Michael Corleone, Truly Unregulated Capitalist: The Godfather II as Political Allegory and Ethical Catastrophe

The Godfather, Part II, is the tragic moral tale of a person who, through a slow, steady, inexorable process, becomes everything he did not want to be. In the first film, Michael Corleone says – and can say – “That’s my family, Kay, not me”. In this film he has lost, through internal erosion, the ground on which such a statement could stand. Francis Ford Coppola has said that his initial thoughts about the film coalesced when he realized that it should be a political film, a film that showed in the microcosm of the person of Michael Corleone the tragedy-inducing progress of a heartless form of business, of unconstrained capitalism, that develops according to one single logic of protected and maximized profit to the exclusion of every other non-monetary form of value. Coppola’s film thus provides an opportunity to stand back from what can all too easily become the morally blinding rush of daily events, encouraging reflection on the results that can come from an all-consuming monomania of profit. It is a film that weaves together issues in politics, ethics, and – extensively – moral psychology.