In the s, one can say that the most advanced provinces of Italy already were expressing their preferences through free institutions or associations—agrarian associations, mutual aid societies, chambers of commerce, savings banks—while the southern ones were more inclined to make use of personal. The southern feudal nobility—along with elements of the urban professional classes who had acquired common land and Church properties expropriated by the newly-forged Italian state—used private violence, as well as their privileged access to state resources, to reinforce vertical relations of dominion and personal dependency and to discourage horizontal solidarity.
Leopoldo Franchetti, a civic-minded Tuscan landowner who in authored a remarkable analysis of social conditions in Sicily, concluded:. The landed classes ruled from on high the network of clientelistic structures at various levels and maintained contact for their own advantage with the supreme representative organs of the country…Every local notable in his jurisdiction of power was the head of a network of persons of the most diverse social conditions, who depended on him for their economic survival and social prestige and who furnished him legal support in terms of electoral suffrage and illegal support in the recourse to private violence in defense of his particular interests, in a rigorously hierarchical relationship of para-feudal dependence.
For wretchedly vulnerable peasants, recourse to patron-client ties was a sensible response to an atomized society. In the absence of horizontal solidarity, as exemplified by mutual aid societies, vertical dependence is a rational strategy for survival—even when those who are dependent recognize its drawbacks.
The dispossessed southern peasantry did not always endure their fate in silence. Violent protest movements, including chronic brigandage, flared like heat lightning across the Mezzogiorno landscape throughout the late nineteenth century.
However, these anarchic episodes unlike the contemporary urban and rural strike waves in the center and north of the country produced no permanent organization and left little residue of collective solidarity.
For it is this submission that provides the historical background to the acceptance of the arrogation of power by individuals, viz. The North after risorgimento rapidly returned to its rich network of horizontal ties established years earlier with a dense and diverse set of mutual aid societies, cooperatives as well as more informal practices such as the aiutarella mutual assistance at harvest. The two new parties of the socialists and catholics reflected and built on these traditions — whilst politically in competition at a socio-cultural level they drew on the same roots of collective being: high trust, mutual aid and solidarity and a rich horizontal network of ties and support.
But in the South, the centuries-old or even millenial-old vertical clientilism continued even under these new, more liberal conditions. Here, with no civic tradition to draw on, no civic tradition was created and politics remained a case of feudalistic vertical assistance and dependency.
Distrust between all parties remained high and all groups detested and distrusted the state. Day to day culture was a case of amoral familism of each for his own, of brutal competition between impoverished peasants fighting for scraps of work and food on the feudal latifundia. It would be interested to study the trust level of, say, peasants from Italy when they migrated northwards. The new institutions of the unified nation-state, far from homogenizing traditional patterns of politics, were themselves pulled ineluctably into conformity with those contrasting traditions, just as the regional governments after would be remolded by these same social and cultural contexts.
The available statistical evidence confirms the stark differences from region to region in associationism and collective solidarity a century ago. By , for example, Piedmont had more than seven times as many mutual aid societies as Puglia, in proportion to population. By , cooperative membership per capita was eighteen times greater in Emilia-Romagna than in Molise.
These regional concentrations depended in turn on the pre-existing traditions of collaboration and sociability. Even a cursory comparison of Figure 5. A more convenient way of visualizing this continuity is provided in Figure 5.
Despite the massive waves of migration, economic change, and social upheaval that have swept along the peninsula in the intervening decades, contemporary civic norms and practices recapitulate regional traditions that were well established long ago.
The pattern is stark: One could have predicted the success or failure of regional government in Italy in the s with extraordinary accuracy from patterns of civic engagement nearly a century earlier.
Arrow b the effect of economics on civics is nonexistent, while arrow c the effect of civics on economics is strong—stronger even than arrow d. Moreover, arrow a civic continuity is very strong, while arrow d socioeconomic continuity is generally weak. Insofar as we can judge from this simple analysis, the contemporary correlation between civics and economics reflects primarily the impact of civics on economics, not the reverse. Despite this whirl of change, however, the regions characterized by civic involvement in the late twentieth century are almost precisely the same regions where cooperatives and cultural associations and mutual aid societies were most abundant in the nineteenth century, and where neighborhood associations and religious confraternities and guilds had contributed to the flourishing communal republics of the twelfth century.
And although those civic regions were not especially advanced economically a century ago, they have steadily outpaced the less civic regions both in economic performance and at least since the advent of regional government in quality of government. The astonishing tensile strength of civic traditions testifies to the power of the past. But why is the past so powerful? What virtuous circles in the North have preserved these traditions of civic engagement through centuries of radical social, economic, and political change?
What vicious circles in the South have reproduced perennial exploitation and dependence? To address such questions we must think not merely in terms of cause and effect, but in terms of social equilibria. To that task we turn in the next chapter.
The more two people display trust towards one another, the greater their mutual confidence. Deep distrust is very difficult to invalidate through experience, for either it prevents people from engaging in the appropriate kind of social experiment or, worse, it leads to behaviour which bolsters the validity of distrust itself…Once distrust has set in it soon becomes impossible to know if it was ever in fact justified, for it has the capacity to be self-fulfilling.
Other forms of social capital, too, such as social norms and networks, increase with use and diminish with disuse. For all these reasons, we should expect the creation and destruction of social capital to be marked by virtuous and vicious circles. One special feature of social capital, like trust, norms, and networks, is that it is ordinarily a public good, unlike conventional capital, which is ordinarily a private good.
For example, my reputation for trustworthiness benefits you as well as me, since it enables us both to engage in mutually rewarding cooperation. But I discount the benefits to you of my being trustworthy or the costs to you of my being untrustworthy and thus I underinvest in trust formation.
This means that social capital, unlike other forms of capital, must often be produced as a by-product of other social activities. Trust is an essential component of social capital. It can be plausibly argued that much of the economic backwardness in the world can be explained by the lack of mutual confidence.
The fact that vertical networks are less helpful than horizontal networks in solving dilemmas of collective action may be one reason why capitalism turned out to be more efficient than feudalism in the eighteenth century, and why democracy has proven more effective than autocracy in the twentieth century. This is an absolutely crucial point if it is the case, as I think, that solving collective action problems is the great engine of progress.
Of course, structure and culture co-evolve. Networks of civic engagement, like the neighborhood associations, choral societies, cooperatives, sports clubs, mass-based parties, and the like examined in Chapters 4 and 5, represent intense horizontal interaction.
Networks of civic engagement are an essential form of social capital: The denser such networks in a community, the more likely that its citizens will be able to cooperate for mutual benefit. Why, exactly, do networks of civic engagement have this powerfully beneficial side-effect? If horizontal networks of civic engagement help participants solve dilemmas of collective action, then the more horizontally structured an organization, the more it should foster institutional success in the broader community.
Membership in horizontally ordered groups like sports clubs, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, cultural associations, and voluntary unions should be positively associated with good government. Since the organizational realities of political parties vary from party to party and region to region vertical in some places, horizontal in others , we should expect party membership as such to be unrelated to good government.
Membership rates in hierarchically ordered organizations like the Mafia or the institutional Catholic Church should be negatively associated with good government; in Italy, at least, the most devout churchgoers are the least civic-minded.
All these expectations are consistent with the evidence of this study, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5. Good government in Italy is a by-product of singing groups and soccer clubs, not prayer. Historical turning points thus can have extremely long-lived consequences. In all societies, to summarize our argument so far, dilemmas of collective action hamper attempts to cooperate for mutual benefit, whether in politics or in economics.
Third-party enforcement is an inadequate solution to this problem. Voluntary cooperation like rotating credit associations depends on social capital. Norms of generalized reciprocity and networks of civic engagement encourage social trust and cooperation because they reduce incentives to defect, reduce uncertainty, and provide models for future cooperation.
Trust itself is an emergent property of the social system, as much as a personal attribute. Individuals are able to be trusting and not merely gullible because of the social norms and networks within which their actions are embedded. Stocks of social capital, such as trust, norms, and networks, tend to be self-reinforcing and cumulative. Virtuous circles result in social equilibria with high levels of cooperation, trust, reciprocity, civic engagement, and collective well-being. These traits define the civic community.
Conversely, the absence of these traits in the un civic community is also selfreinforcing. Defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a suffocating miasma of vicious circles.
This argument suggests that there may be at least two broad equilibria toward which all societies that face problems of collective action that is, all societies tend to evolve and which, once attained, tend to be self-reinforcing.
Once trapped in this situation, no matter how exploitative and backward, it is irrational for any individual to seek a more collaborative alternative, except perhaps within the immediate family. Actors in this social equilibrium may well realize that they are worse off than they would be in a more cooperative equilibrium, but getting to that happier equilibrium is beyond the power of any individual. In this setting, we should expect the Hobbesian, hierarchical solution to dilemmas of collective action—coercion, exploitation, and dependence—to predominate.
This oppressive state of affairs is clearly inferior to a cooperative outcome, for it dooms the society to self-perpetuating backwardness. This Hobbesian outcome has at least the virtue that it is attainable by individuals who are unable to trust their neighbors.
Minimal security, no matter how exploitative and inefficient, is not a contemptible objective for the powerless. The difficulty of solving dilemmas of collective action in this Hobbesian equilibrium means that society is worse off than in a cooperative outcome. This shortfall is probably even greater in a complex industrial or postindustrial context, where impersonal cooperation is essential, than a simple agricultural society.
This may help explain why the gap between the civic North and the uncivic South has widened over the last century. Force and family provide a primitive substitute for the civic community. This equilibrium has been the tragic fate of southern Italy for a millennium. Given an adequate stock of social capital, however, a happier equilibrium is also attainable. Once in either of these two settings, rational actors have an incentive to act consistently with its rules. History determines which of these two stable outcomes characterizes any given society.
One crucial implication of Making Democracy Work is that feeble and corrupt government, operating against the background of a weak and uncivic society, tends not to foster the creation of wealth, but rather to renew poverty. Overmighty government may stifle economic initiative. But enfeebled government and unrepresentative government kills it, or diverts it into corruption and criminality.
This may not, perhaps, be a universal truth; but it is directly relevant to the prospects of democracy in the United States today. Due to global supply chain issues, book orders are currently taking days or longer to be delivered. Please order early for the holidays or consider shopping at your local bookstore.
Putnam on social capital — democratic or civic perspective. Home Social Capital Literature Putnam on social capital — democratic or civic perspective. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks. About The Author. Tristan Claridge Tristan Claridge has a passion for technology, innovation and teaching. He is an academic and entrepreneur, and he uses his cross-discipline knowledge and experience to solve problems and identify opportunities.
He has bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has qualifications in environmental science, social theory, teaching and research, and business management. Tristan is dedicated to the application of social capital theory to organisations. His diverse experience in teaching, research, and business has given him a unique perspective on organisational social capital and the potential improvements that can be achieved in any organisation.
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