are oikos (the homeland, the sense of belonging to a country), ethos (shared values and rules), genos (the bonds of blood) and logos (language).

2. Here I do not address prejudices proper. See Teti (2011, 2013) for what can be considered a ‘racialization’ of ‘southern inferiority’ in the writings of various authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

3. This does not mean that people worldwide read Madame de Staël or watched A Room with a View from start to finish; nonetheless exposure to certain images representing Italy through the same ‘matrix’ leads to the construction of a consistent overall stage-set for the play. Stemming from centuries-old travel narratives, these cultural scripts

Are not narrative texts that actors on the world stage can read from and act out … People rely on mostly unarticulated mental images to make sense of the world and, moreover, work with a notion that others also think in similar images (Alasuutari & Qadir, 2016, p. 635).

Foreign and local actors on the everyday stage of Italy do not so much act as enact (Jepperson, 1991).

4. In addition to his preface to the book, see also Bagnasco’s Tre Italie (1977); Traccie di comunità (1999); Società fuori squadra (2003).

5. Letter to Iacopo Taruffi in Epistolario, ed. L. Piccioni, Bari, Laterza, 1936, vol. I, p. 349 (my translation).

6. For a detailed reconstruction of the literary regard éloigné (Lévi-Strauss, 1983) see Luzzi (2002) and Squillaci (2000) or, among others, Chaney (2014) and Black (1992).

7. In some cases the educational journey triggered the creation of a Bildungsroman. It was on his return from Italy that Johann Wolfgang Goethe began Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796).

8. While the two moments of self- and hetero-recognition are sociologically indivisible, for the purpose of our investigation it is necessary to keep them analytically – that is, rhetorically – separate.

9. I focus here on the antithetic opposition particularism-universalism, though aware that the two can interact in different ways and coexist within the same social context. Similarly, there are also intermediate stages between particularism and universalism (for example networks of solidarity), while ‘familism’ can be considered a specific and ambivalent form of particularism.

10. According to Geertz, a thick description is key for an ‘interpretive science in search of meaning’ that aims to access natives’ conceptual world without claiming to reconstruct a Euclidean order of ‘abstract regularities’. When an anthropologist has reconstructed a good ethnographic miniature, this is already a great deal, albeit that such reconstructions are ‘essentially contestable’. But subjectivism has to be resisted, as does succumbing to the fallacious ‘Jonesville-is-the-USA microcosmic model’ (Geertz, 1973, pp. 3–30).

11. The political culture seen as best suited to democracy is a mixture of submissive and participatory culture termed ‘civic culture’, a schema subsequently elaborated by Aren Lijphart (1977, p. 42).

12. This, as noted among others by Mastropaolo, is the political culture typical of the English-speaking world. For other criticisms of Almond and Verba see Rokkan (1964).

13. For a more recent and comprehensive interpretation of the Italian scholar see Trigilia Non c’è Nord senza Sud (2012).

14. Other criticisms of the strand instigated by Guicciardini and continued by Banfield can be found in Piattoni (2005, 2007).

15. For reflections on the authority of science I thank the seminar discussions at the University of Tampere Research Group for Cultural and Political Sociology (TCuPS) led by Pertti Alasuutari. On the relationship between sociology and rhetoric see Edmondson (1984).

16. My use of ‘archetype’ here is not in the Jungian sense, but purely its etymological meaning: Greek arkhetupon ἀρχή (archē,) ‘beginning, origin’ and τύπος (tupos), inter alia ‘pattern, model, type’.

17. ‘The concept of culture I espouse…is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 5)

18. Beyond the Meridionalist theme, this topic can be inserted into the broader debate about ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt, 2003) and ‘alternative modernities’ (Gaonkar, 2001). This debate thematises the conceptualisation of modernity as a plural process that transcends western modernity to embrace a more global, cosmopolitan perspective.

19. The teleological premises of ‘modernisation without development’ were rejected by Bevilacqua (2005), among others. On the Southern Question see also: Barbagallo (1994); De Francesco (2013); Pescosolido (2017).

20. Stereotypical representations of the Mezzogiorno are persistent features of Italian culture at all levels. Dickie (1999) analyzes these stereotypes in the post-Unification period, when the Mezzogiorno was widely seen as barbaric, violent or irrational, an ‘Africa’ in the European continent.

21. WorldCat, November 2018. The availability of a book in libraries worldwide is a reliable indicator of its academic diffusion. It is hard to discover the number of copies sold, which in any case may be a less reliable indicator of its academic penetration.

22. On ‘orientalism’ and the Southern Question see also Schneider (1998). She describes the Southern Question as ‘Orientalism in one country’. According to Schneider we can reconstruct a northern Italian narrative of the South as culturally distant from Europe – partially owing to Northern European and American ‘orientalist’ images of the entire peninsula. A homogeneous and modern North has been opposed to a homogenous South characterised by backwardness, underdevelopment, clientelism, lawlessness, organised crime and incapacity for cooperation.

23. This echoes Lipmann’s ‘picture in our heads’ metaphor of a stereotype: ‘Whether right or wrong,…imagination is shaped by the pictures seen…. Consequently, they lead to stereotypes that are hard to shake’ (1922/1965), p. 95, emphasis added).