The Lessons of Michael Corleone

What we learn about mobster morality from the first two Godfather films (especially when paired with a little Plato)

Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part 2. (Screen grab taken from YouTube.)

Happy Passover and Easter to readers who celebrate. It’s going be a busy weekend for me, so I’ll be planning for two posts next week, with the first appearing on Tuesday or Wednesday. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the following essay about a pair of classic American movies. Because I go on at such length below, there’s no “Great Song Suggestion” today. I’ve therefore placed the paywall about 2/3 through the essay, which is frustrating for me—because I’d love you all to read the whole thing! I hope you’ll consider converting to a paid subscription. See you next week.

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In my post on Monday of this week, I described the Republican Party as having been infected by “mobster morality,” which I summarized as follows: “helping friends, harming enemies, and denying any broader commonality or shared solidarity underlying either or both.”

I was inspired to make this claim by watching The Godfather and The Godfather, Part 2 for the first time with my teenage daughter over the past week or so. Those films are many things, including two of the greatest American movies ever made. That is widely acknowledged. Less broadly recognized is the extent to which they explore with uncommon depth the distinctive strengths and ultimately fatal instability of mobster morality. This insight can be gleaned from the movies themselves, and in particular from one decisive scene in the second film. But it can be discerned with special clarity when the movies are interpreted in light of the arguments that unfold in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic.   

Friends and Enemies

Vito Corleone’s life is a moving tribute to mobster morality at its most admirable. In the very first scene of the first film, Vito is listening to a plea for justice from an undertaker named Amerigo Bonasera, who begins by telling Vito, and us, that he believes in America—the broader community of his adopted homeland. Yet his allegiance to the country has been undermined by the way the courts have responded to a vicious and violent attack by two young men on his once-beautiful daughter. The perpetrators who inflicted suffering and left her disfigured were found guilty in court but given a suspended sentence by the judge. Bonasera has come to Vito asking for vengeance in the form of a double murder.

In response, Vito says (or implies) several things. First, that murder wouldn’t be justice because Bonasera’s daughter wasn’t killed in the attack. Second, that Bonasera was foolish to place greater faith in the country’s supposedly dispassionate system of public justice (police and courts of law) than in friendship with and respect shown to a powerful private protector like Vito himself. “If you’d come to me in friendship, then the scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day,” Vito says. “And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then they would become my enemies. And then they would fear you.”

That, for Vito, is the proper order of society: enemies fearing harm, loyalty and respect shown by and to friends, with family given absolute protection as the closest of all possible “friends.” Vito embodies these norms in the most honorable way possible—with justice and moderation. In the prequel sections of Part 2, we learn that as a child in Sicily, Vito’s father, mother, and brother were murdered by the local mafia chieftain. Years later, as a rising underworld figure in the United States, Vito returns to his hometown to exact a vendetta against the mafioso, now an old man. The only other murder Vito commits in his early rise targets Don Fanucci, a gangster in his Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood who preys on and threatens Vito (and through him his family) and his friends.

After the latter killing, Vito becomes a “good don” who, unlike his predecessor, gains in stature by doing good deeds for friends and cultivating a reputation as someone who lashes out fiercely and fearlessly against their common enemies. As a result, Vito and his family thrive. They’re continuing to thrive decades later in the early portion of the first film—right up until Vito is targeted in an assassination attempt for refusing to do business with a man looking for a partner in drug trafficking.

Up and Down from Tribalism

Vito’s mafia ethic receives a classic defense in the opening book of Plato’s Republic by the character of Polemarchus, who famously defines justice as helping friends and harming enemies.¹ That formulation would be repeated down through the centuries, receiving a powerful modern-day revival in the work of legal theorist Carl Schmitt. The view has also been sharply criticized by St. Augustine and many others, though few have surpassed the subtlety and depth of the questions and objections raised by Socrates in the Republic itself.

I won’t plunge into those depths here. I merely want to suggest the general shape of the discussion in the dialogue. Socrates treats Polemarchus’s definition of justice with considerable respect, though he also prompts Polemarchus to make various adjustments to his view. Isn’t it the case that our friends sometimes do bad things, even if only by mistake? And also that sometimes good people can be found among our enemies? Reflection on questions like these lead Polemarchus to change his view: Instead of helping all friends and harming all enemies, justice must be helping those friends who are truly good and harming no one.

But this revision provokes the character of Thrasymachus, a sophist, to lash out in anger at Socrates, whom he threatens with violence. Instead of broadening the definition of justice, he and Polemarchus should be moving in the opposite direction, Thrasymachus insists, to acknowledge that in reality no group is owed allegiance—not Polemarchus’ original “friends,” and not the revised notion of “friends who are truly good.” Rather, it’s each of us against the world, with no higher justice at all.

“Justice” is therefore helping oneself and harming anyone who stands in the way of that self-aggrandizement. Everyone is a potential enemy. I should help and harm others precisely to the extent to which doing so furthers my own advantage. If I’m strong and clever enough to win the most power, I’ll also win the capacity to tell the stories that transform this outcome into something people recognize as just. Might makes right, in other words, which means that what people call justice is whatever the strongest among us do and then justify with their power.

Volumes could be (and have been) written on these incredibly rich and radical pages of Plato. But for our purposes, what matters is the relatively simple point that the tribalism of mobster morality makes it inherently unstable, forever on the verge of expansion or contraction. From one angle, it can be pushed easily toward the embrace of a broader and nobler community of those who are truly righteous; from another angle, it can easily collapse into selfish and self-aggrandizing individualism.

It is precisely this tension that defines the central saga of The Godfather and The Godfather, Part 2—the chilling story of Vito Corleone’s son Michael.

Michael’s Rise and Fall

When we first meet Michael during the first movie’s long opening sequence set at his sister Connie’s wedding to Carlo Rizzi, he makes very clear to his girlfriend Kay Adams that he stands apart from “the family business.” His father and his henchmen threaten people with violence and death, but he wants nothing to do with that. Instead of helping friends and harming enemies, Michael has attended college and fought heroically in World War II. He aspires to finer and more expansive goods than tribalism.

The story of the first film is to a large extent an account of how, in the wake of a nearly successful attempt on his father’s life, Michael reverses course, not only accepting an important role in the family as a stealth assassin, but (after the brutal murder of his eldest brother Sonny) its leadership as his father’s successor. Which is to say that Michael comes around to accepting and embracing a life devoted to helping friends and harming enemies, just as his father always had.

But there’s one important difference between father and son in the first film. In addition to acting boldly and ruthlessly to consolidate his power after Vito’s death by killing the heads of the other leading mafia families (along with the traitor in the extended Corleone family, Salvatore Tessio), Michael acts to avenge Sonny’s death by killing Connie’s husband Carlo for helping to finger their brother for the hit. It’s hard to imagine Vito ever doing something so merciless. In going further than his father ever would have, Michael demonstrates that his understanding of “enemies” and the harm he is willing to inflict on them is more expansive than his father’s was—capable of penetrating into the family itself.  

Part 2 shows us that Michael’s willingness to kill his brother-in-law is less a singular exception than a prefigurement. As everybody knows, the second film climaxes with Michael ordering and overseeing the murder of his own brother Fredo, who in a foolish miscalculation inadvertently helped to advance a plot by rival gangster Hyman Roth to assassinate Michael in his Lake Tahoe home. Showing himself incapable of forgiveness and consumed by a rageful compulsion to wipe out every single enemy or potential enemy whomever they may be, Michael ends up by the conclusion of the film a hollowed-out shell of a man facing a future haunted by an act of fratricide.

Michael’s Coda