Reviewed by:

• Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality by Robert Alan Sparling
• Tim Stuart-Buttle

As Nietzsche famously declared, only that which has no history can be defined. Robert Sparling's superb book shows that corruption is a concept with a history. Although Political Corruption is ordered chronologically, it is expressly not a linear account of how one modern definition of corruption evolved. History instead discloses how the concept has been deployed in a variety of modes in occidental political philosophy, seven of which are recovered here: from Erasmus's focus on the moral integrity of the prince to Weber's ethics of bureaucratic office, via Machiavelli, Étienne de la Boétie, Bolingbroke, Robespierre, and Kant. Pursuant to the book's nonlinearity, these philosophers are not placed in conversation with one another—with Machiavelli responding to Erasmus, Bolingbroke to both, and so on—so much as with their classical predecessors (particularly Aristotle and Plato). The texts they have bequeathed to us were the product of intertextuality, and they are much richer for it.

Sparling invites political philosophers to participate in a similar "transhistorical conversation" with their predecessors, ancient and modern (xv). Insofar as we use the concept of corruption, we are in any case already engaged in such a conversation: we just lack the decency or self-awareness to acknowledge our predecessors as our interlocutors. Corruption discourse is "a live, emancipatory language" (3) because the concept assumes [End Page 338] what most Anglophone liberal political theorists now deny: "the Aristotelian view that there is such a thing as living politically that is most conducive to human flourishing" (xii). Corruption connotes the loss of health or purity; it assumes a corresponding vision of what healthy political life looks like. To deploy the concept of political corruption while disdaining political morality and political teleology is to engage in meaningless speech, to deal in metaphor. That we, like Machiavelli, frequently do so is symptomatic of a particularly noxious kind of corruption—of thought.

As this suggests, Sparling sympathizes with Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, who worry that we have inherited a moral vocabulary that has been voided of meaning. He further appreciates why political philosophers and intellectual historians grieved by the deficiencies of modern liberal democratic societies, from Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss to John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, have expressed a preference for the participatory ideals of classical civic republicanism. Aristotelian political philosophy, Sparling notes, discountenanced the separation of political analysis from moral evaluation, of statecraft from soulcraft. Only discrete aspects of this holistic Aristotelian view, however, appeared to translate to the altered sociopolitical and moral conditions of European states from the revival of letters onward. The mode of corruption discourse encountered in each chapter of Political Corruption is, it follows, by itself inadequate: Erasmus focuses on the moral character of the one individual, the prince, who is least likely to be susceptible to moral instruction (as Erasmus himself recognizes); La Boétie, conversely, powerfully articulates the pathologies inherent within absolute monarchy as a form of government, but his solution—a relational ideal of absolute transparency—asks much more of political friendship than had Aristotle; Machiavelli wields a civic republican discourse of corruption as a diagnostic tool, but lacks any teleological conception of human flourishing (a point missed in broadly Aristotelian readings, notably Pocock's); and so on, through the chapters. If these different modes remain recognizable today, even the Erasmian mirror-for-princes genre (now presented as "leadership ethics"), it is because we have inherited a way of talking about politics—or avoiding doing so, as the case might be—that is lacking in wholeness.

Sparling is nonetheless skeptical of any proposal to revitalize ancient moral or political ideals to address contemporary problems. From Erasmus to Weber, those philosophers whose thinking about corruption remains most insightful all recognized the study of ancient texts to be emancipatory. Yet their conversations with the ancients were characterized by ambivalence. If corruption ultimately relates to the policing of boundaries—public/private; citizen/subject; friend/servant—then the book's...

审核人：

• 政治腐败：罗伯特·艾伦·斯伯林（Robert Alan Sparling）的公民道德底蕴
• 蒂姆·斯图尔特·布特尔

正如尼采著名的声明，只能定义没有历史的东西。罗伯特·斯伯林（Robert Sparling）的绝妙著作表明，腐败是有历史的概念。虽然政治腐败按时间顺序排列，显然不是一个现代的腐败定义如何演变的线性描述。相反，历史揭示了这个概念是如何在西方政治哲学中以多种方式部署的，其中有七种在这里得以恢复：从伊拉斯mus（Erasmus）对王子的道德品格的关注到韦伯（Weber）的官僚道德，通过马基雅维利（Machiavelli），埃蒂安·德拉博埃蒂（Étiennede laBoétie） ，波林布鲁克，罗伯斯庇尔和康德。由于这本书的非线性，这些哲学家与他们的经典前辈（尤其是亚里士多德和柏拉图）之间并没有相互交谈，而是马基雅维利对伊拉斯mus斯和博林布鲁克的回应，等等。他们遗赠给我们的文本是互文性的产物，因此互文性更加丰富。

斯帕林邀请政治哲学家与他们的前任古代和现代（xv）参加类似的“跨历史对话”。就我们使用腐败的概念而言，无论如何，我们已经在进行这样的对话：我们缺乏体面或自我意识来承认我们的前任是我们的对话者。腐败话语是“一种活泼的，解放性的语言”（3），因为该概念假定[End Page 338]大多数英国自由派政治理论家现在否认的是：“亚里斯多德主义者认为，某种政治生活最有利于人类的繁荣”（xii）。腐败意味着失去健康或纯洁；它假设健康的政治生活是什么样的。在剥夺政治道德和政治目的论的同时部署政治腐败的概念，是在进行毫无意义的言论，是对隐喻的处理。我们像马基雅维利（Machiavelli）一样经常这样做，这是思想上一种特别有害的腐败现象的征兆。

如此暗示，斯伯林同情查尔斯·泰勒（Charles Taylor）和阿拉斯代尔·麦金太尔（Alasdair MacIntyre），他们担心我们继承了道德词汇，而这些词汇已经失去了意义。他还赞赏为什么从汉娜·阿伦特（Hannah Arendt）和利奥·斯特劳斯（Leo Strauss）到约翰·波考克（John Pocock）和昆汀·斯金纳（Quentin Skinner）的现代自由民主社会的不足而感到悲伤的政治哲学家和思想史学家对古典公民共和主义的参与性理想表示偏爱。斯伯林指出，亚里士多德的政治哲学在政治分析与道德评价，政体与灵魂工艺的分离上有所作为。然而，从整体字母的复兴起，这种整体的亚里斯多德主义观点的离散方面似乎只能转化为欧洲国家改变的社会政治和道德条件。政治腐败因此，这本身就是不足的：伊拉斯mus专注于一个人的道德特征，即王子，他最不可能受到道德教育的影响（伊拉斯mus本人承认）；相反，拉伯蒂（LaBoétie）有力地阐明了君主专制内部固有的病态，即一种政府形式，但他的解决方案（绝对透明的关系理想）比亚里斯多德（Aristotle）拥有更多的政治友谊。马基雅维利（Machiavelli）运用共和党的民间腐败话语作为诊断工具，但缺乏人类繁荣的目的论观点（在亚里斯多德式的广泛阅读中，尤其是波科克的观点中，这一点没有得到体现）；依此类推。如果今天仍然可以辨认出这些不同的模式，即使是伊拉西亚镜象王子的流派（现在被称为“领导道德”），

尽管如此，对于任何旨在振兴古代道德或政治理想以解决当代问题的提议，斯帕林还是持怀疑态度。从伊拉斯mus（Erasmus）到韦伯（Weber），那些对腐败的思想仍然最有见地的哲学家都认为对古代文献的研究是解放性的。然而，他们与古代人的对话却带有矛盾性。如果腐败最终与维护边界（公共/私人）有关；公民/主体；朋友/仆人-那么这本书的...