Banfield's Moral Basis of a Backward Society

Late in life when he was already well-known (if not always well  loved), Ed Banfield offered a credo:

A political system is an accident. It is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstance. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident—the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society, for all of the institutions of the society, and thus its entire character and that of the human types formed within it, depend ultimately upon the government and the political order.

Link.   Or more pithily (same source): “I am a vintage Burkean,   I am convinced that “society exists on the basis of habits and beliefs.” 

 It was not always so.   Banfield began his life as a bureaucrat and long persisted in his commitment to the model of rational planning.   His Damascene moment was his the nine months (in 1954-5) he spent with his family in "Montegrano," a peasant village under the arch of the boot of Italy.  That was the inquiry that led to perhaps his most important and enduring work, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958) another of those short books I will not throw away.  

At the beginning   of his account, Banfield (always a superb analyst) itemizes six commonly held explanations for the kind of poverty he found in the village:

1.  Most people in Montegrano are desperately poor. ...

2.  The peasant is as ignorant as his donkey and the artisan hardley less so. ...

3.  Political behavior reflects class interests and antagonisms. ...

4.  Workers who have a plot of land, however small, want to maintain the status quo. ...

5.  Centuries of oppression have left thepeasant with a pathological distrust of the state and all authority. ... 

6.  The southern Italian is a despairing fatalist.

"There is an element of truth in each of the theories," Banfield wrote, "but none of them is fully consistent with the facts."  Instead, proposed that "the Montegrenesi act as if they were following this rule:

Maximize the material short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all otheers will do likewise."

Banfield coined a name for his hypothesis: "amoral familiasm."  He conceded from the start that the name was inexact: an "amoral familist" might be deeply moral in his commitment to his family, but with little or none to the larger community.  Still, he offered seventeen (!!) implications, of which a sampling may capture the flavor:

9.  In a society of amoral familists, the claim of any person or institution to be inspired by zeal for public rather than privae advantage will be regarded as a fraud. ...

15.  In a society of amoral familists it will be assumed that whatever group is in power is self-serving and corrupt. ...

 Banfield ends with a short chapter of suggestions for reform, but it's a damp squib: as a habitual skeptic, he is not one well armed to  take us up to the mountaintop and show us the broad vistas.  It prefigures the man who would later describe political success as a "lucky accident."   But it also discloses a man of great compassion who can see what is in front of his eyes without blinking.

Reality bitchslap:  I may have thought this book was a keeper, but in my preparation of this timeless commentary, it pretty much fell apart.

Fun Fact:  Evidently  Banfield told his friends that the person he got his ideas from at Chicago was--Frank Knight.