Post-feudal and post-socialist transitions create identical vacuums in property enforcement

Evidence

Mutatis mutandis, the Russia of this anecdote bears a striking resemblance to nineteenth-century Sicily. This similarity is no accident. From an analytical point of view, feudalism and socialism share certain characteristics. In both types of societies very few people are entitled to own private property, and those who do also hold the monopoly on the use of force. When these societies come to an end, the results with respect to property are identical: there is a dramatic increase in the number of property owners and of transactions involving individuals with property rights. In addition, the monopoly on the use of force is not transferred to the new class of property owners. The consequence is a phenomenal increase in the fear of losing property and of being cheated and, correspondingly, in the demand for trust: trust in other people and trust in whoever has the power to enforce property rights. As we know, it does not automatically follow that this demand will be promptly met by the state, especially one whose legislation and bureaucracy are inextricably tied to the previous regime. A few years after the breakup of the Soviet Union there was still no clear property rights legislation or administrative or financial codes of practice, let alone were there authorities equipped to enforce them. Adjustment takes time. Meanwhile, opportunities for private suppliers have soared. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 667

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Gambetta’s own account of nineteenth-century Sicily as his core thesis; also implicitly connects to the reader’s framing of state failure → private enforcer demand, the exact causal chain the Mafia fills. — connects to: Pacted transitions preserve predecessor regimes’ legal and economic frameworks — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1607
• SEED: The post-Soviet private-protection vacuum as a natural experiment replicating Sicilian conditions — a comparative-law/security-studies essay tracing the same Gambetta mechanism in the 1990s Russian context.