Scene 6 of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Bertolt Brecht, written in 1941 and first staged in 1958). At the hotel where he is staying, an old, out-of-work Shakespearean actor teaches Arturo Ui how to walk, sit and stand, and has him recite Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar. Ui, a small-time Chicago gangster, leaves the lesson with the stride and gestures of Hitler’s speeches. Brecht wants him ridiculous, and the scene shows what his power is made of: a pose that others accept. By then he has already found his chance, in the middle of a slump, in the cauliflower trust, the cartel that controls the vegetable trade. The trust’s businessmen have bribed the old and revered Dogsborough, the most respected politician in the city, to obtain a fraudulent municipal loan. Ui discovers the scandal and offers to cover it up in exchange for protection. He then extorts the greengrocers, has a warehouse set on fire and blames an innocent man in a rigged trial, has his lieutenant Roma and his men murdered, and extends his “protection” to the neighboring town of Cicero after killing its leading opponent. Every scene of the play corresponds to an episode in Hitler’s rise, from the aid to the eastern landowners to the Reichstag fire and the annexation of Austria.
// The theoryThe strength of a neighborhood that unites
In a study published in Science in 1997, Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush and Felton Earls analyzed 343 Chicago neighborhoods and found that the best predictor of violence was not poverty alone, but collective efficacy: the combination of social cohesion (neighbors trust one another) and willingness to intervene for the common good. Where people believe their neighbors would act if they saw something, crime has less room. Where everyone shuts themselves in at home, offenders find open ground. Social capital, the network of relationships that lets a community organize, is the basis of that capacity.
Each on his own
The play’s greengrocers are not cowards: each of them, separately, is rational. Paying for protection is safer than resisting alone, and reporting is risky when the judge, the police and the respected politician have already been bought. The result of those reasonable individual decisions is a collective catastrophe. That is what collective efficacy measures: not the courage of each person, but the confidence that others will act too. Without that confidence, everyone waits for someone else to take the first step, and nobody does.
// The subjectA thug who learned to speak
Brecht draws Ui as a ridiculous character: clumsy, insecure, hysterical, prone to fits of self-pity and constantly needing approval. The intention is to dismantle the idea of the great man of destiny. Ui is no genius; he is a vulgar criminal who prospers because the powerful need him and the weak fear him. His greatness is supplied by others.
What the play says about the greengrocers fits into two moments. At the trial over the warehouse fire, Fish, a poor wretch, is convicted in a trial rigged from start to finish: everyone knows who set the warehouse alight and nobody says so. Later, in Cicero, a wounded woman cries out for someone to stop Ui and his men, and nobody comes. They are the two faces of missing collective efficacy: in the courtroom, the silence of those who know; in the street, the loneliness of the one asking for help. Sampson and his colleagues measured it by asking residents whether they thought their neighbors would step in if children were skipping school on a street corner or a fight broke out in front of their house. In Brecht’s Chicago the answer is always no, and everyone knows it of everyone else. That is why, when Ui finally asks the greengrocers of Cicero to accept his protection with his gunmen in the hall, he hardly needs to fire a shot: it is enough that each of them is sure he would be left on his own.
Arturo Ui
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// The crackA parable that simplifies
Reading Ui as a failure of collective efficacy has a limit: Brecht does not mainly blame the grocers, but the trust’s businessmen who struck a deal with the gangster to save their profits. His analysis is Marxist: fascism is the instrument of big capital in crisis. The collective efficacy of neighbors can do little when the elites have already chosen sides.
The parable has also been criticized for simplifying. Reducing Nazism to a story of vegetable gangsters allows it to be ridiculed, but leaves out mass popular support, racial ideology and antisemitism, which barely appear in the play. What works as satire does not quite work as explanation.
Community organization against extortion
Extortion thrives where each victim negotiates alone. That is why the movements that have fought it best have been collective: in Sicily, the Addiopizzo movement, born in 2004, brings together shops that publicly pledge not to pay the mafia and consumers who choose to buy from them. When many refuse at once, the cost of punishing each one soars. It is collective efficacy turned into strategy: what the greengrocers of Cicero did not do.
Three key ideas
- Collective efficacy theory (Sampson, 1997) holds that neighborhoods with mutual trust and a willingness to intervene have less crime, regardless of their poverty.
- Arturo Ui, Brecht’s parable of Hitler’s rise, takes over Chicago’s vegetable trade through protection, bribes and arson, while each grocer decides separately that paying is the safest course.
- The crack: Brecht mainly blames the elites who struck a deal with the gangster, and his satire leaves out Nazism’s popular support and ideology.
Sources · further reading
- Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W. and Earls, F. (1997). “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy”. Science, 277(5328), 918-924.
- Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.
- Gambetta, D. (1993). The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Harvard University Press.
- Brecht, B. (1957). Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui. Suhrkamp.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Arturo Ui?
Arturo Ui is a villain from The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Every grocer thought paying was safer than resisting.
Why does Arturo Ui become a villain?
Collective efficacy measures whether a neighborhood trusts its residents to act against crime. In Arturo Ui’s Chicago nobody does, and Brecht shows how that mistrust lets a ridiculous thug rise.
Which criminological theory explains Arturo Ui?
Arturo Ui's case is analysed through Social capital and collective efficacy. Robert Sampson’s theory of collective efficacy (1997) holds that neighborhoods with mutual trust and a willingness to intervene for the common good have less crime, regardless of their poverty. In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Bertolt Brecht, written in 1941), a parable of Hitler’s rise to power transposed to gangland Chicago, Arturo Ui takes over the cauliflower trust through protection, bribes to the old and respected Dogsborough, a staged fire and the murder of his own associates. The vegetable dealers of Chicago and Cicero could have stopped him if they had united. They did not. The title says it: his rise was resistible.
