ABSTRACT
By shifting the focus from immobilism and backwardness to "change without growth" or "difficult modernization," the traditional parameters of what is southern come into new perspective. The phrase probably works better as a rhetorical flourish than as an analytical formula, because the terms are slippery and have a tendency to become interchangeable; but it seeks to capture the peculiarities of modernization in the South. The ties of interdependence between the southern bourgeoisie and the State went far beyond material benefit, and the role of the southern intellectuals in formulating the theory of the State and in developing Italian nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries needs to be reconsidered in this light. The persistence and the terrible increase in the power and geography of the mafia in recent decades not only constitutes a fundamental challenge to any attempt to equate economic modernization with institutional change, but has also made the mafia the subject of a serious historical analysis.
