ABSTRACT
To move from Lerner to Banfield 1 is to move considerably closer to the field of the empirical investigation to be presented here. Although Banfield does not deal with data from Sicily he gets the empirical stimulus for his thinking about development almost from the neighbour-at least in a global perspective. The 'backward society' the book deals with is a village---called Montegrano, located in the province of Potenza in southern Italy and observed during a stay in 1954-1955. It is on the mainland, but economic conditions are not too different from the Sicilian villages in our study-it is the same arid Mezzogiorno. This does not mean that his findings have immediate empirical tenability outside that village itself: if anything should be the moral of his study (and of ours) it is precisely the danger of believing that there is no significant variation between villages even when economic conditions look similar to the outsider, and perhaps also to the insider. As a matter of fact, we are not even very concerned about whether the findings are tenable inside that particular village: it is the basic variable, and its use in developing a theory is our concern.
