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By Root 557 0

laws-in exchange for their overall structural compliance. The result was a legal tangle that combined the rhetoric of civic disinterestedness with practices reflecting relations of patronage and favor peddling. This was a key aspect of the political opportunism known as trasformismo-here, an idiom of adapting abstract and generic laws to the exigencies of local power.' It left a lasting heritage even at a time when local authorities gradually began, after the end of World War II, to wield more power in the management of citizens' everyday concerns; the idea that laws should be constructed so as to incorporate the calculation of benefits and favors dies hard and meshes perfectly with the popular assumptionan assumption grounded on the everyday understanding of such religious instruments as confession and penitence-that all social action entails some sort of calculus of future benefits and exonerations.4

The state, many Romans conclude, makes its own calculations. These may include a measure of expendability, applied as much to people as to principles. A retired police officer accused the state authorities of indifference to the economic plight of those who enforced the laws at some danger to their personal safety. The state, he suggested, did not really care-beyond a symbolic gesture of mourning-when officers were killed in the line of duty; it calculatingly treated them, not as human beings with families, but as replaceable cogs in an official machine. Such assertions represent a widespread perception; moreover, the state's alleged indifference provides the ethical alibi-and, in a moral economy of small reciprocities, the model-for acts of callous and self-interested disregard for others.

This disgruntled ex-policeman's account, however partial, shows that law enforcement is as compromised as the laws themselves. Neither can be reduced to a set of abstract rules or norms. Frequent scandals engulf the judiciary, the various police entities, and the banking world. Statutes of limitation, as well as an overworked judiciary and a widespread assumption that judges and advocates have everything to gain by procrastinating indefinitely, render the management of criminal accountability an arena for tactical creativity. Most citizens reason that it is better simply to accept the realities of the situation and to try to draw the maximum benefit from these.

The apparent illogic of the legal situation therefore begins to make better sense when we move away from analyses based on idealist models and formal projections, and consider instead the calculations of lawmakers, bureaucrats, and citizens as occurring in a shared social context. We must remember that those who enact new laws, as well as those responsible for their enforcement, are themselves members of the society over which they exercise these forms of authority. Rather than reading the laws as model texts and their infringement as instances of failures in practice, which prejudges the situation in terms of decontextualized concepts such as efficiency and democracy, I prefer to examine their content for evidence of what we can call "structural collusion": the mutual engagement of legislators and citizens in pragmatic compromises that allow life to go on-not always satisfactorily, to be sure, but at least comprehensibly. In this perspective, even the complaints themselves form an important part of the larger social universe of which the laws themselves are only one component.

There is some evidence, moreover, that legislators act to anticipate possible damage to their own interests in the way they write the laws. In this regard, they act just like other citizens, who calculate probable fines and other punishments in the total cost of their illegal building or restoration, their business practices, or their parking violations. As a local joke has it, a government official visited a prison, and kept telling his secretary to make a note that the kitchens needed improving, showers should be installed, and so on-until the secretary got the point that he was preparing for the moment