Corruption and Eighteenth-Century Social Science: Mapping the Space of Political Economy

"Corruption" was one of the most prominent terms in European political "discourse in the eighteenth century. It was central to a wide range of critiques of government in Britain and to French revolutionary ideology.¹ Discourses of corruption figured significantly not only in the practice of oppositional and revolutionary politics but also in political theory, although until recently scholarly attention focused rather narrowly on their role in defining "republicanism." Both political theory and political practice are relevant to this essay, but its main purpose is to explore ways in which the notion of "corruption" was used in the construction of early social science—particularly political economy. These usages provide an important perspective on the circumstances in which public contexts affected the conscious construction of "sciences" of society. They also shed light on a central aspect of the formulation of social science that can be called "mapping."

By "mapping" I mean the process of laying out conceptual and discursive spaces within which such sciences could operate—the notional arenas of human behavior and interaction in which the kinds of rational motivation assumed by the founders of the early social sciences could be represented as working. This required externalizing behaviors and motives that did not fit rational models and identifying notionally foreign spaces in which incongruous phenomena of obvious importance to society could be conceptually quarantined. Some of the most prominent of these external spaces were given the name "corruption." Mapping intersected with other, more obvious aspects of constructing social science such as defining epistemologies and identifying acceptable methodologies, but it possessed a dynamic of its own that is essential to understanding why and how eighteenth-century Europe produced social science. Spaces of corruption identified in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as external to political theory were redefined later as spaces of social science. At the same time, new spaces of corruption were mapped out to accommodate phenomena that had to be excluded from the new social sciences. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a reiteration of the process—the newer spaces of corruption becoming fields of study for even newer social sciences—was in evidence. In each phase, what had previously been treated as corruption was rationalized.

I will concentrate here on two texts: John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). These will be treated as exemplary. There is no evidence that Smith consciously followed Locke or built on the implications in his work with regard to the process that is described. Rather, the texts employ an analytical and discursive technique that was shared by others, the implications of which were more fully developed in the later of the two texts mainly because of changes in the conventions of the public sphere.

The Second Treatise was a work of political theory which established the framework for much of the social discourse of the eighteenth century. Although it does not represent itself as "social science," it implicitly delineates the space in which social science was later to operate—although not, I shall argue, through the familiar propositions of the theory it presents. The Wealth of Nations is the classic foundation text of the first fully-articulated, consciously-designated social science: political economy. The present discussion will suggest that Smith maps political economy in something very much like the space Locke had treated as "corruption," and then in turn creates a new space of corruption for behavior he excludes from his science. The discussion will focus on a particular case that illustrates the way in which the practices of the public sphere may have encouraged the propensity to identify corruption as an external space of exclusion. The instance in question comes from the critique in The Wealth of Nations of the actions of the East India Company in South Asia. At the end of the essay, I will refer briefly to the construction of a truly "foreign" space of exclusion around corruption in the formation of a European ethnology of India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. [End Page 262...