John A. Agnew - Place and Politics in Modern Italy

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Volume 1

PLACE AND POLITICS

The Geographical Mediation of State and Society

JOHN A. AGNEW

First published in 1987

This edition first published in 2015
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1987 John A. Agnew

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ISBN: 978-1-138-80830-0 (Set)
eISBN: 978-1-315-74725-5 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-79865-6 (Volume 1)
eISBN: 978-1-315-75658-5 (Volume 1)

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PLACE AND POLITICS

The Geographical Mediation of State and Society

JOHN A. AGNEW

John A. Agnew, 1987
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No
reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.

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All politics is local

Thomas P. Tip ONeill

Speaker, US House of Representatives (1984)

We speak a different language and here
our tongue is incomprehensible

Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1947)

Signs and the signs of signs are used
only when we are lacking things

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1983)

Pistoia and Lucca are two cities in central Italy that are not very far apart, about forty-three kilometers, but have completely different political profiles. Pistoia is and has been for many years a stronghold of the Italian Communist party, Lucca is a Christian Democratic city in a region in which the party of that name is a minority one. Outwardly the two cities are very much alike for example, they have similar demographic and social characteristics. But their histories as places have been quite different. In the case of Pistoia the city has long been controlled from outside, principally from Florence, and the surrounding countryside is characterized by an intense anti-clericalism that survives from the time when the Church was the major local landowner. In the case of Lucca, the city was the seat of a long independent city-republic that persisted until the late eighteenth century and a countryside in which peasant proprietorship was long established. Political life in these two cities, therefore, can only be understood by reference to their development as places. The central theme of this book is that this is equally the case elsewhere.

But a major contention of modern social science is that time conquers space or that, as history proceeds, differences between places become less and less relevant to social life and hence should have less and less of a role in social theory. This book disputes this contention in the context of one important aspect of social life: political behavior.

The frontispiece quotations capture metaphorically the three major contentions of the book: first, that political activity is structured and realized through place-specific social processes (ONeill); secondly, that social science in general and political sociology in particular have not paid sufficient attention to this (Levi); preferring instead, thirdly, to organize explanations of political activity entirely through the inferred political dispositions of social categories (or individuals as members of them) rather than the causes of political activities in places (Eco). To the extent that a geographical concept of place has survived in recent social science, it is in terms of the geographical impacts of social processes operating through social categories. Places in themselves are rarely seen as constitutive of social behavior.

Place is a complex word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives over three and a half pages to it. Symbolic of its devaluation as a geographical term meaning a portion of space in which people dwell together or locality, place is now quite often a temporal or social-categorical term meaning rank in a list (in the first place), temporal ordering (took place), or position in a social order. In social science, the emphasis that a geographical concept of place puts on social context or milieu has been largely eschewed in favor of an emphasis on either social categories (classes, status groups) defined by compositional analysis of national populations or the placeless individual. Ironically, therefore, place has sometimes appeared in social science but as a social-categorical rather than a geographical concept!

The fundamental question is how to keep a focus on the individuality of places while acknowledging the real interdependence of places to which social-categorical analysis has attempted to respond. The issue is important. It is often viewed in terms of the relation between the unique and the general. Marx, obviously someone who had no aversion to the general, nevertheless captured the issue when he wrote in a letter in 1877:

Events strikingly similar, but occurring in a different historical milieu, lead to completely dissimilar results. By studying each of these evolutions separately and then comparing them, it is easy to find the key to the understanding of this phenomenon; but it is never possible to arrive at this understanding by using the