Conceptions of Corruption, Its Causes, and Its Cure

Corruption was an obsession of eighteenth-century political theorists, and the target of radicals of all stripes at the end of the century. The obverse of the coin was a perhaps too uncritical worship of the stern republicans of ancient Rome and Sparta - the latter being notoriously open to bribes, and as greedy as the next man when not at home under the watchful eyes of their fellows. I begin with Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees emphasized the good effects of our less admirable desires, and the bad effects to be expected of any return to ancient austerity - a proto-Keynesian argument; I then explore Hume's defence of the balance achieved in British constitutional arrangements by essentially corrupt methods which enabled the monarchy to counterbalance the populist pressures of parliament by offering sinecures and near-sinecures - 'jobbery,' to put it briefly. Then I turn to the counterargument, essentially to Bentham's arguments for an inqusitorial political system in which every government officer would be exposed to scrutiny; here the notion of transparency begins to do some work, because Bentham's claim that any committee that was not an inquisition would be a screen rests on the thought that making government visible is the essential step to making it both cheap and honest.