Corruption as systemic political decay

I Introduction

According to Transparency International, corruption is a serious problem today. Only two ¹ of the 176 countries surveyed score above 90% (equivalent to an ‘A’ in cleanliness) and over two-thirds score below 50%, which indicates that the majority of representative governments suffer from ‘endemic corruption’, a kind of ‘systemic grand corruption [that] violates human rights, prevents sustainable development and fuels social exclusion’. ² Even if the Corruption Perceptions Index attempts to explicitly account for systemic corruption – as opposed to mere cash for votes, quid pro quo corruption – the current definition of political corruption does not yet allow for an accurate measurement of its structural layer because it remains blind to the role procedures and political institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning. In this article, I argue that we are working with an imperfect, reductionist explanation of political corruption that, even if it allows for quantitative research and generalizations based on discreet observable variables, it does not capture the broader, more intractable and pernicious form of systemic corruption that ancient and modern political thinkers wanted to avoid.

The predominant definition of corruption as illegal actions concerning public officials is narrower and departs in significant ways from the meaning that was attached to corruption in earlier periods of Western thought. ³ Our current understanding of political corruption is positivist and individualistic, which has served well the research model that became hegemonic in the social sciences in the 1990s and that demanded the development of concepts that could be easily measured and plugged into large N-models. Corruption has thus been conveniently reduced to its most visible and clear expressions: illegal acts involving public officials (e.g. bribery, fraud, nepotism). But even if the reduction of political corruption to a discreet set of expressions serves the reliable measurement of the phenomenon, this account can only be partial since it is clear that political corruption is a slow-moving process, where meaningful change in the independent variable occurs only over the long run, tending then, in practice, to fall off the radar within this type of quantitative methodology. ⁴

Despite a recent renewed empirical interest on systemic corruption and the most effective ways to deal with it, ⁵ the concept is yet to be adequately defined and understood. The bulk of research done on corruption is policy-oriented, aimed at ameliorating the negative economic consequences associated with corruption, especially in the developing world. ⁶

Corruption is thus presented as if it were a matter of misconduct on the part of public officials who are seen, especially in poor countries, as pursuing their own private interests and likely to act corruptly in return for money and other favours, thereby undermining economic development. ⁷

The few attempts at engaging with the concept at a theoretical level fall short from fully conceiving the fundamentally systemic nature of political corruption ⁹ or adequately grounding it on intellectual history and its contexts, ¹⁰ and thus potentially liable to anachronism through ‘mythologies of doctrines’. ¹¹ This article will contribute to this emerging theoretical literature by providing a contextualized theoretical analysis of a type of political corruption that seems to be a systemic feature of all constitutional popular governments. I will argue that systemic corruption, which encompasses structural forms of corruption such as legal and institutional corruption, is not only different from the actor-based meanings of the term – the bending and breaking of the law by a clan or class for their own benefit, or the buying of political influences by private interest – but also differs from definitions of corruption as the undermining of the rule of law. ¹² Systemic corruption is a term that seems to directly address the nature of the superstructure and not the manipulation or dismantling of a structure that is seen as the normative ground for neutrality.

II Systemic political corruption in ancient thought

Even though today we associate corruption with illegal action, the etymological origin of the word has a far more complex meaning. The Greek ancestor of the word corruption has been traced to phthora (ϕθορά), which meant destruction, decay and ‘passing away’ as correlative to genesis – the beginning of a process. ¹³ While in early pre-Socratic texts the word was used only to denote the moral degradation of women and youth, and the ruining of crops due to bad weather, the concept appears to acquire a decisively abstract meaning in the sixth-century BC. The theoretical conception of phthora was first developed, according to Aristotle, by Thales of Miletus, the founder of the school of philosophy who identified unchangeable elements in nature, principles that are ‘neither generated nor destroyed, but persist eternally’. ¹⁴ The physicists attempted to understand how plurality in the cosmos could be generated from matter as a ‘single underlying substance’. Anaximander argued that matter was governed by a ‘diversifying antithesis’ in which matter is constantly being generated through ‘condensation and rarefication’ and that phthora was the natural process through which things returned to the original, indefinite principle. ¹⁵ Empedocles and Anaxagoras assigned a direction to this poietic process of generation. While for Empedocles generation of matter was circular, always coming back to its starting point, for Anaxagoras this movement was spiral, never repeating itself. ¹⁶

The concept of corruption acquired a political meaning when it was first attached to the constitution of the state by Plato and then furthered analysed by Aristotle in the Politics – work explicitly dedicated to the analysis of the corruption (ϕθορᾶ) and preservation of constitutions. I would argue both authors developed their conception of corruption responding to their own sociopolitical context, and thus we should analyse their ideas on political corruption as inherently tied to a stable democratic regime in a diminished, post-imperial Athens. Through a contextual analysis of their ideas, in what follows I show that while for Plato the source of corruption in democracy was the constitutive principle of liberty, which gradually eroded hierarchies and rule, for Aristotle corruption sprung from the full realization of the principle of equal share in government.

Since the series of constitutional reforms begun by Cleisthenes (508/7 BC) based on the principle of isonomia (ἰσονομία), right up to Pericles’s pro-democratic policies, the popular sectors in Ancient Athens were gradually empowered until acquiring pre-eminence. By the fourth century, almost all magistrates were selected by lottery from a broad pool of citizens ¹⁷ who enjoyed isegoria (ἰσηγορία) – the equal right to speak to the assembly – and were paid by the state to exercise political power. ¹⁸ The empowerment of non-elite citizens came hand in hand with Athens’ increased naval power and state revenue and with the diminishing of the elite’s institutional power. While during Athens golden years the increased participation of the masses in political power was financed through colonial tributes and high production of state silver mines, after Athens lost its empire and the production of mines begun to decrease, equal share in government was mostly financed through indirect taxation on the leisured classes, whose political influence decreased especially after the aristocratic Areopagus was stripped from its veto power. ¹⁹

An Athenian citizen of high status, Plato, came of age in the midst of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), in which Athens was ultimately defeated, and the long-time brewing 411 oligarchic coup. ²⁰ After the restoration of democracy shortly after, Plato witnessed the execution of his mentor, Socrates, condemned to death by the Athenian assembly for corrupting the youth and religion. Pay for assembly goers and jurors, and the establishment of the nomothetai (νομοθέται) selected by lot, ²¹ had effectively made the popular sectors the judges of behaviour and the interpreters of law, and in Plato’s eyes the death of Socrates came to evidence the hubris the multitude was capable of when drunk with liberty. Dēmokratiā was certainly not a perfect form of government, and its consolidation (or radicalization) was seen by Plato as only one more phase in the relentless decay of political organizations. In Republic, he envisioned the best form of government as that of the philosopher kings, an aristocracy of the guardians of virtue, who are able to organize society in the best way possible because they lack a stake in it; guardians live communally, separated from other classes and barred from owning property. However, even Plato’s seemly perfect constitution maintained by the most virtuous elite could not escape corruption, because ‘phthora (ϕθορά) awaits everything that has come to be, [and] even a foundation of this kind will not survive for the whole of time’. ²²

Even if in later writings Plato further explores phthora only as a process of degradation that is proper to physis, since there is no strict separation between the natural and the political in his thought, this process of decay would also rule the political realm created by men. In Timaeus, Plato puts forward a basic intuition about the decay of bodies, which would later be confirmed by the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics ²³ : as revealing an inherent process of degradation through the transfer of energy:

For when any one element suffers a change of condition that is contrary to nature, all its particles that formerly were being cooled become heated, and the dry presently become moist, and the light heavy, and they undergo every variety of change in every respect. For, as we maintain, it is only the addition or subtraction of the same substance from the same substance in the same order and in the same manner and in due proportion which will allow the latter to remain safe and sound in its sameness with itself. But whatsoever oversteps any of these conditions in its going out or its coming in will produce alterations of every variety and countless diseases and corruptions. ²⁴

The same as an ice cube will inevitably melt at room temperature and cease to be an ice cube and become water, the constitution of a given state would be completely ruined by the entropy inevitably produced by its normal functioning and turn into a different political order. From Plato’s utopian aristocracy, political forms would gradually degrade first into the lesser form of timocracy (the regime by the honourable), then into oligarchy (rule by the wealthy), then into democracy (based on equal share in political power and liberty) and finally into tyranny, the worst form of government that imposes ‘the harshest and most complete slavery’ ²⁵ : the complete opposite of the virtuous aristocracy of the guardians, in which all citizens are virtuous and contribute in their particular roles to the harmony of the polis.

When developing his idea of political decay, Plato’s target was the democracy of his own time. While he recognizes that liberty is the principle of democracy, he argues that liberty is itself a liability, a source of disorder because it results in individuals living according to ‘their own constitution’, having their own rules, pursuing only their own interests and respecting no other authority but their own will. ²⁶ For Plato, corruption in a democracy would be the inevitable result of the equal distribution of liberty, which allows for the pursuit of individual interest and the consequent increase of ‘entropy’ within the constitutional framework. In other words, liberty as constitutive to the democratic regime is for Plato a liability that contaminates the public realm, weakening the possibility of arche and virtue, permanently undermining hierarchies, tradition and rules and making government prone to hubris and destined to injustice and tyranny. ²⁷

Departing from Plato’s linear pattern of corruption as a gradual process of decay from aristocracy to tyranny, Aristotle argues for a typology of regimes based on the fundamental ‘diversifying antithesis’ of genesis and phthora that exists in everything. Since ‘all things that come into existence in the course of nature are either opposites themselves or are compounded of opposites’, corruption can be analysed as a movement ‘along the determined line between the terms of contrast; or (if we start from some intermediate state) the movement towards one of the extremes’. ²⁸ On this premise of the generative nature of opposites, Aristotle bases one of his most original observations, with far-reaching political implications: that change comes about through the corruption of nature, that ‘change (μεταβολή) is primarily a “passing away” (ϕθορᾶς)’. ²⁹ Phthora, therefore, is an inevitable natural force driving change in the physical world, working within bounded spheres determined by the opposition implied in the ‘coming into being’ of a thing; each thing has a principle (or mixture of them) and it is its realization what brings about corruption. Every thing begins to corrupt the moment it is fully realized, and metabole occurs when that realization is fully negated.

Since ‘all things arose out of what existed, and so must be there already’, ³⁰ according to Aristotle, every constitution would have constitutive principles that would become fully realized, enabling its demise. The degree of corruption of constitutions would relate to the movement within its extremes. Following this idea, Aristotle conceived of three good constitutions (kingship, aristocracy and politeia) based on the nature of the sovereign (one, few or many) and their final cause (ruling for the common interest, eudaimonia) and their corresponding perverted forms brought about by corruption (tyranny, oligarchy and democracy) aimed not at advancing the common good but at satisfying the personal interests of the rulers. ³¹ There is much debate about the fundamental feature of the ideal politeia in Aristotle’s thought. While some define politeia as a combination of democracy and oligarchy, and thus a mixed government in which the interest of the few and the many keep each other in check, ³² others emphasize its ‘constitutional’ character, given that the ultimate authority would reside on fundamental law and not on the will of the majority. ³³ I would argue these interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

As Aristotle described in On the Constitution of Athens and the Politics, Athenian democracy during his time corresponded to the most extreme and corrupt form of democracy – the absolute rule of the many for their own benefit. In his classification of regimes, he identified four types of democracy based on the social basis of the sovereign, the degree of participation in government and the supremacy of the law. The first three types of democracy, in which the masses share equally in constitutional rights but are unable, due to material constraints, to actually exercise their sovereign power, the rule of law is supreme and thus Aristotle considered them as good, constitutional forms of government. The fourth type of democracy, however, which he identifies with the Athenian democracy of his time, is inherently corrupt since the ‘mass of the poor’, thanks to a system of state payment for attending the assembly, are ‘the sovereign power instead of the law’. ³⁴ This extreme form of democracy is brought about by ‘leaders of the demagogue type’, who arrive precisely because decrees and not laws are sovereign, making the sovereign demos a type of despotic autocrat. ³⁵ This form of government has no proper constitution, since the people are sovereign in all matters, and is easily influenced by demagogues who have no official position other than the one conferred by the contingent favour of the masses. Demagogues educate the poor on how to advance their own interests, increasing their power, ³⁶ and thus are the agents of corruption, enabling interest to be made into law. The full realization of equal share in government appears then to inevitably produce regime change since such a regime, in which ‘everything is managed merely by decrees, is not even a democracy’. ³⁷

In Aristotle’s particular historical account of Athens’ history, demagoguery plagued the state since the rise of Pericles, who not only ‘took powers away from the Areopagites’ but also ‘impelled the state toward naval power [and] as a result of this power it befell that the masses took confidence and began in greater degree to draw the whole constitution into their hands’. ³⁸ Thus, departing from Thucydides’ account of Athenian history, which puts total control of government in the masses after Pericles’ death in 429 BC, Aristotle argues that the extreme form of democracy begun three decades earlier with the reforms of the Areopagus, which enabled a regime change (metabole). ³⁹ While the absolute liberty the assembly gained after the last aristocratic constraints were removed would mark the beginning of regime change, the complete realization of democracy occurs only when the principle of equal access to political power is fully applied.

Even though a corrupt state implies for Aristotle a loss of virtue by rulers and common citizens, he is very clear that virtue depends on the appropriate legal structure to thrive. Because virtue is not natural to human beings, but needs to be acquired by habit and action, the degree of virtue and corruption in the polis is determined by the law and its effects on the members of the state. ⁴⁰ In Aristotle’s account, good character – desire in accord with right reason – cannot exist without habituation. Moral virtue is difficult to acquire because it is concerned with pleasures and pains, the discipline of the appetites, and the internalization of social norms. Therefore, the right habituation must be learned from others and exercised constantly to create a sort of second, moral nature.

For pleasure causes us to do base actions, and pain causes us to abstain from fine ones. That is why we need to have had the appropriate upbringing – right from early youth, as Plato says – to make us find enjoyment or pain in the right things; for this is the correct education. ⁴¹

Despite their different theories of constitutions, both Plato and Aristotle agree that political corruption occurs in pure regimes due to a loss of virtue in the sovereign body when personal interests take the place of the common good as the final cause of government. If viewed from the second law of thermodynamics, the process of political corruption as phthora could be conceived as the natural increase of entropy generated by the pursuit of individual/sectional interest against the common good within a given constitutional framework. This loss of virtue in the ruling body would mark the beginning of the end of a given good constitution, if no constant or episodic external ‘work’ is applied to it to counteract the thrust of actions aimed at the satisfaction of partial interests. Moreover, because corruption and the increase of entropy inevitably produce a change of nature and thus an effective modification of the constitution of the state, the quest for virtue is connected to the idea of preservation against corruption.

Aristotle aims at counteracting corruption by proposing as the best form of government one based on a mixture of natures and principles, in which both the few and the many share in government, and the majority of citizens are part of the middle classes. Aristotle’s politeia is a constitutional direct democracy in which ‘the masses govern the state with a view to the common interest’, ⁴³ and the masses are composed mainly of the middle classes, who possess ‘moderate and adequate property’. ⁴⁴ This best ‘practicable’ constitution – an intermediate regime between the extremes of oligarchy and democracy – would successfully combine qualifications of wealth and legal equality because the middle classes, as majority, would effectively control government.

Being a mixture of constitutions and thus in an intermediate position, one could argue that, following Aristotle’s ideas on corruption, politeia as an ideal type could become corrupt by tending either to oligarchy or democracy. However, the same as Plato, he only entertains a corrupting tendency towards democracy, even if from his ideas of the nature of things, it is clear that things that are in intermediate positions inevitably drift towards either of the extremes that define them. The same as a politeia would suffer metabole if the principle of equal share in government is fully realized, if the principle of oligarchy – inequality based on wealth, status, knowledge – becomes predominant and driven to its extreme – with a handful of people owning most of the property – the politeia would inevitably undergo a regime change into an oligarchy, a regime ‘analogous to the last form of democracy’ in which the sovereign is unbound to seek its own advantage, ‘closely akin to the personal rule of a monarch’. ⁴⁵

Extending Aristotle’s taxonomy of good and deviant constitutions, and combining it with Empedocles’ cosmological theory of cyclical change, ⁴⁶ the Greek historian Polybius, who documented the rise of the Roman republic from 264 BC to 146 BC, articulated a ‘cycle of political revolution, the course appointed by nature in which constitutions change, disappear, and finally return to the point from which they started’. ⁴⁷ According to his anacyclosis, pure regimes, starting from the best one – kinship then aristocracy and finally democracy – are bound to degenerate into their deviant forms, until the tyranny of the many establishes the rule of violence, and the people ‘degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch’. ⁴⁸

For Polybius, corruption is inevitable in pure regime forms, because ‘each constitution has a vice engendered in it and inseparable from it’. ⁴⁹ Following Aristotle, he argues only mixture could stave off corruption. However, instead of combining the worse two regime types as Aristotle did, following the example of Lycurgus, Polybius argues we must regard as the best constitution a combination of the three best forms of government – kinship, aristocracy and democracy – which he conceived as forms of limited government. While the king’s actions were bounded by rational principles, and aristocratic rule was limited by the morality and wisdom of the few selected to administrate public affairs, democracy was the regime in which majority decision prevailed within a traditional framework of popular obedience to the dictates of religion, elders and civil laws. ⁵⁰

The Roman constitution was of a mixed nature because it institutionalized these three sources of authority, which shared ‘in the control of the Roman state’. ⁵¹ While the Consuls exercise authority in Rome over all public affairs, the Senate exerted control over the republic’s finances and public works, in addition to dispatching embassies and declaring war and giving advice to magistrates. ⁵² The people, on the other hand, had the ‘right to confer honors and inflict punishment’, especially on individuals who had held public office and the power of approving or rejecting laws and ratifying issues related to war and peace. ⁵³ These three forms of authority and institutional power were, moreover, in permanent dynamic balance in a system in which ‘none of the principles should grow unduly and be perverted into its allied evil, but that, the force of each being neutralized by that of the others, neither of them should prevail and outbalance another’. ⁵⁴ Corruption in this mixed regime, which Polybius associates with the Roman republic, is not the full realization of an antithesis, but the result of an imbalance of political power in the constitution, which allows for the domination of one of the principles/factions over the others.

Even if by the late Republic the Plebeian Tribunate appeared as a strong institution able not only to give protection to individuals against the Consuls, but also to obstruct the Senate and initiate legislation, it was unable to ultimately thwart the overgrowth of the power of the nobility. The republic kept progressively drifting into oligarchy mainly due to the co-optation of tribunes into patrician ranks and the Senate’s disregard of the legislative authority of the Plebeian Council. ⁵⁵ The tumults that resulted from this disregard of plebeian authority plagued the late Roman republic and served as a catalyst for regime change and the birth of imperial authority.

III Individual corruption and the Machiavellian challenge

The translation of phthora into the Latin root corruptus kept its abstract meaning of destruction and decay at the systemic level ⁵⁶ alongside a substantive, moral meaning related to individual political actions: to bribe, falsify, seduce or pervert. ⁵⁷ It was mainly Cicero who used the word corruptus in a political sense to refer to the decay of mores and the ‘depravity of evil custom’ ⁵⁸ as the culprit of the decline of Rome. Following closely Plato’s analysis of the corruption of democracy, Cicero blames the decay of the republic to the success of ‘extreme liberty’ that inevitably reaches everything in a commonwealth in which everyone is free and ‘all sense of shame is lost’. ⁵⁹ This individual moral meaning of corruptus was further developed during medieval times in which the sinful nature of human beings took centre stage. Following closely the Ciceronian legacy, Augustine famously argued all earthly governments are inherently corrupt because rooted in original sin and veered the focus of analysis to civic stability as the highest attainable political good. This approach spawned more than 10 centuries of ‘mirror of princes’ texts centred on the moral virtue of rulers as a way of achieving stability and good rule.

After the reintroduction of Aristotle to philosophical inquiry in the 13th century, political analyses on virtue and corruption shifted once more from the moral qualities of individual rulers towards the institutional merits of political regimes. Within scholastic thought, Aquinas fused moral values to the Aristotelian conception of ‘right reason’, producing a new political meaning of virtue and corruption associated with the res publica christiana. ⁶⁰ Political corruption was once again associated with the preference for individual interest against the common good ⁶¹ but remained pegged to Christian morality and the Augustinian framework that conceived of civic stability as the highest political goal and of civic discord as a sign of corruption.

As Quentin Skinner shows, scholastic thought had a significant impact on the new humanist strand that developed in early quattrocento Florence, which attempted to defend the republican experiment in scholastic terms based primarily on virtue ethics. ⁶² It is in this Ciceronian-scholastic humanist legacy – according to which political corruption is reduced to individual vicious actions – that our current juridical conception of corruption is grounded. ⁶³ A crucial challenge to the scholastic view of political corruption centred on individual virtue came from a ‘civic’ strand of humanist thinkers from the Italian city states being threatened by papacy and empire in the 14th and 15th centuries. Reintroducing Ancient Roman political values, this humanist tradition brought to the fore the political concept of liberty as connected to civic virtue and good, popular government ⁶⁴ and positioned corruption as an evil in need of permanent contention in their proposed constitutional designs.

Even if Machiavelli was not the first thinker of the Renaissance to focus on the role of corruption in politics, according to Skinner, he reveals a ‘heightened awareness of the problem, and devote[s] an unprecedented amount of attention to the investigation of its causes’. ⁶⁵ By challenging humanists’ virtue ethics and their support for the rule by an educated elite as the best form of government, Machiavelli proposes a structural understanding of corruption that puts the burden of good government on institutions, laws and procedures rather than individual actions by the ruling elite. While ‘virtue-ethics’ humanists saw virtue in the ruling class as the key to good government, for Machiavelli republican liberty was the result of good laws, which are themselves the product of the institutional political conflict between the few and the many. ⁶⁶

Machiavelli’s preoccupation with political corruption was embedded in the extraordinary democratic experiment of the republic of Florence, which begun in 1494 with the establishment of the Great Council, a form of direct democracy that allowed for extensive citizen participation in legislative, electoral and judicial authority within the republic. Following the Aristotelian definition of political corruption as the favouring of individual interests instead of the common good, in History of Florence, Machiavelli defines a corrupt state as the one in which ‘laws and ordinances, peace, wars, and treaties are adopted and pursued, not for the public good, not for the common glory of the state, but for the convenience or advantage of a few individuals’. ⁶⁷ Since for Machiavelli men are by nature wicked and fickle, prone to breaking the rules ⁶⁸ ‘at every chance for their own profit’, ⁶⁹ every form of government has a natural tendency towards corruption. Even though a good foundation can counteract this egotistic inclination, it does not eliminate it, so the degeneration of political rule is a constant threat that needs to be averted through extraordinary measures.

In his analysis of corruption, Machiavelli distinguishes three interrelated elements: matter, form and method. In a city the matter is constituted by the citizens, the form by the laws and the methods by the rules and procedures for selecting magistrates and making laws. ⁷⁰ Even if Machiavelli certainly denounces ‘gifts’ and ‘promises’ as frequent means to corrupt individuals ⁷¹ and agrees with Cicero that a corrupt government necessarily entails corrupt mores, his conception of corruption is decisively institutional and his analysis thus focuses on the rules and procedures that enable citizens to exert domination. For Machiavelli the corrupting process does not begin in the matter (governed in part by the unavoidable egoistic tendencies of individuals) but on the form restraining individual interest and the methods by which rules and policies are selected. Individual interest is a force permanently trying to unduly influence government but only succeeding, and thus effectively corrupting the republic, if laws and methods are flawed and liberty’s scaffolding is already being slowly dismantled from within: ‘an evil-disposed citizen cannot effect any changes for the worse in a republic, unless it be already corrupt’. ⁷²

For Machiavelli, good laws promote civic virtue and bad laws enable general corruption. Throughout his writings, he identifies two types of corrupting norms promoting two forms of evil: license and socio-economic inequality. Referring to the case of Scipio, Machiavelli makes the case that norms allowing for increased license bring ruin even to the most glorious men and institutions. Scipio was called ‘the corrupter of the Roman soldiery’ because he was too lenient and ‘gave his soldiers more license than is consistent with military discipline’, ⁷³ which encouraged them to become unruly. And the same as good, disciplined soldiers became bad and rowdy through the lifting of restraints to their behaviour, the general corruption of mores is allowed to begin when

the laws that restrained the citizens were often altered, such as the law relating to adultery, the sumptuary laws, that in relation to ambition, and many others, which were changed according as the citizens from one day to another became more and more corrupt. ⁷⁴

But even if Machiavelli strongly denounces wealthy elites and their great influence as ‘the cause of states being reduced to servitude’, ⁷⁷ he also acknowledges that a ‘republic that has no distinguished citizens cannot be well governed’ ⁷⁸ and that it is the job of the institutions of the state to adequately channel individual interest for the benefit of the republic. Bad laws enable undue influence on government from ‘fatal families’ and the division of society into factions that ‘will strive by every means of corruption to secure friends and supporters’ in order to satisfy their interests. ⁷⁹ Good laws, on the other hand, establish necessity and duty to create virtuous citizens and make sure the influence of wealth ‘is kept within proper limits’ ⁸⁰ by prohibiting the legal ability to command enormous fortunes, castles and subjects. Anti-corruption laws putting limits to the command of wealth and patronage are thus essential to preserve a good constitutional form.

Even though in Machiavelli’s theory fundamental laws make good citizens ⁸¹ by establishing appropriate limits, rights and duties, it is for him on the methods were the burden of the maintenance of the constitution and the virtue of the citizens appears to be finally placed. Because human affairs are in constant flux, and the matter is not homogenous but composed of two opposing ‘humors’ (the few desire to oppress and the many to be left alone), there is a dynamic relation between form and matter, laws and men. Therefore, the methods regulating the creation of law and the exercise of power, the procedures allowing for the institutional balance between the elite and the people, are crucial. Good laws are not enough to shape good citizens and keep corruption at bay; an appropriate method of allocating political power and the management of state rule – good procedures aimed at non-domination – are also necessary. It is at this point in his analysis that Machiavelli criticizes, as vehicles for corruption, what are the two most fundamental elements in our current liberal, representative systems: elections and free speech.

Using as an example the Roman republic, Machiavelli describes how corruption derived from inequality at the political level ultimately undermined the constitutional order. The procedure for the selection of magistrates, based on voluntary candidacy, and the right to propose legislation and speak in the assembly, even though were in the beginning good, allowing for the most able to become magistrates and for ‘each one who thinks of something of benefit to the public’ to have the right to propose it, ⁸² were the means through which corruption crept into the political system, undermining liberty:

such a basic custom became bad, because only the powerful proposed laws, not for the common liberty but for their own power, and for fear of such men no one dared to speak against those laws. Thus the people were either deceived or forced into decreeing their own ruin. ⁸³

At least two lessons are to be learnt from what Machiavelli discovered in the examples of the Ancients: that neither the matter or the form are inherently virtuous, and that even if the matter has been made good through an original virtuous form, the form is not enough to keep citizens good when corruption has been introduced through legitimate political methods and has become pervasive. Moreover, when the matter is corrupt, the form and the methods do nothing more than fostering corruption, and republics increasingly drift into an oligarchy of consent through the natural functioning of its methods.

IV Institutional corruption and corrupting dependence

As seen from a longue durée perspective, it is clear that the concept of political corruption was meant to account for a systemic phenomenon, a layer of great explanatory value that was almost entirely dropped from theoretical analysis after the 18th century, when it was reduced to its current juridical form. While the Ancients thought of corruption as inherent to everything, and thus inescapable to political forms, Machiavelli was perhaps the only modern thinker to engage at length with the problem of universal corruption as a constitutional challenge. I argue we need to pick up this lost thread of thinking that conceptualized political corruption as systemic and draw the contours of this structural form of political corruption for our present time. This alternative meaning of corruption should be seen as complementing, instead of replacing, political corruption as individual acts of misconduct by public officials, since particular instances of corruption are expressions of a universal phenomenon that cannot be reduced to their aggregation. This attempt at rethinking political corruption from a republican approach is meant to contribute to an emerging literature that has been assertive in criticizing the neo-republican interpretation of corruption (for not being different enough from the liberal conception) but not propositive enough.

Perhaps, the most prominent scholars to dedicate attention to corruption in republican thought are JGA Pocock, Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. Despite their invaluable contributions in bringing republican thought to the forefront during the last four decades, I would argue their misreading of Machiavelli makes them unable to grasp the systemic nature of political corruption. This misreading is of course not rooted in their lack of knowledge about Machiavelli, but rather on their own fierce commitment to liberal democracy. To question the constitutional structure of a regime that was progressively becoming ‘the only game in town’ in the last stages of the Cold War would have been perhaps ludicrous, especially after legal positivism and a minimalist procedural conception of democracy became hegemonic in the social sciences. ⁸⁴ But it is precisely the consolidation of liberal democracies – when, according to Adam Przeworski, the regime ‘becomes self-reinforcing’ and ‘no one can imagine acting outside the democratic institutions’ ⁸⁵ – what for Aristotle would prompt metabole, allowing for systemic corruption to begin taking hold of institutions, relentlessly moving the regime into oligarchy. This drift was missed by mainstream academia, oblivious of rising inequality and its effects on the political system, ⁸⁶ dedicated to studying the institutional framework instead of appraising it, and thus unable to recognize systemic corruption and articulate a structural critique of liberal democracy. Republican theory was no exception to this blind spot.

In his civic humanist reading of the Florentine Secretary, Pocock famously identifies in Machiavelli the emergence of contingency as an ‘irruption of temporality in political discourse’, which positioned republican thought as a radically immanent approach to theorizing the political. Nevertheless, he understood Machiavellism as a mode of thought that pursued ‘universal values in transitory form’, ⁸⁷ which minimized both the role of institutional conflict to produce good laws and the radical creative force of virtù during republican refoundings. In his recent critique of Pocock, Robert Sparling argues this Aristotelian reading of Machiavelli coupled with Pocock’s attempt to construct a conceptual continuous tradition of corruption from the early Renaissance to the late 18th century resulted in a misleading interpretation of political corruption and the pessimistic outlook derived from it. If corruption is connected to universal values that cannot be fully realized in any given institutional form, then corruption is perennial and liberty at most only partial. What Sparling misses in his critique is that Pocock chooses principles as the source of normativity because he neglects the pivotal role institutional conflict between the few and the many plays in Machiavelli’s theory of republican liberty. It is not constitutionalized principles what for Machiavelli keeps the republic free from corruption, but rather political conflict and periodic renewals of fundamental laws and institutions.

The hopelessness to effectively deal with corruption in an era determined by commerce and self-interest also seems to run against Machiavelli’s account of virtù as an inherently contingent force, grounded on necessity and effectual truth (verità effetuale), capable of bringing republics back to their beginnings even in the case of universal corruption. Machiavelli’s project in the Discourses was to figure out how to re-establish liberty and then keep it. In his theory of foundings, Machiavelli argues that refounding a republic is the most glorious action because it is the most difficult – because of the strength with which individuals benefiting from corruption will defend the status quo; we should not only admire the actions of extraordinary leaders such as Romulus, Lycurgus and Solon but also imitate them. ⁸⁸

Even if in Pocock’s interpretation of Machiavelli political corruption is an ‘irreversible, one-way process’ ⁸⁹ of moral decay, and thus it is the degeneration of customs and mores what renders the constitutional framework ineffective to reactivate civic virtue, it is Skinner who decisively positions corruption within the current liberal, juridical paradigm. As Amanda Maher shows in her critique of Skinner’s interpretation of Machiavelli, his humanist reading of the Florentine Secretary coupled with his project to combine civic participation and negative liberty obscured the ‘sociological foundations of political corruption in Machiavelli’s republicanism’. ⁹⁰ Skinner reduces corruption to a sinful disposition, to being unable ‘to devote one’s energies to the common good’, ⁹¹ ‘a failure of rationality’ ⁹² that can be best counteracted by promoting civic virtue and a sense of patriotism in the citizenry. Even if he acknowledges both the role of institutions in fostering virtue through participation and the connection between corruption and the capture of the state by oligarchs, the same as Cicero, Skinner puts the burden of liberty on the virtue of individual citizens instead of on institutions, procedures and material conditions. Because he detaches this ‘ineptitude for a free way of life’ ⁹³ from its fundamental cause – inequality – in his analysis, Skinner is unable to account for the structural conditions that determine individuals’ public spirit incompetence.

Systematizing Skinner’s interpretation of Machiavelli, Pettit put forward a theory of republicanism based on the conceptualization of republican liberty as the lack of arbitrary interference. Despite Pettit’s important contribution to the decoupling of domination from interference – broadening the conception of negative liberty to account for domination even in the absence of interference – his conception of corruption is even further removed from Machiavelli’s than that of Pocock’s and Skinner’s. By reducing domination to arbitrary power, Pettit is unable to escape laws and procedures as parameters for arbitrariness and legitimacy, and thus his theory of liberty as non-domination creates a problem of endogeneity with respect to corruption. If domination is defined by arbitrary power, and what is considered arbitrary is determined by the legal regime, then there is no external referent to judge laws and procedures in terms of their potential corrupting tendencies.

Even if Pettit conceives of interference as being non-arbitrary if it ‘track[s] the interests and ideas of those who suffer the interference,’ ⁹⁴ this surely can only apply to interference coming from the state, leaving interpersonal relations of domination largely unaccounted for. One could not reasonably expect that individual contracts must track equally the interests and ideas of all the parties involved, at least not in our capitalist societies in which relations of production are necessarily unequal. Moreover, because for Pettit liberty as non-domination is advanced ‘through a legal regime stopping people from dominating one another without itself dominating anyone in turn’, the burden of keeping this basic constitutional structure free from corruption relies on citizens’ ‘virtuous vigilance’ and their effective contestation through institutional mechanisms. ⁹⁵ However, while citizen’s civic judgment might be ‘clouded by uncivic inclinations born of radical material inequalities’, ⁹⁶ institutional mechanisms might be too corrupt to allow for meaningful input and reform.

In Pettit’s framework, if a citizen suffers domination, she has the civic duty to contest it through a process that on the ground tends to be time-consuming and frustrating. From a collective action perspective, to expect aggrieved citizens to stand up for their interests, given the high costs involved in claim procedures, is wishful thinking. ⁹⁷ To put the burden on keeping corruption at bay on individual agency is thus a recipe for disaster because it allows for the silent, gradual, apparently consented slip into oligarchy. Pettit is unable to see that material conditions determine the possibility of civic virtue – there is no vigilance when mere survival is at stake and one does not need to be in abject poverty to be overwhelmed enough to avoid seeking redress when wronged. In addition to time-consuming, dealing with bureaucracy and the courts is not a particularly pleasant experience, and thus placing the struggle against domination in the court system seems, from a realist point of view, not very different than leaving institutions to their own devices.

Recognizing the institutional corruption that the neo-republican conception of corruption neglects, in the mid-1990s, there were increasing attempts in the fields of ethics to challenge the prevailing positivist, individualist approach to political corruption, which pushed the focus of corruption studies towards the political structure. Dennis F Thompson was the first to identify a type of corruption that is institutional, ‘usually built into the routines and practices of organizations’, that pertains to actions that tend to undermine institutions’ normal processes, frustrating their primary purposes. ⁹⁸ Corruption is for him the ‘condition in which private interests distort public purposes by influencing the government in disregard of the democratic process’. ⁹⁹ He highlights the case of democratic elections in which laws allowing for private financing of campaigns and lobby generate institutional corruption by enabling the distortion of public purposes by private interests.

Building on this perspective, Lawrence Lessig argues that institutional corruption is the outmost threat to democracy because it promotes ‘corrupting dependence’ ¹⁰⁰ based on material relations of subordination, which undermines citizens’ trust on democratic institutions. According to Lessig, corruption should be understood as

a systemic and strategic influence which is legal, or even currently ethical, that undermines the institution’s effectiveness by diverting it from its purpose or weakening its ability to achieve its purpose, including, to the extent relevant to its purpose, weakening either the public’s trust in that institution or the institution’s inherent trustworthiness. ¹⁰¹

Despite the important contribution of the institutionalist approach to corruption, which allows us to see more clearly the corrupting dependence fostered by electoral rules and the normal functioning of representative institutions, its functionalist definition leaves open the problem of determining the proper objective of government and therefore it is unable to provide a systemic account of corruption beyond the direct link between financiers and elected representatives. Moreover, it has been argued that corruption might even be functional to the primary purpose of institutions since some forms of clientelism may result in a more efficient delivery of goods and services, depending on the relative weakness of the state; if an institution is inefficient and unable to fulfil its task, patron–client relations may increase its efficiency, allowing it to fulfill its goal. ¹⁰² Finally, because it does not provide for criteria for the ‘magnetic north’ of government, institutional corruption seems to be applicable only to particular institutions in relation to the political structure, taking basic institutional and procedural arrangements as a given. ¹⁰³

Perhaps as a way of salvaging the neo-republican tradition, Sparling suggests republican thought should incorporate this institutionalist conception of corruption by conceiving domination as a form of dependence. Since liberal democracies have eradicated ‘dominating dependence’, Sparling argues republican theory should focus on analysing and averting ‘corrupting dependence’, which is the dependence ‘at issue in systemic corruption’. Even if I agree that republican thought needs a new theory of freedom to account for this type of systemic corruption ¹⁰⁴ and that it is necessary to identify socio-economic inequality and an ‘unbalanced regime’ ¹⁰⁵ form as the structural origins of corruption, Sparling’s attempt to reduce corruption to a form of dependence seems to me misguided. First, because dependence is not inherently corrupting, the need for a substantive agreement on what kind of dependence would be considered corrupting would still be needed. Second, if corruption is the opposite of civic virtue, it has more to do with the prevalence of interest against the common good rather than directly with dependence – corrupting dependence being the result of corruption. And finally, reducing corruption to dependence does not allow us to escape interpersonal relations as the locus of corruption, leaving us unable to properly define systemic corruption structurally.

V Systemic corruption and the oligarchization of power

In his essay analysing the problems associated with developing an encompassing definition of political corruption, Mark Philp argued that the main challenge any such definition encounters is to presuppose a notion of an ideal, uncorrupt form of political rule. ¹⁰⁶ If democracy should be understood as a procedural, ¹⁰⁷ deliberative ¹⁰⁸ or radical ¹⁰⁹ political form is in itself a controversial issue. I do not wish to contribute to this debate but simply to identify a minimal condition of good popular government.

Following Aristotle’s logic, representative government could be conceived both as a compound ideal type defined by its terms of contrast and as an intermediate political regime that moves towards one of its extremes. Being a hybrid regime composed of the principles of democracy and liberalism, a minimal definition of an ideal liberal democracy would be a regime that fully realizes its democratic and liberal ends to accurately represent the interests of the majority within the limits imposed by individual rights and separation of powers. The complete opposite of this ideal type would be an unrepresentative illiberal government, in which neither the interests of the majority nor basic norms are respected. This corrupt government would fall within the ancient definition of tyranny, in which those in power benefit themselves without any limitations on their will but their own power of coercion.

From the perspective not of principles but of the regime’s ruling element, given that representative government is factually a collection of individuals elected by citizens to make law and policy decisions, this minimalist conception of an ideal type of liberal democracy would be akin to a constitutional elective aristocracy: a government by the few (the best, wisest, most representative) chosen by the majority to rule within established constitutional limitations. Seen through a republican lens, the corrupt form that completely negates liberal democracy would be then an illiberal oligarchy: a government by few, for the benefit of few, without constitutional constraints. Even if everyone would agree that a government that does not represent the majority and does not respect rights is no longer a democracy, this analysis is not helpful for developing a definition for systemic corruption, which thrives within highly guarded constitutional frameworks.

If we conceive this ideal type as an intermediate regime that corrupts by moving towards either of its extremes, liberal democracy would corrupt by becoming either unrepresentative of the majority, or illiberal, depending on what principle is being undermined or realized. Therefore, a liberal democracy could corrupt and become either (1) an oligarchic democracy, a non-representative liberal government in which individual rights and separation of powers are upheld but the interests of the majority are consistently not represented or (2) an illiberal democracy, a representative but illiberal government in which the majority’s interests trump the rights of minorities. While an oligarchic democracy is still a democracy in which there are ‘free and fair’ elections and formal individual rights are protected, an illiberal democracy is a totalitarian form of government in which human rights of minorities are systematically violated.

Even if certainly there have been examples of these three corrupt forms of government – illiberal oligarchy, oligarchic democracy and illiberal democracy – the type of systemic corruption republican thinkers were most concerned about, and that is ubiquitous today, is the gradual decay of ‘representativeness’ and the increasing oligarchization of government and society within a general respect for the rule of law. A conception of systemic corruption thus needs to be connected to increasing socio-economic inequality, which enables inequality of political influence and the drift into oligarchic democracy, a regime in which citizens empower, through their ballots, those who enable their own dispossession and oppression.

Perhaps, the first contour we need to draw to accurately define systemic corruption is its political nature. Currently, political corruption relates to fraudulent action involving public office, which puts the focus on the corrupt nexus between public and private. Given the complex relation between corruption and the law, a definition that focuses mainly on the agents of corruption and their exchanges seems inappropriate to conceptualize the systemic layer of political corruption. The conception of institutional corruption, even if a step in the right direction – away from the mainly juridical conception – is also unable to appropriately track the oligarchic component of systemic corruption given its ungrounded functionalism that avoids substantive definitions of primary purposes. I would argue systemic corruption in liberal democracies should be understood as a long-term, slow-moving process of oligarchization of society’s political structure, and thus it should be analysed at the macro level. Instead of looking at the inputs of political corruption (undue influence, which is hard to prove and thus prosecute), we should focus rather on its outputs, as anything pertaining to rules, procedures and institutions that has the effect of benefiting the wealthy instead of the majority. We need to move away from intention and towards the consequences of political corruption to identify its structural character.

Following the Ancients’ insights on systemic corruption as an inevitable and progressive process, the first major implication of this alternative meaning of political corruption would be that our liberal democracies would not be exempt from this degenerative movement because of the individual liberty they guarantee. This awareness would make us recognize not only the folly and presumptuousness of the modern and contemporary men who believe their institutional creations were close to perfection, but more importantly to acknowledge that our constitutional systems are inherently flawed and in need of immediate and periodic repair due to the high degree of ‘entropy’ they allow for.

The second implication, which was so evident for the Ancients as for modern republican thinkers like Machiavelli, is that the law is not necessarily a source of virtue, and that not all constitutional forms are virtuous enough to counteract natural and relentless corrupting tendencies. Consequently, what is legal is not necessarily virtuous and what is corrupt is not necessarily illegal. Campaign finance and lobbying regulations, which legalized forms of bribery and undue influence, are an example of this. If we take as a premise that all constitutions and the laws they produce could tend to foster corruption, the moral relativity of the rule of law, which both neo-republican and neo-liberal thinkers argue is the mark of liberty, becomes evident. As we saw in Machiavelli’s work, corruption is the vehicle for oppression and it originates not only in individuals but also in laws, and thus the rule of law must not be necessarily understood as a source of liberty. Because laws can be manipulated and used as tools for oppression, the rule of law appears not only as an inadequate measure of liberty but also as an extremely problematic one since it could actually tend to uphold and sustain domination instead of combating it.

A third implication comes from qualifying political corruption as pertaining to rules, procedures and institutions that affect the sociopolitical realm: there is an inevitable enlargement of the scope of the phenomenon. If the mark of political corruption is the advancement of individual/sectional interest against those of the majority, then we could think as being corrupt not only laws and policies actively favouring the wealthy, and consider as corrupting ideologies those which have this consequence when implemented, but also the negligence of lawmakers and policymakers to counteract oligarchic outcomes, passively letting the wealthy keep further enriching themselves. Because conceiving political corruption in terms of its systemic effects allows us to separate corruption from individual immoral disposition and its immediate, tangible actions, both ideologies such as neoliberalism – which has the effect of increasing socio-economic inequality and thus the power of the wealthy ¹¹⁰ – and governmental inaction, such as the lack of proper regulation in the financial system – which ultimately enabled the last global economic crisis and the transfer of wealth from the many to the few ¹¹¹ – could be conceived as forms of political corruption because they enable the further oligarchization of liberal democracy.

In terms of how we could attempt to measure systemic corruption, the only way to account for the drift into oligarchy would be to take into account the effects that the legal structure and governmental action have on society. And thus a corruption index should include, in addition to corruption laws, number of prosecutions and opinion polls, variables relating to the outputs of law and policy such as the degree of inequality, the gap between capital and labour, allocation of gross domestic product (GDP) among social classes and regressive/progressive taxation schemes. These data are not only already available but seem better suited for undertaking a comparison among countries than solely relying on laws, court records and individual perceptions of corruption, which are in themselves conditioned by law and political culture.

If one agrees that the minimal normative expectation of liberal democracies is that governments should maintain or advance the interests of the majority within constitutional safeguards, increasing income inequality and the relative immiseration of the majority of citizens would be in itself a deviation from good rule, a sign of corruption. However, this insight is yet to be properly analysed since our juridical, individualist conception of corruption prevents us from fully capturing its systemic nature and its effects on the exercise of individual liberties. Following Machiavelli’s analysis, if corruption is reduced to individual illegal actions, the relentless process of political degradation and loss of liberty is obscured. Individual pursuit of interest is an inevitable feature in a free state, and so it is the degradation of the constitutional constraints on undue influence on government. While the former cannot be eliminated, the latter must be acknowledged and remedied to keep corruption at bay.

The engagement with the history of the systemic meaning of political corruption I offer here intends to be a first step towards conceptualizing political corruption as a systemic feature, helping lift the positivist veil that currently obscures the domination flourishing under the constitutional frameworks of liberal representative governments around the world.