ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the reality of the Italian interventionist state up to the mid-1980s. The state in every developed society participates in and controls civil society in a way which would have been unthinkable a hundred or even fifty years ago. Clientelism process, usually called trasformismo, consisted essentially in the winning over of the opposition in return for a combination of ideological and opportunistic benefits. The latter were in practice clientelistic; trasformismo was used not only to neutralise differences within the liberal ruling elite, but also as a form of co-option of parts of the non-liberal opposition. The combination of clientelistic action at home with a ‘statesmanlike’ or ‘principled’ stance in Rome was nothing new in Calabria; ‘Vincenzo Sprovieri (1823–95), member for Acri, was an enlightened exponent of the historic left at the national level but a strenuous defender of the takeover of the common land as mayor’.
