Browsing by Author "Sabetti, Filippo"

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An Agenda for the Study of Long-Enduring Institutions of Self-Governance in the Italian South
(1999) Sabetti, Filippo
"This paper aims to contribute to a more reliable and more nuanced understanding of South Italian development by suggesting the need to map and survey what, if any, enduring institutions of self-governance existed in the Italian South and what difference, if any, their presence or absence made for human welfare between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century - the so called early modern period of state formation and preparation for economic growth. The advantage of stretching the entire period before us is that it allows to spot variations, fluctuations and long-term trends better than a shorter time-span, but any analysis across such time and space carries its own constraints. There is no pretension here to do justice to a topic encompassing more than 700 years of developments since Norman times; that would be premature and beyond the confines of a single paper. Rather, the paper seeks to advance the argument in two ways: by sketching what and where to look for long-enduring institutions of self-governance and by suggesting what gains in understanding are most likely to result from such research. In brief, the paper presents an agenda for comparative research not its results."
Cattaneo e il Modelo Americano: Per una Scienza Politica Nuova
(2000) Sabetti, Filippo
"L'influenza del costitutionalismo e def federalismo americano sul processo di formazione dell'Italia unita e stata studiata separatamente da singoli ricercatori1 e congiutamente in parecchi congressi scientifici sulle due sponde dell'Atlantico . La conclusione prevalente, per dirla con le parole di un insigne studioso americano del Risorgimento, e che il modello di governo degli Stati Uniti era appena visibile agli italiani. Questa conclusione era stata prospettata in precedenza da Aldo Garosci quando aveva osservato che neppure in Italia."
The Challenge of Reform in France, Italy and Spain
(1999) Sabetti, Filippo
"It is hard to imagine many countries so similar and dissimilar - at times amici/nemici all at once - as France, Italy and Spain. In addition to physical proximity and characteristics, they share common linguistic and cultural roots, have for the most part genuflected at the same altar, and assimilated, emulated and, at times, sought to avoid each another's customs, institutions and ways of life. Seldom severed for long periods, the movement of ideas, people and goods between them has proceeded over the centuries through mutual consent, rivalry, imitation, alliance, dynastic or territorial aggrandizement and force. The network of relations became more fixed, but no less complex to understand, with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and their political and economic reverberations. A Neapolitan Bourbon monarch and Neapolitan advisers in the eighteenth century helped to make Spain a nation state, but it was Napoleon's brother who was truly the first king of Spain. Before becoming king of France in 1830, Louis Philippe sat as a peer in the Sicilian parliament. The Spaniards fought against the Napolepnic state being created in France and Italy but undertook to create a more centralized and more egalitarian constitutional arrangement of their own in 1812, in the process giving the world the term 'liberal' and setting a precedent for a military veto to constitutional and institutional reforms (the so called pronunciamientos) that was to afflict Spanish public life until the Franco regime."
Community Self Help and the Law and Regulations of Government
(1985) Sabetti, Filippo
"Community self help may be a particularly useful notion for coming to terms with the self organizing and self governing capabilities of people within and across particular historical periods and different political systems. Emphasis on a theory of "the state" as predatory rule and on a theory of politics as exchange has led to too many pessimistic comments about the human condition. At the same time, recent analyses by Jane Jacobs (1984) and Charles Sabel (1982) tend to support the late J.P. Nettl's observation that 'the traditional European notion of state and its structural application in practice may not be adequate for the tasks of goal-setting and goal-attainment in a modern, fully industrialized society' (1968: 587). Jacobs argues that cities and not nation states are the salient basic entities for understanding economic life; Sabel offers evidence to suggest that the future of industrial society lies not in 'Fordism' but in the small, high technological industries such as those he found in several Italian cities."
Democracy, Social Capital and Unity of Law: Some Lessons from Italy about Interpreting Social Experiments
(1994) Sabetti, Filippo
"The failed expectations engendered by the experience of postcolonial regimes in Africa as in most of Latin America, the unanticipated collapse of totalitarian parties and regimes in Eastern Europe and the difficulties of consolidating self-governing institutions there, together with renewed attempts aimed at strengthening, or 'reinventing', government in established democracies in other parts of the world, have all given added importance to how we interpret social - experiments. Three major interpretative strands of political theory and policy analysis can be identified in discussions of democratic development. One strand, derived from the history of the growth of representative government, has tended to focus on social and economic conditions as essential requisites of democratic development. A second, of a more diffusionist kind, has tended to ground explanations in questions of political crafting among political actors on all sides. A third strand, with a longer intellectual lineage in the history of political inquiry, has sought modern answers to the ancient question of 'Which values and norms tend to produce good government or successful polities? Each interpretation can be used to illuminate the inadequacies of the others. The path to democratic development set by the Anglo-American experience (if it is possible to speak of a single experience) is not the only way; political crafting, and not civic culture as such, can motivate incumbents and nondemocratic actors to accept democracy. At the same time, while successful transitions to democracy can occur without social and economic preconditions and without the social capital of civic traditions, the consolidation of democratic political practices cannot depend on political crafting and elite accommodation alone, or be confined to one level, usually national."
The Liberal Idea in 19th Century Italy: Building a New Science of Politics
(2001) Sabetti, Filippo
"Liberal ideas in France grew within a long-established state, with the result that they sought either to reconceptualize political power (Guizot) or to challenge the very entrenched view of that state (Tocqueville). By contrast, liberal ideas in Italy combined with nationalism to generate a variety of ways to achieve national as well as individual liberation. The prospect of a single political regime for the entire Italian peninsula and islands generated considerable debate as to what kind of liberal, constitutional design or model of government was best suited to a population that had lived under separate and diverse political regimes for more than thirteen hundred years. This debate gave rise to two broad currents of thought and action known as moderate liberalism and radical, or democratic, liberalism. Both were intended to realize, promote and advance what has been called "the liberal conception of European history" (Tilly 1975, 37). But the two differed on some fundamental aspects. The first derived from notions of constitutional monarchy and representative government, drawing support from the British experience and particularly the work of John Stuart Mill; the other rejected constitutional monarchy and went beyond representative government to include principles for a self-governing, as opposed to state-governed, society, drawing support from Tocqueville's analysis of democracy in America. The first is closely associated with the Piedmontese Prime Minister Cavour and the creation of the Italian state; the other with the Milanese writer Carlo Cattaneo and the constitutional design that did not happen, the defeated federalist alternative. The net result was that, while the former lent support to the entrenched European view of the state, the latter lent support to a non-unitary, polycentric, political order. For this reason, Cavour and Cattaneo could agree on the basic features of incivilimento or progress in Europe and even on how to resolve the Irish question, but they could not agree on what system of government was best suited to a free and united Italy. I have elsewhere discussed the chains of events that created the prospect of a single political regime for the entire Italian peninsula and islands, the considerable debate it generated as to which constitutional design or model of governance was best suited to a pluralist society like Italy and the chain of events that weighted the result of the Risorgimento in favor of the creation of the state organized as a milder form of the French system of centralized government and administration to minimize the problems of bureaucratic preemption and failure associated with the French case (Sabetti 2000: chaps. 2-3). In this paper, I propose to focus, more specifically, on how liberal ideas were used to provide an Italian parallel to what Tocqueville sought to do by examining Carlo Cattaneo's attempt to fashion a new science of politics for a self-governing society."
The Making of Italy as an Experiment in Constitutional Choice
(1982) Sabetti, Filippo
"Since 1870 Italy has been a country with a single more or less sovereign power (my qualification refers to the pope, not to the Republic of San Marino) and its history has been the story of central government, of regional reactions and regional influences within the framework of central government, and of a foreign policy backed by a single national army. No wonder that in preparation for this historians were active in proclaiming Italian unity and no wonder that since 1870 they have been writing Italian history in the way French or English historians write their history. Yet this approach does not in fact correspond with the realities. No history of Italy can be written on the French or British model which does not seriously distort the true picture. Thus, in a sentence, the basic problem of Italian history is that before the nineteenth century there-is no Italian history, at least not in the same sense as we talk of English or French history."
Passage to Modernity: Thinking Theoretically About the Experience of France, Italy and Spain
(2002) Sabetti, Filippo
"It is hard to imagine many countries so similar and dissimilar - at times amici/nemici all at once - as France, Italy and Spain. In addition to physical proximity and characteristics, they share common linguistic and cultural roots, have for the most part genuflected at the same altar, and assimilated, emulated and, at times, sought to avoid each another's customs, institutions and ways of life. The movement of ideas, people and goods between them, seldom severed for long, proceeded over the centuries through mutual consent, rivalry, imitation, alliance, dynastic or territorial aggrandizement and force. The network of relations became more fixed, but no less complex to understand, with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and their respective reverberations. Just consider."
Power and Incentives: From Behavioral to Institutional Analysis
(1987) Landry, Rejean; Sabetti, Filippo
"The growth of collective and public choice theory in more recent times has led to a shift from studies of power and influence to studies of the structure of decision-making arrangements that affect the way power and influence are mobilized and exercised. Without denying the potential for some to exercise power over others within particular constitutional arrangements, the growth of public choice theory has extended consideration to many contexts in which, to paraphrase Mary Parker Follett (1951: 188-189), some citizens and officials have power with, rather than power over, others. This shift in orientation has led to a renewed appreciation of another concept whose roots are deep in our intellectual tradition and whose importance in the design, creation and maintenance of organizational arrangements may well outrank that of power."
A Quiet Revolution: Rethinking the Foundations of Human Society
(2006) Sabetti, Filippo
"This paper is partly autobiographical, partly about the way Vincent Ostrom introduced many graduate students to the quest for understanding human affairs and partly a combination of the two in the form of a prologue of work being done in response to Vincent's enduring challenge to do theory rather than talk about theory. The first part of the paper offers a retrospective view of why the challenge posed by Vincent had revolutionary proportions as it prepared new generations of graduate students and led to the way for the political science that was yet to come. The rest of the paper suggests that the tradition of critical inquiry that Vincent continued was not just confined to Tocqueville in France but extended to Italy and Switzerland. The challenge is to recover similar traditions in other parts of Europe and the world."
Some Missing Elements in the Quebec Constitutional Debate
(no date) Sabetti, Filippo
"Whether the constitutional and political future of Quebec and the rest of Canada will take on radically different sovereignist turns, or fall back on the status quo, it will not be for a lack of talks, public symposia and reports of one kind or another. Yet for all these talks and activities, there has been little or no public debate informed by covenant theory, and its relation to the Canadian admixture of federal principles with a parliamentary, majoritarian system. This is the missing element in the constitutional debate. From both a sovereignist or status quo position, serious consideration of covenant theory and its relation to Canadian federal arrangements is not important. Indeed, the logic of each position requires not to address this issue. But any attempt at creating or recreating self-rule and shared rule among ourselves — in Quebec as in Canada — must of necessity address or be concerned with this question. This is what I wish to argue here."
Thinking Theoretically and Comparatively About History
(2002) Sabetti, Filippo
"The history of Sicily is no by means unique, but it constitutes a rich laboratory for thinking theoretically and comparatively about politics and a general puzzle in the social sciences: how individuals relate to one another so as to realize their productive potentials in an interdependent situation which characterizes public affairs. This is, after all, why some of us became interested in Sicilian development. If we cannot, for a variety of reasons, do our own archival research, we can turn to the work of historians who provide us with a data base as far back as the ancient world. To be sure, most historians do not use the theoretical distinctions or language of social science but in their own fashion they address critical issues in several topics dear to comparativists: the architecture of choice and constitutional political economy more generally; collective-action dilemmas in self-governance; law and the political basis of economic development; dynamics of contentious politics; positive and dark sides of social capital; conditions under which citizens give, refuse, and withdraw their consent to government; what makes government, and what leads people to work outside the law; and, of course, the political economy of crimes and punishments. In short, problematics and issues in Sicilian history lie, in the words of Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman, within the 'ambitious scope of inquiry' of comparative politics. For, 'no political phenomenon is foreign to it; no level of analysis is irrelevant, and no time period beyond its reach'."
Whose Law? Whose Order? of Crime and Punishment in Modern Times
(no date) Sabetti, Filippo
"The response by Italian national and local authorities to the organized crime problem has changed little in the past few years. Already by 1988 the megatrials were becoming a thing of the past and by 1991 they ended in mass acquittals. The Palermo and Catania communes have ceased to be —-as they appeared in 1988— vital points in the antimafia campaign and the people and coalitions that transformed those communes into antimafia outposts are in disarray. While the former DC mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, continues his antimafia campaign as a leader of the Network movement (Rete) and as Sicilian regional deputy, his former Catania counterpart, Republican Enzo Bianco, is struggling to shore up his moribund party in Sicily. Crime statistics are up. Even by the standards of Italy's crime-hardened South, 1990 and 1991 were exceptional blood-soaked years in Calabria, Sicily and Campania. In his traditional end of the year message, the president of the Republic expressed the hope that 1991 would the be year of justice."