Political Corruption

The Underside of Civic Morality

Robert Alan Sparling

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812295924
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The notion of corruption as a problem for politics spans many centuries and political, social, and cultural contexts. But it is incredibly difficult to define what we mean when we describe a regime or actor as corrupt: while corruption suggests a falling away from purity, health, or integrity, it flourishes today in an environment that is often inarticulate about its moral ideals and wary of perfectionist discourse. Providing a historical perspective on the idea, Robert Alan Sparling explores diverse visions of corruption that have been elucidated by thinkers across the modern philosophical tradition.In a series of chronologically ordered philosophical portraits, Political Corruption considers the different ways in which a metaphor of impurity, disease, and dissolution was deployed by political philosophers from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. Focusing specifically on the thought of Erasmus, Étienne de La Boétie, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Bolingbroke, Robespierre, Kant, and Weber, Sparling situates these thinkers in their historical contexts and argues that each of them offers a distinctive vision of corruption that has continuing relevance in contemporary political debates. He contrasts immoderate purists with impure moderates and reveals corruption to be a language of reaction and revolution. The book explores themes such as the nature of civic trust and distrust; the relationship of transparency to accountability; the integrity of leaders and the character of uncorrupted citizens; the division between public and private; the nature of dependency; and the relationship between regime and civic disposition. Political Corruption examines how philosophers have conceived of public office and its abuse and how they have sought to insulate the public sphere from anticivic inclinations and interests. Sparling argues that speaking coherently about political corruption in our present moment requires a robust account of the good regime and of the character of its citizens and officeholders.

CHAPTER 1

Corruption Discourse and the Ubiquity of Distinctions

Let us begin with some doggerel from the eighteenth century:

Through all the Employments of Life

Each Neighbour abuses his Brother;

Whore and Rogue they call Husband and Wife:

All Professions be-rogue one another:

The Priest calls the Lawyer a Cheat,

The Lawyer be-knaves the Divine:

And the Statesman, because he’s so great,

Thinks his Trade as honest as mine.¹

So sings Peachum, the embodiment of corruption in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728). Both thief catcher and fencer of stolen goods, Peachum casts doubt on the very distinction between just and unjust. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt reflects on the reception of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928), a work that brought Peachum’s argument to a generation already prone to seeing things his way. Arendt suggests that the play’s declaration that morality is but a thin veneer under which lies the reality of dogs eating dogs was widely applauded by audiences who thought the message of “erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” (first comes eating,² then comes morality) had pierced through a prevalent hypocrisy: “the irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism.”³ The Threepenny Opera, like Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, is an unrelenting denunciation of a corruption that has permeated society. But the effect of this thoroughgoing attack on pretentions is to leave the audience in a universe where all is permitted. Gay’s play remained a satire of Hogarthian dimensions—and satire, like corruption discourse, depends upon moral boundaries. Brecht’s version seems beyond satire and is thus profoundly destabilizing: it appears to undermine the very moral categories that make moral denunciation possible. Brechtian stagecraft—producing a sense of alienation in the audience—reinforces this. Indeed, it can have the effect not of inspiring the sociopolitical reflection that he sought but rather of awakening a sense of the absurd, a vertiginous nausea born of the erasure of moral distinctions that had previously structured one’s worldview. As Arendt suggests, some gangsters might well have left the theater with a self-satisfied air, confirmed in the moral rectitude of gangsterism; an alternate effect of the play—at least on those on whom the irony has not been entirely lost—is to cast the viewer into a sense of helplessness, where the laughter derives not from a simple superiority that one has seen through bourgeois pretense but from a kind of despair at not knowing which way is up.

If corruption is as generalized as portrayed in these plays, it seems difficult to see what political project might possibly be capable of facing it. Might the term “corruption” itself not be mere obfuscation? Brecht’s humor is so bleak, one despairs for a political remedy, and his subsequent communism seems more like a salto mortale than a solution.⁴ In the Threepenny Opera, fundamental distinctions disappear; the police and the crooks are two sides of the same coin, and the possibility of nonpredation seems remote. The audience emerges from the theater wondering if, in the famous exchange between Alexander the Great and the pirate (in which the pirate claims that the difference between them is merely one of scale),⁵ the pirate was not expressing something true of all rule. Without Brecht’s overt call for socialism, his drama can feel like an ode to Callicles. The very term “corruption” and the entire moral vocabulary surrounding it come across as ideological mystification, and we sing along with the chorus, “verfolgt das Unrecht nicht zu sehr” (do not persecute injustice too much).

There are good reasons for taking a Brechtian attitude toward corruption discourse itself. For corruption discourse (as we shall see in Chapter 2) often sounds a note of individual moralism in instances of systemic oppression. As such, it can serve as a mask, a pretense that the most egregious examples of abuse are mere individual moral failings. Such moralizing discourse can serve to reinforce domination. In numerous authoritarian societies accusations of corruption are useful means for inter-elite competition; red hot fury at the convicted deflects from the more systemic nature of exploitation. Moralizing tones can also take on global dimensions, as accusations of systemic corruption are employed to discipline countries caught in global power structures that are already exploitative. There is something highly suspect, after all, in the accusation that the relative poverty of Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Italy in the European Union is due primarily to “corruption.” Students of post-Soviet transition can equally appreciate the skeptical attitude toward corruption discourse.⁶ The same can be said of postcolonial societies. It does seem dodgy that local elites who extract massive riches in poorer societies are termed corrupt, while in the wealthy world elites who extract massive resources from the poor world are considered job creators. (Transparency International’s “corruption perceptions index,” while an interesting tool in many respects, can have the unintended effect of reinforcing neocolonial stereotypes: the color-coded map emerges every year with a bright yellow West and blood red in the global South.) Suspicions are further nourished by the fact that the very rise of anticorruption efforts in the period following the Cold War is replete with ideological overtones (liberalism’s mopping-up effort, as it were). The war against corruption can appear galling in an age in which we witness state and regulatory capture to such an extent that wealthy countries’ governments create vast structures (national and international tax havens, regulatory loopholes, structures of economic dependence) permitting behavior that is perfectly legal, but of dubious legitimacy given that its very purpose is to subvert democratic will and legal protections.

But an attitude of suspicion toward the discourse of corruption can never be the end of the story, for the term is often wielded by those below, who are much less subject to false consciousness than would-be vanguards assume. The discourse of corruption remains a live, emancipatory language capable of attacking the illegitimate exercise of power even when such power is cloaked in legality. Corruption discourse can serve to mask exploitation or to condemn it. It can buttress systems of domination or undermine them. It may be employed by Socratic figures denouncing feverish cities; it may be employed to feed hemlock to those very figures. But whether it be turned to radical critique or complacent defense of the reigning order, the discourse of corruption is an inescapable element of life wherever there is the regular exercise of entrusted power. And corruption discourse is always about policing lines—first and foremost between kings and pirates.

We must, then, begin our study of this discourse by insisting upon two related distinctions. The first is the fundamental moral distinction between legitimate rule and predation. This distinction, for all its apparent common sense, must be defended against those who would see it as moralizing at best and ideological obfuscation at worst. The second is the separations between realms of activity, and between, loosely speaking, that which is “public” and that which is not. I say “loosely speaking,” for the distinction between public and private as we widely conceive of it is not at all universal, and the manner of dividing these things is, indeed, a central question of political philosophy itself.⁷ In Sparta and Rome no less than in ancien régime France the personal was political. The feudal king’s “state” was his condition, his legal standing. But this does not mean that distinctions between public and private have no place in those regimes.

There is a universal tendency to think about institutions, people, and practices that serve the good of the group as being special, bound by norms regarding the group’s good and capable of being perverted. Marcel Mauss speaks of a Haida chief who failed to give a lavish potlatch as having a “rotten face.”⁸ Nothing in classical Haida culture approaches the public-private distinction of late modernity, but there is a clear communal disapprobation of a breach of norms pertaining to this important community role—ought we to be surprised to learn that the Haida deployed a metaphor indicating decay? Bo Rothstein, exasperated by cultural relativists, has put his finger on the universal core of corruption discourse: “My argument departs from the idea that it is difficult to envision a society without some public goods. The point is that when these public goods are handled or converted into private goods this is generally understood as corruption independently of the culture.”⁹ As evident as this might appear, it is an important point. Rothstein correctly notes that something we might term “public goods” can be located in every collectivity, and the core of corruption is injustice. Unfortunately, he subsequently overreaches by making the unconvincing suggestion that the distinction between public and private and the conception of corruption as the opposite of impartiality are more or less universal. “Public” functions do entail a special relationship between rulers and the ruled: but how these lines are drawn and what the relationship is between the mores of the public and nonpublic worlds are essential elements of how the term “corruption” declines in a given political language. The way in which corruption is conceived in a feudal monarchy will differ from the manner in which it is understood in capitalist modernity, and it will differ from the manner it is conceived in a republic like Sparta, where the basic acts of eating, mating, and exercising are civic duties that are matters of public concern every bit as much as the activities of a judge. Norms, too, will shift. Rothstein cites social-scientific evidence that throughout the world people seek impartiality from public officeholders. This might be a widespread desideratum, but if it is, it merely indicates the cultural success of a certain imaginary favoring the types of separation characteristic of the modern “Weberian” state. To mention just one notable exception to this rule, consider the thought of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the great admirer of social solidarity of Bedouin tribes. For Ibn Khaldun, corruption derived from the diminution of “group feeling” (‘asabiyyah), a concept that looks very much like the antonym of impartiality. This group feeling is the most important source of strength and vitality of a community. While he thought impartiality was always good in some instances (in the office of a judge, for example), he did not celebrate it as the soul of integrity—on the contrary, impartiality becomes more important in large, corrupt urban settings which have less group feeling, and thus require centralized authority and strict law to replace lost mores.¹⁰ Where and when partiality is a good are questions of a political and philosophical nature that have admitted of radically different answers throughout the history of political institutions and political philosophy.

Discovering what is steady and what is shifting in corruption discourse entails saying something about the ubiquity of the distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate behaviors and dispositions of those entrusted with authority. This, in turn, entails saying something about the split between what we commonly term “public” and “private.” The definition of corruption that is dominant today (used by the World Bank, among others)—the abuse of public office for private gain—has been criticized for being excessively focused on individual behaviors and for being insufficiently attentive to classical republican concerns about a general depredation of mores or civic decline. Some have even wanted to insist upon a strict separation between these two sorts of discourses. But in fact they are difficult to disentangle, and the World Bank’s definition can be made to fit almost any conception of corruption, so long as one interprets the terms properly. Aristotle’s distinction between legitimate and deviant forms of government turns on the distinction between rule in the interests of the ruled and in the interests of the ruler (Politics 1279a). There is clearly a public good—the interests of the ruled—that can be undermined by the holders of office abusing that office for private gain.¹¹ When, in classical republican discourse, wealth and luxury are termed corrosive and corrupting, the reason is that they are thought to lead to an oligarchic disposition in which the city is treated as a means for private domination: this is a betrayal of the public good. Alien as this view is from the understanding of the economists at the World Bank (who offer no moral disapprobation of luxury and think, rather, in terms of individual officeholders breaching rules for private gain), the two conceptions are visions of the public good being undermined or usurped for nonpublic (or anti-public) ends.

Public, Private, and the “State”: Continuities and Discontinuities

So far, I have suggested that there are family resemblances between varieties of corruption discourse and that it is important to retain the moral core of the concept entailing some conception of a public good subject to abuse. But, of course, the devil is in the details, and we need to attend to how the notion of public office and the mores required for its legitimate exercise are constructed in any given context. In our zeal to avoid anachronism, however, we ought to make certain that we do not fall into reified historical categories. Interpreters have tended to founder on the Scylla of false universalism or the Charybdis of historicism. In brief, I am suggesting that worries about corruption are indeed perennial, though the manner in which the concept is deployed varies radically. And this variety, I am arguing, is not merely the stuff of historical contingency.

To see the commonalities among the varieties of corruption talk—to understand why contrasting conceptions of political corruption belong to the same family—one must take care not to overstate the strangeness of ancient ideas or the radical novelty of modern ones. Much hangs on the degree to which the distinction between public and private governing the modern state is an unprecedented phenomenon. Quentin Skinner has given an intricate story about the emergence of the “impersonal” state. It has much to recommend it, but I wish to suggest a nuance. For while the word “state,” status, originally described a condition, rather than some independent, objective Weberian entity claiming a monopoly on legitimate use of violence, the notion of a polity as an object of analysis independent from its ruler and its members (and, indeed, bearing proto-Weberian marks of exercising legitimate violence for the control of its territory) certainly existed in classical antiquity. That is, while the politeia was its citizens, it could also be thought about in an abstract manner, as a legal order or an institution.

According to Skinner, the key aspect of the modern state is that it is impersonal in the sense of being distinct from both rulers and the ruled. Now, I do not challenge the claim that modern states are novel in many ways, as is the manner in which we tend to divide public from private, and we will have cause to revisit the conception of “impersonality” that is at the heart of some late modern visions of integrity, but there is something misleading about Skinner’s presentation that can have the unfortunate effect of blinding us to a universal dimension of corruption discourse. The notion that there exists some entity, institution, or moral person analytically separable from the actual flesh-and-blood rulers and ruled is quite prevalent throughout Western history, even in instances in which it appears to be absent. Consider one example that Skinner cites as a clear case of the absence of this distinction: “A writer like [Jacques-Bénigne] Bossuet, for example, deliberately sets out to obliterate the distinction between the office and the person of the king. . . . He insists that the figure of the ruler ‘embodies in himself the whole of the state’: tout l’état est en lui.”¹² But Bossuet did exactly the opposite. The complete phrase from his Politics Drawn from the Very Words of the Holy Scripture is the following: “The prince, insofar as he is a prince [en tant que prince], is not regarded as a particular man: h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface. What Is Political Corruption?
• Chapter 1. Corruption Discourse and the Ubiquity of Distinctions
• Chapter 2. The Character of Rulers: Corruption and Integrity in Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince
• Chapter 3. The Character of Citizens, Part I: Virtue and Corruption in the Machiavellian Republic of Distrust
• Chapter 4. The Character of Citizens, Part II: Étienne de La Boétie on Corruption, Transparency, and the Republicanism of Trust
• Chapter 5. Corruption, Social Change, and the Constitution: The Case of Viscount Bolingbroke
• Chapter 6. “La vertu même a besoin de limites”: Montesquieu on Moderation and Integrity in the Modern Commercial Republic
• Chapter 7. Kant, Robespierre, and the Politics of Purity
• Chapter 8. Purity and the Public Official: Max Weber on Bureaucratic Integrity
• Conclusion. The Abuse of Public Things
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments