Political Corruption and the Concept of Dependence in Republican Thought

Skinner and Pettit on Dependence and Domination

The terms “dependence” and “independence” cover a great deal of ground. ⁷ Naturally, a central republican preoccupation is the independence of states from external control. Our primary interest here, however, is the independence of citizens and officeholders. The republican tradition, according to Skinner, Pettit, and Viroli, thinks that there is a kind of dependence that is fundamentally illegitimate. This is the dependence in which lives the Roman slave. The slave’s condition is unacceptable even if he has a completely permissive master. On a Hobbesian view of freedom, the slave would actually be free in these conditions, but to a Roman this slave’s condition remains infinitely worse than that of the freeman because the slave remains subject to the arbitrary power of the master. ⁸ The mainstream liberal world, Skinner and Pettit believe, has failed to understand this and thus has no coherent principle with which to oppose people’s being legally subject to arbitrary power. ⁹ “Dependence on the will of another” is slavery. ¹⁰ Certainly, republican writers—Romans and their heirs—loved to point out that kings tend to treat subjects as masters treat slaves, something that undermines public virtue—under absolute princes, we become cringing courtiers, the most base form of human existence imaginable. A person enjoying republican liberty can look others in the eye.

Skinner, Pettit, and Viroli all speak in these terms. Pettit tends to prefer the term “domination” to “dependence,” but ultimately uses the words interchangeably. ¹¹ But Skinner takes the dependence talk beyond the reference to relationships of absolute, arbitrary power. A republican equally objects to the type of dependence complained about by Bolingbroke ¹² —the dependence of electors and, particularly, MPs who need to kowtow to court favourites in order to win places. Bolingbroke employs republican language to equate absolutism and corruption: “Friends of liberty see that the greatest masters of tyranny have judged the form, without the spirit, of free government more favourable to their schemes of oppression, than all the authority that absolute monarchy can give; and that they made an innovation in the form of their government on this very motive, and for this very purpose.” ¹³ “The masters of tyranny” (Robert Walpole and his friends) can attain the equivalent of absolutism through corruption: they can control representatives and elections through the power of place and gift. By this, Bolingbroke did not merely mean to attack illegal acts generally understood as corrupt, but also the thoroughly legal types of dependence with which the Walpolean oligarchy managed British politics for two decades. This is a dependence that is not defined in absolutist terms, but that is as insidious as abused prerogative—the people remain in full possession of their rights, but the balanced constitution is nonetheless fatally compromised by a kind of legalized bribery. The constant recourse to the language of virtue and corruption in “republican” texts attests to this concern that liberty is not merely a matter of formal legal structures but of public spiritedness and structures of influence. Dependence causes people to behave in a slavish way, attendant to the smiles and frowns of their patrons and thus inattentive to the public good. Corrupting dependence allows the state to be captured for private interests by turning electors and representatives into groveling courtiers. Dependence is a malaise that can affect all offices from the lowliest elector to the highest minister, and it is one that creates the same lamentable psychological disposition in the country’s inhabitants whether the regime be a thorough despotism or nominally “free”, which is to say ruled according to law. ¹⁴

Now surely there is an important conceptual distinction that is elided in this use of “dependence.” A legal slave—and even a legal dependent ¹⁵ —is not the same thing as someone whose position inclines him or her to act slavishly. Ibsen (to use an example dear to Pettit) illustrates clearly the lack of liberty of Nora in A Doll’s House—Nora is loved by her husband, and treated well, but while she can mostly do what she wants, she is legally subordinate. For Pettit, this condition is essentially that of a slave since Nora is subject to arbitrary power. But her situation differs radically from that of an MP who feels he must ingratiate himself to Walpole in order that his cousin might get a commission, or from the position of an American congressman who ingratiates himself to the tobacco lobby in order to fund his next election campaign. For the MP or congressperson does have an option, of a sort. To use a Canadian example, I cannot employ this phrase without thinking of Brian Mulroney’s famous indignation in his debate with John Turner over the latter’s acceptance of his predecessor’s patronage appointments. Mulroney intoned, “You had an option, sir. You could have said ‘I am not going to do it!’” (This excellent political theatre became even more delicious when Mulroney proved to have servile dependence on wealth from arms lobbyists.) The relationship of dependence, for Mulroney circa 1984, is voluntary. (For the older, more mature Mulroney, abject poverty renders one unable to say no to envelopes of cash.) The point is, there is an important distinction between being subject to absolute, arbitrary power and being subject to temptation or strong influence. Republican thought has tended to portray both instances as corrupt and corrupting—dependence of both sorts undermines the character of citizen and officeholder. An individual approaches the condition of slavery by behaving in a slavish manner. This is why the issue of civic virtue is so important, for corruption turns a nominally free society into one that is effectively enslaved. Many of the situations denounced by republicans as indicative of a corrupting dependence are not strictly speaking instances of domination in the Pettitian meaning—and they are particularly insidious precisely because they occur in a condition free from domination. When people’s attention to civic duty is undermined by incentives of wealth or station, they are not being limited arbitrarily in their choices; rather, they are being offered special opportunities—they are having doors opened to them that would otherwise remain closed.

Pettit is too analytically rigorous to conflate domination with temptation. For this reason he, unlike Skinner, explicitly excludes bribery from the relationship of domination. Domination, on his definition, only occurs when an agent can arbitrarily interfere in another’s choices. “Interference cannot take the form of a bribe or a reward; when I interfere I make things worse for you, not better.” ¹⁶ A more civic republican would dispute whether a bribe makes things better, pointing out the manner in which this incentive weakens civic character leaving both parties worse, but Pettit wishes to leave his concepts unmoralized, so this consideration cannot inform his analysis. But if temptation is not the same thing as domination, might it nonetheless constitute a problem for republican freedom?

It might if freedom is understood in a wider systemic sense. But this does present certain analytical difficulties. There is something awkward in the republican conception of liberty that underlies the worries about corruption. If a political representative sells his vote (in however direct or indirect a manner) it is difficult to conceive of him as being unfree. After all, he made a conscious, uncoerced decision, and the fact that that decision was highly influenced by anti-civic hopes and fears does not make it any less voluntary. At the same time, we are intuitively drawn to the view that systemic incentives affect liberty. Consider the case of a judge who is trying a case involving the interests of a powerful corporation. Let us say she receives an enormous incentive—she is in a jurisdiction where judges are elected, and if she acquits the defendant her career will be advanced by a sizeable campaign contribution (and she might also get some side benefits, such as being invited to a prestigious country club), but if she convicts, her career advancement will possibly be blocked (for the company will fund her opponent). ¹⁷ Of course, the judge remains free to decide, and the civically inclined would treat her harshly for succumbing to this pressure—after all, she has a civic duty to stand up to this sort of thing. She is certainly not subject to anything approaching Pettitian domination. But if the system regularly allows such pressures to be placed upon the judge, we have a hard time declaring her to be as free as a judge who has been shielded from such large carrots and small sticks. Note that in the scenario I have drawn the judge does not face serious threats to life or liberty—if she did, she would face simple Pettitian domination. What she faces is corrupting dependence.

On an individual moral level, this does not absolve her of responsibility. We would still say that she is morally free to decide. Of course, we might also say this if she faced the threat of imminent death as well, but on the Pettitian account of liberty we would clearly not call such a situation free (though on a Pettitian account it remains unclear just what type of coercion would absolve one of moral responsibility). But when we evaluate the regime in which this situation is possible, we are inclined to think it less free than one where this relationship did not obtain, and insofar as the judge is not enjoying the independence necessary for her civic office, she, on an individual level, lacks a degree of civic liberty. If a situation obtained in which many or all civic offices—including the most basic office of elector—systemically faced such distorting incentives, we might well think that liberty—both at the level of the individual and at a civic level—was negatively affected. Ruth Grant has offered an important argument for the manner in which incentives reduce individual liberty (she considers things like plea-bargaining, tax code deductions, IMF loan conditions, etc.). Her point is that there are powers that are below the level of what we would typically characterize as coercion that nonetheless are ethically problematic, undermining individual autonomy. ¹⁸ Whether we accept this argument or not—and there is much more to be said on the question of how incentives affect liberty—the civic republican tradition has typically been worried about this type of incentive becoming systemic, and hence speaks of economic dependence with the same opprobrium that it reserves for domination. The rhetorical stance of the civic republican often plays both sides of this moral equation, treating the corrupted as blameable (hence free) and yet socially determined (unfree). Writers like Machiavelli, La Boétie, or Harrington consistently blame slavish subjects for their voluntary subjection yet at the same time point out the manner in which lack of civic freedom habituates them to servitude. Hence, Machiavelli can decry as slavish, cowardly, and unvirtuous those who allow themselves to become dependent on others, but he does not limit himself to moral disapprobation; rather, he champions institutional and legal mechanisms to diminish the possibility of elites making people dependent upon them. Note his celebration of the punishment of Spurius Maelius, whose crime was to have fed the public from his own stores in a time of famine. ¹⁹ No doubt Maelius would have faced no punishment had he quietly given the grain to the city to distribute; as it was, his action was interpreted as an attempt to corrupt the populace and acquire partisans. Just as Machiavelli approves of the punishment of Maelius, so too does he approve of the “uncorrupted” populace that spurned the attempt by Spurius Cassius to give them a gift: “they refused it outright, since it seemed to them that Spurius was offering it them as the price of their liberty. Whereas, had the population been corrupt, they would have accepted the money, and would have opened the way to tyranny.” ²⁰ Machiavelli thought civic liberty endangered by these attempts at private beneficence which corrupt the beneficiaries. As Eric Nelson notes, “Throughout the Discorsi Machiavelli insists that an uncorrupt republic will simply not have citizens who are capable of such ‘liberality.’” ²¹ In treating the mere attempt to give a gift as corrupting and compromising liberty, republican discourse of this sort is analytically messier than the Pettitian view, which makes freedom a status in which an individual is shielded from the possibility of arbitrary interference. ²²

Now, Pettit is not unconcerned with corruption—he worries about officeholders abusing their positions and breaking laws and regulations for personal gain. His solution to this problem is to have checks on power, transparency, mechanisms to screen out “knaves,” and a strong group ethic that shames those who deviate from accepted norms. ²³ Without considering the merits of these proposals, let us simply note that they all depend on viewing corruption in terms of individual officeholders deviating from their duty and breaking laws or regulations. Corruption is simply one way in which power can be abused and people dominated. There is little space in Pettit’s view for the position that the offer—or even the mere capacity to offer—a reward (legal or otherwise) might constitute in itself a relationship in which freedom is compromised in any way, nor is there anything in his work approaching the social psychology of corruption that we most associate with the civic republican tradition.

If republican liberty is the absence of dependence on the will of others, Pettit wishes to limit our attention to dependence in the form of domination, or subjection to arbitrary interference. There is analytical cleanliness in this that is missing in Skinner’s treatment. But in excluding bribery and reward from domination, Pettit has distanced himself from much of the republican tradition that he wishes to claim for ancestry. For republican worries about dependence corruption stem from a view that liberty is threatened as much—if not more—by systemic anti-civic inclinations and temptations as it is by straightforward domination. Let us illustrate this difference by comparing two of the thinkers in the pantheon of new republicanism.

Dependence and Freedom: Locke and Harrington

Skinner, momentarily ignoring Pocock’s dictum that English republicanism was a language rather than a program ²⁴ or unified theory, writes that “the theory” of republican freedom was developed by Harrington, “further developed” by Locke and Sidney, and later “deployed” by Bolingbroke and by Trenchard and Gordon. ²⁵ Pettit follows Skinner’s lead, offering the same list of authors as champions of the view that freedom means non-domination. But even on first glimpse there is something jarring in a reading that would locate Harrington and Locke under the same banner. A brief inquiry will confirm our suspicion that an important distinction has been ignored in constructing this genealogy.

Locke’s definition of liberty accords well with Pettit’s non-domination: “The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the common-wealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it.” ²⁶ Subjection to “absolute, arbitrary power” is illegitimate for no one can reasonably place their life in the hands of another (nor has one a natural right to, but that is a more complicated subject). Thus, killing thieves is rational (if the law is not available), for the thief attempts to take away one’s liberty and even if the thief has no intention of harming one, one must assume that he would be willing to do so—that is, to put it in Pettitian terms, I cannot allow myself to be put in a condition of domination even if the master is kind because liberty is more than the mere absence of interference. Locke was not objecting to interference, but to domination, the condition of being subject to arbitrary power. But did Locke offer the intellectual resources for treating corruption as a source of slavery?

For the most part, Locke was not preoccupied with the phenomena typically described as corrupt by republican writers. He did, however, engage briefly in the type of language that would become a staple of Whig ideology and subsequent “country” opposition. The Second Treatise offers the following attack on an overreaching executive: “He acts also contrary to his trust, when he either employs the force, treasure, and offices of the society, to corrupt the representatives, and gain them to his purposes: or openly pre-engages the electors, and prescribes to their choice, such, whom he has, by solicitations, threats, promises, or otherwise, won to his designs.” ²⁷ It is important that representatives be “freely chosen” by electors and that they be able “freely [to] act, and advise, as the necessity of the common-wealth, and the public good should, upon examination, and mature debate, be judged to require.” Locke, here, lumps together two different phenomena—one is, of course, James II’s revamping of borough charters and his intervention in elections to rig them in favour of his supporters. ²⁸ This is a simple example of the king abusing prerogative and undermining the institution of parliament, and it is the sort of abuse entirely in keeping with domination decried by Pettit. But Locke equally speaks of corruption as a means with which the executive can undermine liberty—it is not merely threats, but “solicitations” and “promises” that can undermine the liberty of representatives to act in the public good.

Quentin Skinner notes the manner in which bribes are treated as coercion in this passage, and he suggests that it raised an important question: how much does corruption, or James’s solicitations, count as a break on freedom? ²⁹ Skinner argues that for those thinkers adopting the liberal notion of freedom (notably Bentham) the question had a clear answer: not at all. But Skinner hints, in a manner consistent with his favourite “neo-Roman” authors, that dependence has a capacious meaning, covering more than mere subjection to coercion, but also covering other types of threats and inducements that take place in a formally free society: “The triumph of free markets, with the concomitant collapse of trade union movements, has left successive governments subject to blackmail by multinational corporations while leaving the workforce increasingly dependent on the arbitrary power of employers.” ³⁰ These are the issues that make the resurrection of republican liberty an important political task today. Republican liberty is as much endangered by dependence on wealthy corporations as it is on outright coercion. ³¹

Now, Locke’s suggestion that a representative’s capacity to act and to advise freely might be undermined by corrupt inducements is in keeping with the tradition to which Lessig appeals, and it is the basis for the constant worry expressed by eighteenth-century “patriots” that the representative function of parliament was being distorted. It is, however, difficult on a Lockean account to view a member of parliament’s—or an elector’s—tendency to lean towards the interests of his benefactors as an instance of non-freedom. Where the representative is concerned, such leaning breaches an important trust whose purpose is to protect freedom, but it is not in itself an example of slavery. Nor indeed could one be considered unfree if one is in a state of significant economic disadvantage. For after all, Locke was quite clear to distinguish between servitude and slavery. ³² Certainly Skinner’s concern with the blackmail of governments or the dependence of workforces on their employers would have elicited from Locke a supercilious shrug. As long as the employer does not have the arbitrary power to kill or maim the servant and as long as the servant has access to labour somewhere, there is no lack of liberty. If anything, the form of corruption that Locke most worried about was the laxity of the work ethic: “The growth of the poor must have some other cause; and it can be nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners.” ³³ He proceeded to argue that beggars should be arrested and made to do hard labour or pressed into naval service, and anyone complaining of unemployment should be forced to accept employment at a lower than normal rate, or be forced into maritime service. There is equally a duty on the part of the propertied—instead of paying their parish tax for relief of the poor, those in the parish will be instructed to pay wages (at a lower rate) to the unemployed and instructed to set them to work. In this way, the unemployed will no longer be able to complain of lack of work and to claim the right of necessity on that basis. For Locke, this disciplining of labour is not in the least a form of dependence undermining freedom, for one is never truly dependent who has hands (if one really doesn’t like the state of the labour market, one is free to go live in some vacuis locis). In this sense, we cannot on a Lockean account see the “arbitrary power of employers” as a break on freedom save in such instances where the aspiring worker faces absolute exclusion from the labour market and hence the possibility of starvation; nor can we argue that inducements and solicitations offered to political representatives somehow undermine their liberty. If successful, they might weaken the capacity of the institution of parliament to fulfil its function of honest representation, and hence to be an instrument by which the governed express consent. ³⁴ This is no small matter, of course, but it is important to distinguish it from the claim that the systemic inequalities that allow for corrupting inducements undermine liberty.

James Harrington, however, worried about both types of dependence, being subject to arbitrary power (domination) and being in a condition of economic inferiority (corrupting dependence). Harrington argued that you could not have a commonwealth (or popular regime) if you did not have a large degree of material equality. That is, the economic foundation determines the political superstructure. ³⁵ If an individual or class overpowers the others in property, that individual or class will attain “empire” over the others, and if there is a mismatch between foundation and superstructure there is bound to be conflict. If there is no proper balance, the competing property holders will struggle for power; this was a perpetual source of strife in Rome and ultimately the cause of its downfall. ³⁶ In Harrington’s interpretation of English history, the “Gothick” or feudal constitution was itself a poor construction in which the king and nobles lived on the backs of the people all the while struggling against one another. The crown had finally done in the nobility with Henry VII’s banning of noble retainers, or dependents that owed them military service, and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the sale of whose land created a strong class of gentry and freeholding yeomanry. This was a Pyrrhic victory for the crown, since the result was that the balance of property was overwhelmingly in the “people”—civil war was bound to come once a prince “as stiff in disputes as the nerve of the monarchy was grown slack” started testing the limits of his power. ³⁷ For the effects of the two kings’ policies, Harrington argued, was that “the yeomanry or middle people, who living not in a servile or indigent fashion, were much unlinked from dependence upon their lords, and living in a free and plentiful manner, became a more excellent infantry, but such a one upon which the lords had so little power, that from henceforth they may be computed to have been disarmed.” ³⁸ The nobility had been the monarch’s main support, but once they were diminished in power and the gentry and yeomanry raised to sufficient independence (in property and arms), a popular government was in the offing.

The entire Harringtonian edifice was constructed on the principle that “the man that cannot live upon his own must be a servant; but he that can live upon his own may be a freeman.” ³⁹ Pettit, bizarrely, attempts to explain away this line as a vestige of a “premodern” set of prejudices: “it went without saying among premoderns that the state could aspire to realize the ideal only for a small élite of males.” ⁴⁰ Perhaps. But this unfortunate generalization discounts the most essential aspect of Harrington’s argument—the relationship between property and independence—as a mere prejudice from an unenlightened age. Hence Pettit can insist that “there is no reason to think that by equalizing holdings, and by equalizing the extent of undominated choice, the state may be expected to maximize the overall level of nondomination in society.” ⁴¹ For Harrington, there was every reason to think such a thing (though he would not have worried much about “undominated choice” ⁴² ).

“Equalizing holdings” is misleading; balancing holdings is more accurate. Harrington was no leveller—indeed, his system, akin to the type of agrarian democracy celebrated in Aristotle (Politics 1318b), entails a class division between “horse” (people with £100 or more a year) and “foot.” Sovereignty is divided between the “natural aristocracy,” the Senate, and the popular body, the Prerogative. The senate, composed entirely of Horse, debates and proposes laws; the Prerogative, which is three parts horse and four parts foot, does not debate but votes on laws. Thus, while he quoted with approval the Machiavellian dictum that the way to destroy a republic is to establish a nobility who “bring in the rest to dependence upon themselves” ⁴³ and who are dependent on the prince for their condition, he thought that a free republic could be well served by a strong nobility as long as offices rotated, wealth (particularly land) was kept from becoming excessive, and a strong class of farmer-soldiers had its power entrenched. You needed “unto the support of a true and natural aristocracy, the deepest root of a democracy that hath been planted.” ⁴⁴ That is, aristocracy could be prevented from becoming oligarchy, but only if you divided the roles between class-based bodies and, more importantly, preserved the economic base. Since no decision could be made without the assent of the more popular body, the wealthy could not simply rule in their own interest. But since power follows property, this structure was only going to remain viable if the “natural aristocracy” could not “overbalance” the popular element, making the people dependent on them. Hence, the most important element of the constitution was the establishment, through an agrarian law, of upper limits on the level of inequality in land. No one was to be able to inherit more land than is worth £2000 per year (or £500 for Scots). ⁴⁵ Finally, dependencies would be prevented with frequent elections and the rotation of offices, ensuring widespread participation and preventing entrenched interests in civic offices.

Note that Harrington’s class divisions are also divisions of military function: property, arms, and citizenship are inseparable. For a state to be corrupt is for it to lack the capacity to protect its independence; to be corrupt as an individual is to lack the vigour of a citizen, who defends his freedom with his own arms. There is perhaps nothing that more undermines Pettit’s republican credentials than his (thoroughly sensible) championing of a professional army. ⁴⁶ If Aristotle had insisted that “those who carry arms can always determine the fate of the constitution” (Politics, 1329a12), the Machiavellian innovation was to have made arms more than a necessary condition of liberty, but the very soul of liberty itself. Harrington shared Machiavelli’s disapproval of those who pay others for their defence when he wrote, “we, excusing the rich and arming the poor, become the vassals of our servants, they [the Romans], by excusing the poor and arming such as were rich enough to be freemen, became lords of the earth.” ⁴⁷ That systemic corruption should emerge from dependence on the arms of others is not a theme that arises in Pettit. (Indeed, on Pettit’s view of freedom as non-domination, there are no compelling objections to, say, the U.S. government’s current reliance on military contractors.) The standing army was a constant source of worry for republicans not merely because an armed caste of soldiers risked dominating others (though this is, of course, a dominant concern), but also because being unengaged in the defense of one’s country rendered one passively dependent (just as standing armies are composed of people dependent upon some particular person or power).

We can see why Harrington celebrated Machiavelli as the “only politician who has gone about to retrieve” ancient political thought. Harrington’s insistence on the danger of property imbalance also has a clear Machiavellian ring. The Florentine had written, “corruption of this kind and ineptitude for a free mode of life is due to the inequality one finds in a city.” ⁴⁸ But Harrington was, as we have seen, somewhat more sanguine (and far less sanguinary) about the existence of a nobility than his inspiration, Machiavelli, who counseled, as a defence against corruption in a free regime, the elimination of idle gentlemen, going so far as to approve of killing them if they make an appearance in an uncorrupted state (though he nonetheless appeared content with the Roman senatorial class’s imperial rapacity). ⁴⁹ Harrington thought the world could do without slothful parasites, but he valued the leisured class that he, following Aristotle, thought most fit for civic business. What Machiavelli had seen as a source of strength for Rome—the tension between the Patricians and Plebeians—was for Harrington the sign of a rotten foundation upon which the structure was bound eventually to collapse. ⁵⁰ The agrarian balance established by Harrington and the attendant political structure which divides the functions of government according to class were intended to create a perpetual harmony between the Senate and the people in a manner that the Roman agrarian laws had failed to do. If the balance could be made to hold, gentlemen would not be able to build up private armies of servants or be able to control the small freeholders. For all the un-Machiavellian tenor of Harrington’s desire to establish eternal harmony between the classes, he clearly had learned the lesson that Roman corruption was born of gentlemen becoming richer than citizenship should allow.

Philip Pettit claims Harringtonian ancestry when he calls for a welfare state to prevent individuals from being subject to arbitrary power by economically dominant actors, ⁵¹ but Pettit’s worry about economic power resulting in domination is distinct from Harrington’s worry about property imbalance sapping civic spirit and creating dependence. Pettit’s worry is not about inequality serving to lessen civic virtue or about a given class or group attaining excessive economic weight; it is not about the enervating nature of luxury or the manner in which excessive inequality makes the less wealthy easy prey for corruption and transforms them into petty, small-minded courtiers rather than active citizens; nor yet is it about the manner in which it renders private interest the enemy of public interest: it is rather about individuals not having to be in a position of depending on the whim of an individual or group for survival. Pettit thinks an employer must not have sufficient arbitrary power to threaten a person with “destitution.” ⁵² This is consistent with the principles animating Locke’s views on the right of necessity. For the very thing that made Locke insist that property owners had to give the destitute access to labour was the principle that one cannot employ economic inequality to exercise absolute, arbitrary power over someone. Pettit would no doubt set the bar for destitution somewhat higher than Locke, for the type of servant–master relationship that Locke thought acceptable would no doubt be read by Pettit as dominating. But the principle is the same: inequality ought not to permit the exercise of absolute, arbitrary power. For the rest, Pettitian non-domination does not conceive of economic balance as mitigating the related diseases of corrupting dependence and servitude. He writes, “In order for the state to provide one person with extra resources, and thereby to extend their undominated choices, it must deprive another person of those resources, and must thereby reduce the extent of that person’s undominated choices. There is no reason to think that the transfer will make for a gain.” ⁵³ This calculus for the maximization of undominated choices is entirely removed from Harrington’s desire to fix the balance of property. (It is also somewhat distant from Machiavelli, who insisted not on individual choice but on channelling citizens’ energies through the artificial necessity of good laws.) For Pettit (as for Locke) the dependency relationship between the propertied and the poor is problematic when the power imbalance entails a relationship approaching coercion—the poor person has no other option but obedience or “destitution.” Hence some constitutionally fixed welfare provision must be provided. But Pettit’s concern is domination, not corrupting dependence; his defence of the welfare state and of checks on employers’ arbitrary rights to fire at will is not based on a Harringtonian precedent, for it is not intended to prevent citizens from being purchasable, but rather to prevent property from becoming a means of coercion or domination. ⁵⁴

The worry about corrupting dependence equally informs other writers in the pantheon of the new republicanism. Consider Rousseau’s preoccupation with dependence as a condition incompatible with citizenship. Pettit claims a Rousseauian pedigree, ⁵⁵ and he sounds Rousseauian when he writes that republicanism “will seek to foster a form of life within which each is able to look other in the eye, in a shared awareness of not being dependent on their good will.” ⁵⁶ But such independence, for Rousseau, required much more than the mechanism of the general will which Pettit discusses, and the existence of relationships of dependence is much more corrupting in Rousseau’s mind than Pettit would think. Rousseau called for a thorough attention to property imbalance, and a constitutional and pedagogical effort of unparalleled proportions. Pettit argues that “people may choose to make themselves dependent on one another’s good will, and this may be a source of fruitful relationships between them, but they will not have vulnerability or dependency thrust upon them.” ⁵⁷ In this, he captures only the second half of Rousseau’s dictum that “no citizen should be so rich as to be capable of buying another citizen, and none so poor that he is forced to sell himself.” ⁵⁸ Rousseau’s double imperative is born of the view that material inequality will breed a thoroughly corrupting dependence. This preoccupation with dependence is, incidentally, why Rousseau was so prickly about accepting gifts, since he felt every gift to be a mark of slavery. The need for independence is why Rousseau’s Émile must learn carpentry, for it is a simple trade that he can exercise in his own shop—be his own boss, and thus independent of fortune. ⁵⁹ “Man is weak when he is dependent, and he is emancipated from that dependence when he is robust.” ⁶⁰ Rousseau went so far as to point out that dependency-servitude does not merely affect the poor, but affects the rich who depend on their servants. Dependency is universally corrupting. There is a great deal more to be said about the political, psychological, and metaphysical dimensions of independence in Rousseau’s thought, but it will suffice for our purposes to note that Rousseau fully approved of the motivation behind the Roman agrarian laws, though he thought, with Machiavelli, that the Gracchi had erred, since their introduction of laws came in a time that was so corrupt that they merely made matters worse.

It would take us into complicated territory to explore the way in which Harringtonian worries about dependence were taken up by those eighteenth-century writers Pocock has termed “neo-Harringtonians,” ⁶¹ Lord Bolingbroke and the authors of Cato’s Letters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, but a brief word on this is worthwhile given the place Pettit accords to them in his republican genealogy. ⁶² Bolingbroke and “Cato” were thoroughly indebted to Harrington’s historical narrative and his view that power follows property, but they had a more conservative view of where the proper balance of both should lie. Unlike Harrington, who wanted to build a new commonwealth on stones roughly hewed out of ancient literature, Bolingbroke simply wanted to resurrect what he thought to be the genius of the English constitution, ⁶³ the balance between King, Lords, and Commons. ⁶⁴ On Bolingbroke’s thesis, there was a danger of the court and its ministry managing, through national debt, placemen, and patronage so to overpower the estates that it would be able to make them dependent upon it. ⁶⁵ The integrity of the constitution “depends on the freedom and the independency of Parliament.” ⁶⁶ “Freedom and independency” are synonyms, and they are equally synonymous with property, for the root of the problem is the ability of the court (and the Minister) to subvert the constitution by subjecting members of the two houses to “private influence.” ⁶⁷ And it is the new bureaucratic-financial state that, with an ever-expanding series of administrative posts and sinecures, with novel financial instruments for floating debt, and with a monopoly on places, is undermining the independence of the freeholder and nobility: “immense wealth of particular men is a circumstance which always attends national poverty, and is in a great measure the cause of it.” ⁶⁸ No Gracchus, Bolingbroke: the call here was simply for frequent elections, the reduction of public debt and the elimination of a standing army and of placemen, things that would bring relationships of dependence back to the proper order of the ancient constitution.

Something similar may be said of “Cato,” who echoed Harrington, writing “A free People are kept so, by no other Means than an equal Distribution of Property; every Man, who has a Share of Property, having a proportional Share of Power.” ⁶⁹ But “Cato” thought levelling neither possible nor desirable. ⁷⁰ Rather, Trenchard and Gordon, like Bolingbroke, favoured the kind of institutional measures to reduce the power of the purse available to ministers and to wealthy financiers. These inheritors of the thesis that power follows property worried about imbalance, this time due to radical innovations in finance and public debt and innovations like the South Sea Company. “Cato” laments that exclusive companies “alter the Balance of our Government.” “Very great Riches in private Men are always dangerous to States, because they create a greater Dependence than can be consistent with the Security of any sort of Government whatsoever.” ⁷¹ Without the Harringtonian thought that liberty rests on property and that strong imbalances of property cause corrupt dependencies to arise, their constant denunciation of corruption as tyranny would merely look like hyperbole. Stock-Jobbing is not domination, after all. Trenchard and Gordon did not want to see property balanced in a Harringtonian fashion primarily because they did not want to see popular government. But they might not have objected to hanging of the odd director of the South-Sea Company. ⁷²

More than attacks on arbitrary power and domination, then, these texts were complaints about corrupting dependence, and their shared aim was to remove the source of illegitimate influence by cutting down to size those who had amassed a wealth disproportionate to their rightful constitutional place.

Citizenship, Office, and Independence: Excluding the Dependent

The republican view that inequality can breed corrupting dependence—dependence that renders one incapable of civic virtue—need not necessarily serve egalitarian purposes. On most accounts, republican citizenship is conceived of as a civic status conferring not only legal protection but the possibility or duty of bearing offices. If blocking corrupting dependence entails ceilings on wealth, it also demands floors. Not only does excessive wealth undermine character, encouraging subjection to one’s lusts, ⁷³ but insufficient wealth destroys civic-virtue. Trenchard and Gordon wrote, “where there are Wealth and Power, there will always be Crowds of servile Dependents. . . . Poverty dejects the Mind, fashions it for Slavery, and renders it incapable of opposing any bold Usurpations.” ⁷⁴ For all the Stoic cant of eighteenth-century champions of civic-virtue, “Cato” here places quite a lot of weight on the externals in determining character.

Property qualifications have, historically, had numerous justifications—they can exclude those who have no time for deliberation, or who are perceived to be less “excellent” in the necessary qualities. They can exist to make sure that government protects property. Another typical justification is that given by Locke: representation is to be established “in all places, that have a right to be distinctly represented, which no part of the people however incorporated can pretend to, but in proportion to the assistance, which it affords to the publick.” ⁷⁵ By assistance, here, he means payment of the land tax. So, in effect, no representation without taxation, or “you pays your nickel and you takes your choice.” ⁷⁶ But those who worry about corrupting dependence think the franchise is unsafe with the poor because of their dependence on others. When the Republican Party candidate for the U.S. presidency Rick Perry blustered during a primary debate, “If you are saying I can be bought for $5000, I am offended,” many commentators pointed out that the correct response would have been to ask, “what is your price, governor?” One justification for excluding the propertyless from the franchise was always that their price was too low. William Blackstone wrote that property qualifications existed “to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these persons had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some influence or other. This would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty.” If they could be expected not to be bought, there would be no reason to exclude them, wrote Blackstone, but since poverty makes them too susceptible “all popular states have been obliged to establish certain qualifications; whereby some, who are suspected to have no will of their own, are excluded from voting, in order to set other individuals, whose wills may be supposed independent, more thoroughly upon a level with each other.” ⁷⁷ Note that Blackstone’s argument had to do neither with the rational inadequacies of the poor nor their lack of leisure for proper deliberation, but rather with a temptation that one must necessarily impute to them. Blackstone’s assumption, which he suggests is universal, has a somewhat anti-Machiavellian tenor, for it attributes to the popolo a grasping, corrupt tendency while according the grandi the distinction of being high-minded, like Governor Perry.

This consideration is also the basis for one of the more compelling philosophical distinctions in the political thought of Immanuel Kant, namely, that between the wigmaker and the hairdresser. ⁷⁸ One is worthy of full civic rights and the other is not. Modern readers of Kant like to pass over the passage with an indulgent smile, but Kant is alluding to a significant republican principle that active citizenship requires “independence,” and independence requires property–in Kant’s case, you have to be able to alienate an object, rather than perform a service. ⁷⁹ (Naturally, this concern for independence was also a basis for gender exclusions.) This is the issue that Skinner has flagged in the English republican debates of the 1640s and 1650s, where the subject of the extent of the franchise was intimately tied to the degree to which people could be thought capable of independence, and hence responsibility and virtue. “To be ‘your own man,’ rather than someone else’s creature, and hence to be in possession of true manhood, requires that you should be able to act sui iuris, to make up your own mind independently of the will and desires of anyone else.” ⁸⁰ This was, as we have seen, certainly Harrington’s view: liberty was equivalent to economic independence. Thus, “if a man has prodigally wasted and spent his patrimony, he is neither capable of magistracy, office, nor suffrage in the commonwealth.” ⁸¹ The importance of independence justifies the exclusion of servants from the franchise and it justifies property qualifications for the Senate, for property is the equipment of virtue and the nobles of Oceana, “having no stamp whence to derive their price, can have it no otherwise than by their intrinsic value.” ⁸²

The view that poverty renders people easy prey to dependence relationships is an old mainstay of the anti-corruption movement. Decent salaries on the part of officials, it is often argued, will mitigate the tendency to solicit or accept bribes (legal or otherwise). Lessig, in his concern with institutional corruption, voices this concern, devoting a chapter to the argument that low congressional pay makes congresspeople liable to seek post-congress, highly paid employment with lobbying firms. ⁸³ Whether increased pay for representatives would reduce the oligarchic nature of American politics is an open question. ⁸⁴ But the principle behind the proposal is clear: civic duty will not bear economic inferiority.

Conclusion

I have indicated some shortcomings in Pettit’s appropriation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors but my purpose has not been to quibble or to deny him the right to deploy their work in novel ways. My point is rather that Pettit’s vices are a function of his virtue: his analytical cleanliness—his desire to conceive of republican freedom as infringed by arbitrary harms rather than voluntary benefits—distorts the modern republican tradition. He has rightly wanted to avoid confounding subjection to arbitrary power with concern about corrupting dependence generated by material inequality; inequality matters for him insofar as it cashes out in domination, not corrupting dependency. I have not suggested that Pettit contradicts himself; on the contrary, he is fully consistent. But in interpreting the republican tradition in this way he makes the constant republican lamentations about corruption as tyranny come across as fuzzy-thinking hyperbole. The polysemous nature of the word “dependence” captures both subjection to violent coercion and subjection to corrupting temptation under the same heading, and republican writers have historically tended to worry about both types of dependence—often they would even confound them, noting the similar political and social-psychological effects of servility, whether born of appetite or aversion, hope or fear. When Maurizio Viroli condemns Italians for becoming, under Berlusconi, a nation of courtiers rather than citizens he is aware that this vice is not for the most part a product of simple coercion—Berlusconi had no black shirts in his service. ⁸⁵ But when one man is able, through vast wealth, to create such a towering system of personal dependence he can strike as decisive a blow against civic liberty as any tyrant.

I do not wish to enter into a semantic battle over what constitutes “true” republicanism; I do wish to emphasise that if republican freedom means independence upon the will of another, that independence can mean very different things. If dependence means subjection to absolute, arbitrary power, then the basic institutions of the liberal-democratic state will suffice, with greater or lesser state intervention depending on, to use Pettit’s phrase, “empirical contingencies.” ⁸⁶ But if dependence means that citizens and officeholders have their civic judgment clouded by uncivic inclinations born of radical material inequalities, then more drastic remedies are entailed. ⁸⁷ Those who articulated a fear of corrupting dependence were not all radical egalitarians—as we saw in the last section, the worry about corrupting dependence could also serve to exclude servants and women from the franchise. But the common element was that they did not see the issue of dependence merely in terms of capacities for individual agents to dominate others; rather, dependence was a more insidious corrosion of civic spirit rooted in an imbalance of property.

In this essay, we have focused on Harrington’s attempt to lower England’s GINI coefficient through state intervention in inheritance, but the view that dependence makes one a slave can be deployed by opponents of large and small government alike. Paul Rahe worries that “those consigned to the dole” will develop “a dependence upon the generosity of an all-encompassing state,” ⁸⁸ and there is a tradition of seeing welfare as something that saps civic spirit. (Pettit himself treats this as a plausible claim.) There is a strong line of anti-government feeling that could draw happily from Bolingbroke and “Cato” given that the main source of dependency they worried about was that which stemmed from court appointments. It is for this reason that Rahe decries Skinner’s republicanism as having “despotic propensities.” ⁸⁹ Somewhat heated, perhaps, but Rahe has rightly noted that Skinner’s reading of dependence puts him much more in the camp of Rousseau and Harrington than Bolingbroke and “Cato.” (At the same time, there are passages in Cato’s Letters that would be well received at a Wall Street occupation.) The point is, to worry about dependency corruption does not commit one to an endorsement or rejection of radical material equality; it does commit one to conceiving of integrity in terms of some balance of property.

Let us conclude, then, with Lawrence Lessig’s proposals for addressing systemic, corrupting dependence in the American congress. Lessig’s worries about dependence corruption are tied to concerns about the radical inequality that has emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. His view is that this inequality has not been a mere result of market forces (he is not opposed to inequalities developing in the free market), but rather as a result of government interventions into the economy that have been purchased by lobbyists. Enormous wealth transfers have been able to take place because of state capture in the form of institutional “dependence corruption” largely created by the demands of campaign fundraising. Lessig’s solution is to realign this dependence through a scheme to democratize campaign finance without either limiting speech or suffering from the problem of other public financing laws in which people’s taxes pay for speech with which they disagree. The scheme would give every taxpayer a $50 “democracy voucher” to allocate to the party or candidate of her choice. She would additionally be entitled to make a personal donation not exceeding $100. This is an intriguing plan, but the result that one might envision is simply that the wealth of oligarchs would find another way to capture electors and legislators. Lessig himself notes that this is a concern—it is possible, for instance, that large corporations would turn to massive independent expenditure (much like the current “super-PACs”). ⁹⁰ Lessig ultimately thinks some sort of constitutional amendment will be required.

But the difficulty, a Harringtonian or Rousseauian would say, is that these solutions do not strike at the root of the problem because corrupting dependency is a result of an unbalanced regime. If power follows property, the superstructure will follow the base in spite of institutional arrangements. Harrington’s equal agrarian is an anachronism, and it could be argued that it was not only wildly utopian but anachronistic when Harrington articulated it himself. I do not propose to venture into the heady task of crafting ideal cities; I merely wish to insist that republican worries about corruption will not be addressed on a theory of freedom that only conceives of dependence in the form of domination.