Edward banfield on italian culture and customs article

Universities in America and Britain are full of Italian academics too ambitious to sit around for decades to get tenure in Italy. Brussels is another escape hatch: Italy is a great provider of dedicated Eurocrats. Examples of such practices can be found in every country, but Italy is different for two reasons: raccomandazioni are ubiquitous and rarely questioned.

1 The most important direct attack on Banfield is a recent article by Sydel Silverman ().

The thesis was intended as an analysis of a single village but has often been read as a condemnation of an entire nation. Read more. More than 60 years after publication, the idea of amoral familism remains in intellectual currency. That is a rare thing in the social sciences. Kimberly Hendrickson wrote this article for a special issue of Publius devoted to Conservative views on federalism.

Before Edward C. Banfield left the University of Chicago for Harvard University, he was feted. The famed political philosopher, Leo Strauss, who thought well of Banfield, delivered these remarks. It is an easy reading book that nearly anyone can read and enjoy. Dry, academic treatise it most certainly is not. The most characteristic feature of modern society, perhaps, is the great and increasing role of formal organizations of all kinds.

This article analyses literary sources that have influenced interpretations of the Italian collective identity, focusing on the conceptual pairing ‘familism-particularism’.

Primitive societies were and are held together chiefly by the nonlogical bounds of custom and tradition; in modern society the relations of individuals are to a large extent consciously and deliberately organized by the use of intelligence, and the rules of logic. This attempt to organize society along rational lines is a stupendous experiment.

Nothing in history promises that it will succeed.