Abstract
This chapter examines the historical forces that have turned clientelism into a definite feature of Greek social networks of power. It explores the ways pre-modern social structures were ‘modernized’ in the framework of an imported, pre-fabricated model of a centralized state, and how clientelism became an organic part of the Greek polity. In this context, a comparison of Greece with Ireland and the US clientelistic patterns clarifies the difference between ‘limited clientelism’ and ‘generalized clientelism’ and links the latter with out-worldly religious patterns which downplay individual initiative and consider social order to be fixed and eternal. Accordingly, the cultural pragmatics, the internalized code orientations, and the institutional ground rules of Greek generalized clientelism are identified and modeled.
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Notes
- 1.
Also John O’Brien, personal communication.
- 2.
Interestingly enough, this combination of detrimental factors is not fixed and absolute, but instead, the absence of one factor could be neutralized by the presence of another. Thus, democracy-before-bureaucracy, as is the American case, was neutralized by widespread economic development; local interests, as in the case of Ireland, are kept at bay by an autonomous bureaucracy. Thus, a society could arrive to meritocracy, following various organizational paths.
- 3.
All of the examples of clientelism derive from rural Greece. Unfortunately, no anthropological or ethnographic studies on urban clientelism exist to my knowledge.
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Marangudakis, M. (2019). Clientelistic Social Structures and Cultural Orientations. In: The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13589-8_3
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