Amoral Immobilism: Or, What I Learned From a Half-Year Sabbatical in Rome and Naples?

As Italy navigates a period of rising nationalism and the influence of a far-right government, a mid-20th-century concept has regained attention. Edward Banfield’s notion of “amoral familism”—a social pattern characterized by strong familial loyalty alongside limited trust in wider society—was originally used to interpret the persistent underdevelopment of a rural ...