The work offers an analysis the interactions between modernization, politics and wealth creation in the South, an area in which some negative phenomena determined by these relations seem particularly evident and serious, although they are not unique to the area. After a historical account of the main ways in which the South has been modernized, and some basic hypotheses and facts, including those of the profound link between social regulation, welfare and wealth creation and the persistence of a dependence culture in southern welfare, the essay describes some significant links between politics, the market, the community, interest groups and welfare, reflecting on the forms politics has taken in its incapacity to encourage real processes of institutional organization and redistribution of wealth.