Illusions of Purity in Bergeois Society.pdf

The Construction of Corruption, or

RULES OF SEPARATION AND ILLUSIONS OF PURITY

IN BOURGEOIS SOCIETIES

What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

— Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

Peter Bratsis

Deﬁlement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a

systematic ordering of ideas. Hence any piecemeal interpretation of pollution

rules of another culture is bound to fail. For the only way in which pollution

ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought whose key-

stone, boundaries, margins and internal lines are held in relation by rituals of

separation.

— Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

Did Somebody Say Corruption ?

George W. Bush and his “coalition of the willing” wage war on the cor-

rupt regime of Saddam Hussein. Islamic fundamentalists deride their

national governments as corrupt and, accordingly, have little love for the

United States, a patron of many of these regimes. The World Bank has

declared that corruption is the single greatest obstacle to global develop-

ment. The Michigan Militia and similar right-wing populist groups claim

that federal institutions, such as the FBI and IRS, are a corruption. Left-

leaning critics and reformers, such as Michael Moore and Ralph Nader,

attack the corruption that presumably plagues American political and eco-

nomic life.

The list could go on and on; it seems that there is hardly any con-

temporary political tendency that does not contain some form of anti-

corruption agenda. It is striking that so many disparate and competing

political discourses all agree that corruption is a problem, oftentimes the

problem. Regardless of the interpretive frame (right, left, populist, tech-

nocratic, religious, secular, etc.), the specter of corruption is a constant,

and is both unavoidable and unquestioned; unquestioned in the sense that

the undesirability of corruption is taken as a given, no substantive argu-

ment is needed — who is, after all, in favor of corruption?— and unavoid-

able in that corruption seems to refer to underlying tensions, antago-

nisms, and traumas that, regardless of one’s conceptual toolbox and

political tendencies, cannot be ignored or passed over.

These cursory observations highlight the main hurdle in, as well as

the need for, the understanding of corruption. The idea of corruption has

become so universal, so unquestioned, so much a part of various common

senses, that its determinations, historical speciﬁcities, and social functions

tend to remain hidden. If this is true anywhere, it is true in regard to the

ever growing popularity of the term corporate corruption. Insider trading

and bribery may likely be placed under the category of “corporate cor-

ruption.” But what about embezzlement or union busting or transfer pric-

ing or planned obsolescence? What makes something a corruption? Fur-

thermore, what’s so bad about corruption?

This essay is an examination of the foundations and function of the

concept of corruption. Discussion focuses on the most developed and

seminal version of the concept in modern society, political corruption.

Beginning with a discussion of deﬁnitions of political corruption, the essay

argues that there is a signiﬁcant and much neglected difference between

modern and premodern understandings of corruption. The modern under-

standing of corruption, it is argued, is directly tied to the rise of the orga-

nization of social life and interests by way of the categories of the public

and private. The main function of the idea of corruption and the rules

and rituals that arise from it has been to keep the categories of the public

and private pure and believable. The homology between the rules regard-

ing clean and unclean foods in Leviticus and the rules regarding clean and

unclean politics in congressional ethics regulations is demonstrated. Based

on this reading of congressional regulations, the key components behind

the modern concept of corruption are identiﬁed and exposed. The essay

concludes with a discussion of the implications of this argument for the

question of corporate corruption, the apparent proliferation of anticorrup-

tion discourses, and politics overall.

What Is Corruption?

Nearly all deﬁnitions of political corruption emphasize the subversion of

the public good by private interest. Among the more famous deﬁnitions of

corruption is the one offered by Joseph Nye (1989): “Behavior which

deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regard-

ing (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or state gains; or vio-

lates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding inﬂu-

ence” (966). Similarly, Carl Friedrich (1989) argues that

corruption is a kind of behavior which deviates from the norm actually

prevalent or believed to prevail in a given context, such as the political. It is

Peter Bratsis

deviant behavior associated with a particular motivation, namely that of pri-

vate gain at public expense. But whether this was the motivation or not, it is

the fact that private gain was secured at public expense that matters. Such

private gain may be a monetary one, and in the minds of the general public

it usually is, but it may take other forms. (15) 1

Contained within the modern understanding of corruption are two inter-

related assumptions: that mutually exclusive public and private interests

exist and that public servants must necessarily abstract themselves from

the realm of the private in order to properly function.

The signiﬁcance and relative historical novelty of this deﬁnition has

been ignored in the contemporary literature on political corruption. The

tendency has been to emphasize the continuity of the concept of political

corruption from the ancient to modern times. Carl Friedrich (1989) has

argued that the basic understanding of corruption as “a general disease of

the body politic” is common to the ancients and the moderns (18). John

Noonan (1984), who deﬁnes bribery, presumably the most obvious form

of political corruption, as “an inducement improperly inﬂuencing the per-

formance of a public function” (xi), traces the concept back to roughly

3000 B . C . and claims that, although the concept has transformed over time,

it has, in its main contours, remained constant.

Along the same lines, there are usually numerous references to Aris-

totle and Machiavelli in works tracing the history of the concept of cor-

ruption. Aristotle is often cited for his assertion that political forms can be

corrupted. In his classiﬁcation of the three kinds of constitution, Aristotle

lists kingship, aristocracy, and polity. 2 He goes on to note that each can be

corrupted. His discussion of kingship is particularly relevant because what

causes the corruption of kingship into tyranny is the disregard the tyrant

has for his subjects; he rules only to further his own “interests” (Aristotle

1958, 373 –75). Machiavelli’s discussion of the function and causes of

corruption are also often discussed, especially as he developed them in

The Discourses in discussing the decline of the republic of Rome (Machi-

avelli 1970, esp. book 1). Sara Shumer (1979) has noted that Machi-

avelli’s discussion of corruption includes the idea of the subversion of the

public by the private: “One dimension of political corruption is the priva-

tization both of the average citizen and those in ofﬁce. In the corrupt

state, men locate their values wholly within the private sphere and they use

the public sphere to promote private interests” (9).

There are reasons to doubt this ofﬁcial history of corruption as a con-

cept common to nearly all political forms and historical epochs. For one

thing, the apparent lack of a word for bribery in Ancient Greek presents a

problem for those who assume an unbroken line in the concept of cor-

The Construction of Corruption

The recipient of

ruption. Mark Philp (1997) notes that there are many words in Ancient

Greek that make no distinction between a gift and a bribe ( doron , lemma ,

chresmasi peithein ) since, for the Greeks, to persuade through gift giving

was acceptable and no perversion of judgment could be assumed (26).

Philp makes the point that if the Greeks have no conception of bribery,

then the whole idea of a public body in Ancient Greece is put into ques-

tion: “If these were the only terms for bribery in the Ancient Greek world

we would have to take the view that there is a basic untranslatability of the

terms between us and them — that they not only failed to distinguish gifts

and bribes, but that they also had no real concept of public ofﬁce or

trust” (26). On this point, Philp is absolutely right. He goes on to argue,

following Harvey (1985), that there was a term for bribery in Ancient

Greece, diaphtheirein . However, contrary to Philp’s interpretation, it is

not true that diaphtheirein has the same status as the modern term bribery

or that it can be said to connote a form of corruption in the modern

sense. Diaphtheirein refers to the corruption of the mind by which the abil-

ity to make sound judgments and pursue the good has been impaired

and, more generally, to destruction and decay. Not all bribery is corrup-

tion in the modern sense. A closer reading of Harvey’s discussion of

diaphtheirein reveals this point. Harvey takes great pains to show that in

contrast to and concurrent with neutral and positive terms, there did

indeed exist at least one negative term ( diaphtheirein ) for inﬂuencing

through giving money and gifts. Nowhere, however, do we ﬁnd any refer-

ence to public trust, private interest, or any category we usually use in dis-

cussing bribery and corruption. Bribery as diaphthora (the more com-

mon version of the word) was negative because it implied that the citizen,

by way of accepting a bribe, was no longer able to properly act as a citizen

since the will and power to judge had been destroyed. 3 As Harvey puts it,

“The man who takes a bribe surrenders his free will; what he says and

does he does for another, and in that sense he no longer exists as an inde-

pendent individual: he is a non-entity. That, I suggest, is the essential

point” (86). Instead of some public trust succumbing to private interests,

the recipient of a bribe has lost the ability to be a citizen by relinquishing

his autonomy. Like slaves, merchants, and women, all precluded from

being citizens since they lack basic requisites for properly acting as a citi-

zen, the recipient of a bribe is incapable of the autonomous thought and

moral judgment necessary for being a citizen. 4

The categories of the public and the private are integral to the mod-

ern notion of corruption. Put simply, no corruption in the modern sense

is possible if there is no public and private. As Philp’s arguments illustrate,

much of the literature on corruption assumes that the apparent omnipres-

a bribe is

incapable of the

autonomous

thought and

moral judgment

necessary for

being a citizen.

Peter Bratsis

ence of a concept of corruption is a sure sign that the public and private

are also omnipresent social categories. That the ancient understanding of

corruption is so far removed from the modern one puts this assumption

into question.

Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (1957) provides a useful

corrective to this ahistorical tendency in the corruption literature. For

Kantorowicz, our modern understanding of public and private is tied to

the rise in early modern England of the legal and political doctrine of the

king’s two bodies. This doctrine asserts that we have two bodies, a public

and a private one. In its most developed form, the two bodies doctrine

asserts that while, on the one hand, we exist as concrete individuals with

physical bodies, particular passions, interests, obligations, and so forth, on

the other hand, we exist in an abstract sense, as members of the body

politic, a body that is beyond our physical bodies and concrete social exis-

tence. This body politic is the polity, characterized by the common inter-

ests that bind its members together and is materialized in the rituals, per-

sonnel, and institutions of the state (193 – 272).

It should be noted that this version of public and private differs

greatly from other typical uses of these categories within political thought,

notably, the Arendtian understanding of public and private, most clearly

exempliﬁed by Habermas’s treatise on the public sphere. Habermas (1991)

notes that the terms private and public ﬁrst appear in German in the mid-

dle of the sixteenth century and argues that no such divisions existed in

feudal societies. He goes on to argue that these categories did exist in

ancient societies and equates the ancient Greek terms of polis and oikos

with public and private (Habermas 1991, chap. 1). Thus, in the Arendtian

sense, the categories of the public and the private are mainly functional

distinctions based on different uses of space. The public sphere becomes

the space within which individuals can come together and discuss and

formulate political opinions and positions. This is contrasted to the state,

on the one hand, with its police and legal functions, and to the private side

of civil society on the other hand, with its family ties and market relations

(Habermas 1991, 30). Although the two distinctions are not necessarily

mutually exclusive, this functionalist distinction between what is public

and what is private is not the distinction between public and private con-

noted by corruption. In political corruption, private interests and pas-

sions come to displace the common good. It is not that public spaces

come to be used for nonpolitical goals, for example, that makes for polit-

ical corruption. Thus, although we see the categories of public and private

applied to most societies, including those of the ancient world, it is usually

done so in this more functionalist way and the categories themselves have

The Construction of Corruption

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