| supporters. These complications are not known, or at least not understood, by everyone. But government deputies and senators make no attempt to conceal their belief in the principle of personal intervention. Indeed, they boast about their power to influence decisions of government, which one would have thought at least in theory should be impersonal and technical. Before the election, public notices on walls and in newspapers told all and sundry that certain grants for sewers, roads and markets for their towns had been obtained from the Casa per il Mezzogiorno per l’ interessamento of the Honourable So and So. No one seemed to think this in the least strange or immoral; in the Italian view, it is not dishonest to use one's office to win favours for one's political clients. If the rules of technical impartiality are publicly flouted at this level, it is not surprising that people accept personal morality at lower levels. The extension of a system of personal morality throughout the whole apparatus of a government, and its consequent conversion to intrigue, political horse dealing, and a patron client system based on the most powerful, —or in many cases the only,—political party is, among countries struggling with problems of development, in no way exceptional. What is exceptional in Italy is rather, the co-existence of these conditions with a highly developed industrial economy and a stable system of genuinely free elections. But though the reasons for its existence may be special to Italy, the situation is not. So far I have compromised between two modes of presenting my argument. On the one hand I have talked in terms of general principles, as though setting up a model which should hold good for all relevant situations. Of course, as always, these principles are oversimplified, and stated in concepts insufficiently precise; all the same they have a certain analytical and explanatory power. On the other hand, I have constantly turned to Italy for my examples, because the thoughts here recorded were inspired by living for some months in the Italian south. Italy is in many ways a special case. Underdevelopment is a relative concept, and if the term can be applied at all to South Italy, it is certainly in a very different sense to that in which the newly independent States of Asia and Africa are underdeveloped. Equally, of course, these underdeveloped countries differ among themselves in vast degrees and important particulars. In spite of this, my general argument stands. Small scale closed societies, whether they were until yesterday independent tribes, or whether they have for centuries been settled rural communities linked administratively and politically to a State, operate a system of personal relations in which rights and duties are |
| seen as specific to specific people in specific relationships. Certainly, the notions of justice and impartiality exist in such communities, but they have relatively little application, and are applied only in cases where the people involved are of the same social standing, and where the social relationships involved are of the same order. No one expects one to treat a stranger as one would treat a member of the community, or to treat a property owner and university graduate as one would treat an illiterate landless labourer. People living in this kind of society are not interested in the aims of large scale government organisation, even if they are capable of understanding them, and inevitably positions of bureaucratic standing are seen as positions of power, for dispensing privileges and favours, or protection. Normally, the bureaucrats themselves will be locally recruited, belong to the local network and share the local morality. Thus notions of impartiality and conscientious efficiency simply do not form a part of either the public's or the officials' expectations of bureaucratic conduct. Throughout the world, almost all governments are in haste to impose a technically open, economically thriving form of society on their countries. In order to do this, they are forced to vastly expand their bureaucracies, manning them with people often inadequately trained who belong to relatively stable closed communities, and to use these bureaucracies for the distribution of government (often foreign) resources on a vast scale. It is impossible for the new bureaucrats not to respond to the built-in pressures of their own society, which force them to use their new powers and privileges for the benefit of kin, friends, clients and patrons. Once people accustom themselves to inefficiency and the twisting and ignoring of the formal rules implied in whole scale favouritism, other and more seriously dishonest forms of corruption become easier, indeed, to some extent inevitable also. Add to this, struggles for power and political manoeuvering at government level, and a fairly high general degree of corruption follows automatically. But this is not the result of personal dishonesty. It is the direct result of setting certain kinds of social system tasks which it cannot perform. In the extreme case a society which consists only of small scale, technically simple, socially undifferentiated, non-literate groups operating a subsistent economy can obviously not even begin to operate a development programme. We can state a rough rule, that the less sophisticated the society on the one hand, and the more complex technically and administratively the programme on the other, the greater will be the corruption, the greater the waste and inefficiency and the less the results for the resources consumed. If this generalisation is even partly true, then we face an enormous practical problem,—a problem for applied social science,—the solution of which is prior to the solution of more specific problems such as methods of community development, agricultural expansion, public health and so forth. It would be absurd to argue that planners and economists must simply make allowances for |
| the fact that in some countries things take much longer and cost much more than in others. If we increase the resources available for a given objective above what seems objectively necessary, the surplus will only disappear the more quickly, adding to the corruption and producing no more results than before. What then are we to do? What kinds of social action, if any, is likely to promote impartiality in administration at the cost of personal morality? This is a vast topic. Two obvious sources of sanctions are available. The first is control from above, partly by the imposition of sensible rules and the devising of self- correcting procedures, partly by rigorous and consistent pressure from individuals holding high office. The second, even more difficult to influence by deliberate policy, is public opinion, including the expectations the bureaucrats themselves have of each other. But, policy apart, it is possible to argue that technical advance and competition, taken together, by increasing the pressure for efficiency and reliability in junior employees, automatically operate over time to reduce the part played by personal morality, and even to swing public opinion towards a demand for public impartiality. It is plausible to argue that the relative impartiality of most State bureaucracies in western countries is a consequence of, among other things, the technical and administrative sophistication of these societies. For example, Olivetti and Italsider must compete with European rivals, and they therefore choose reliable and competent employees. An incompetent assignee of the Land Reform Board may succeed by intrigue in retaining his plot, but no one will retain a man on a production line if he is holding up production. I am not of course saying that technical complexity and corruption cannot exist side by side. Often indeed the evasion of rules may increase efficiency. But I do suggest an overall connection between technical advance under competitive pressure and an increase in impartiality. I would, for example, argue that the need to compete in European markets will impose on the Land Reform Board efficient procedures for grading, packing, transport and marketing, and that this in turn will reduce the importance of specific personal ties. But neither the manipulation of rules, nor a policy of public education anal persuasion nor the growth of an industrial and technical economy seem likely rapidly to change a system so well entrenched, and so self-reproducing. Would it not be extremely interesting, and conceivably of practical use, to analyse structurally the evolution in the technically advanced countries of more or less impartial and efficient administrations ? Once all systems worked on personal morality. The problem is not why corruption exists; it is a perfectly reasonable institution and precisely what one would expect. The problem is why on earth there are some relatively non-corrupt systems. |
| NOTES 1. Emigration from 1890 on, especially to the U.S.A., had considerable social consequences, but not enough to invalidate my general description (cf. Lopreato, 1961). 2. Ann Stat. Ital., 1961, p. 352, List fifty-five. 3. Mauss, 1954. 4. Sometimes for a percentage of the benefit obtained. REFERENCES Barnes, A. J., “ Law as politically active: an anthropological view ”, in Studies in the Sociology of Law, 1961. Colson, E., The Mahak Indians, 1953. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937. Gluckman, Max, The Judicial Process among the Lozi, 1955; Custom and Conflict in Africa, 195?. Kenny, Michael, A Spanish Tapestry, 1961. Lopreato, Joseph, “ Social stratification and mobility in a South Italian Town ”, American Sociological Review, vol. XXVI (4), August 1961. Mauss, Marcel, Essai sur be Don, 1925 (translated by Cunnison as The Gift, 1954). Middleton, J. and Winter, E. H., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 1963. Ottieri, O., Donnaruma all' asalto, 1959 (translated as The Men at the Gate, 1962). Peristiany, John, The Kipsigis, 1947. |