What is Mafia

Mosca Gaetano 지음

마주 2014년 08월 29일 출간

작품소개

책소개

This book, that is a transcript of a lecture by Gaetano Mosca in Milan in 1900, tries to define the essential characteristics of the phenomenon Mafia. These characteristics are the spirit of Mafia which permeates Sicilian society, the omert？ which build up a perfect environment where the Mafia's activities can easily develop, and the ability of the Mafia's cosche to take advantage of their local power linking it to political and financial power.
Nowadays when we talk about Mafia, it seems that there is an underestimation of this phenomenon, in addition to political and cultural limits to the approach to this problem. All problems that more than one hundred years ago Mosca already noticed and to which tried to give an answer. For this reason we believe that the translation and the publication of a book already older than one hundred year, will help us to take advantage of a witness who tells us about a world far away in time but close to our interests. The interests of people still struggling with the same criminal phenomenon that afflicted Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century.

목차

The Author
Preface of the editor
A Note From the Translator
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

출판사 서평

Gaetano Mosca’s essay on the organized criminal fraternity usually referred to as the ‘Mafia’ gives an insight into one of the most significant figures of late nineteenth-century European sociology, but its relevance is not solely historical. Mosca’s essay speaks to our own time as well as to his own. In Italy in Mosca’s era, it was still possible to believe that the networks of criminality were something separate from the networks on which and through which “respectable” society based its rule and its hegemony. Italian unification had created a state that may have been the smallest of the Great Powers, but was a power nonetheless, one that was recognized as such by the rest of Europe. In the upper echelons of Italian society, an older aristocracy was being supplanted with a new bourgeoisie, some of whose enterprises (Fiat, for example) remain household names to this day. The power of the elites who had usurped Garibaldi’s original republican project was not as secure as they supposed however. Across Italy, it was increasingly challenged by radical popular movements ？ and in the south of Italy, local elites still relied for their hegemony on a social organization, la cosa nostra, whose whole existence was (in theory) anathema to the rule of law on which modern European societies were supposed to be based.

This essay ？ presented here in English translation for the first time ？ was published at the very cusp of the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, a generation after Italy had been united, and when Italian liberalism appeared to be leading the newly united society into the status of a great power. True, the assault on Ethiopia had failed, but the new colony in Eritrea had been consolidated, and a decade later Rome would be able to seize Tripoli and its Libyan hinterland. Within Italy, however, there were also ominous signs that the liberal graft on to the old society was failing. Most importantly, it was failing to transcend the highly uneven, and barely combined development of the disparate societies which had been gathered together in the single Kingdom of Italy. For a liberal of Mosca’s generation, the key problem was the introduction of the rule of law to those regions of the Kingdom where it was absent. Hence his interest in the mafia, whose killing of a Milanese prosecutor in 1900 provided the initial inspiration for this work. In spite of events such as that killing, Mosca’s era was one of optimism and the hegemony of classical liberalism, in Italy as elsewhere. That optimism was destroyed by the events of 1914 and the century that followed it. Among the lessons of the past century is the knowledge that even in modern Europe, networks of organized crime can persist as viable social entities, and even penetrate into the heart of the state (and this is something by no means at all confined to Italy).

This is why the essay presented here retains its relevance in the twenty-first century. Sociological classics enjoy their classic status because they continue to remain relevant beyond the times in which they were published. Such classics of sociology retain their relevance by one of two methods: either they examine, in depth, social phenomenon that persist beyond their own time and into ours, or they represent early attempts to understand aspects of social life that are common, or even universal, across human societies. Mosca’s Mafia, I would contend, combines both these aspects of classic status.
......

인물정보

저자(글) Mosca Gaetano

Gaetano Mosca (1858 ？ 1941) was an Italian political scientist, journalist and public servant. He is credited with developing the Theory of Elitism and the doctrine of the Political Class and is one of the three members constituting the Italian School of Elitists together with Vilfredo Paredo and Robert Michels. Their works inspired subsequent studies by political scientists of the process of the “circulation of elites” within democracies and other political systems.
His most famous works are Sulla teorica dei governi e sul governo parlamentare (Theory of Governments and Parliamentary Government), published in 1884; Elementi di scienza politica (The Ruling Class, published in English in 1934), published in 1896; and Storia delle dottrine politiche (History of Political Doctrines), published in 1936.

가에타노 모스카 (Gaetano Mosca, 1858년 4월 1일 이탈리아 팔레르모 ~ 1941년 11월 8일 이탈리아 로마) 는 이탈리아의 정치학자이다. 토리노, 로마의 각 대학 교수· 하원의원·상원의원을 역임하였다. 국가의 통치는 항상 전통·의원·경제력 등에 있어서 우월한 소수의 지배계급의 손에 있다고 주장하였다.