WHEN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE amoral familism of the Italian south, Edward Banfield drew an explicit contrast with the vibrant civic culture of a small Midwestern American town in the 1950s, a social group with which he was intimately familiar. Banfield’s observations echo in a remarkable way those of Alexis de Tocqueville. We have already had a chance to consult Tocqueville’s study of the civic life in America. But Tocqueville also traveled in Naples and Sicily as a young man, before he went to America, and in the long essay he wrote describing the trip he remarked on the culture of distrust
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