Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality by Robert Alan Sparling (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality by Robert Alan Sparling
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...
