On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art (review)

Historians of nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century France and the United States should be provoked, positively, by this thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of Oscar Wilde's time, French political corruption, Watergate, and Monica Lewinsky. Adut's employment of "scandal" as a window onto these and other formative public events is innovative, and plausibly heuristic.

Adut employs several converging definitions of scandal. He writes that "scandal underlies all kinds of events and processes in public that have to do with actual, alleged, or apparent transgressions." A "catastrophe that instigates recriminations" is an example. So is "a heretical act in the open," a "witch-hunt," or even a congressional hearing (23). His sociological point seems to be that scandals are more than they ostensibly seem to be. There are unintended effects on first, second, and third parties. Individuals, groups, organizations, and society as a whole often push back to modify or magnify incidents that caused or formed the ostensible (or actual) bases of the scandal in question. For Adut, scandals are phenomena, obeying peculiar sets of rules and providing unexpected entry into the scandal for participants other than those immediately involved.

These are instructive definitions, but when the author attempts to dissect the American presidency, with its propensity to scandal, he vacillates. On the one hand, scandals stemmed from moral lapses—a mistress in the White House, alleged influence peddling, and a vicuna coat. But, on the other hand, they also flowed out of disagreements between the executive and the legislature—President Tyler's alleged prevarications and President Andrew Johnson's vetoes and his attempt to appoint his own secretary of war. Adut implies that President Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco should have been a scandal, but his popularity and prestige—his charisma—enabled him and his presidency to avoid lapsing into scandal.

As these representative examples suggest, the author believes in broad, indeed muddy, assertions of scandal—or perhaps "imprecise" might be the better adjective. Nevertheless, his contextualization of "scandal" is well-developed and worth pondering. In the case of the American presidency, he argues that the weakness of the nineteenth-century American executive vis à vis the legislature somewhat protected presidents of that era. In the twentieth century, with the rise of a stronger executive branch and of presidents with greater charisma, scandal became more pronounced and central even though a few revelations occurred after a president had left office. Adut's proposition is that "the accretion of its functions granted a real and symbolic centrality to the presidency." Thus, "normative attacks … [had] … collective costs" (94).

Toward the end of the book, in discussing President Clinton's scandalous escapade, Adut suggests that the high frequency of sex scandals in American political life results from more than a deep-seated puritanical streak in the national psyche or from moral activism. The French, he reports, are no less straitlaced about sex and, especially, the reporting of adultery. They are no less prurient. Paradoxically, Adut argues persuasively that the basic enabling factor that led to sex scandals was the sexual liberation of the 1960s. Sex scandals "luxuriate" when citizens are less modest than before (181). In other words, because the thresholds of shame have been lowered, scandals come easier to Americans (and others) than ever before.

The sex-scandal sections of the book are racier than the others, but the most enriching section focuses on the outbreak of corruption in France. It had always been there; the financing of political parties and other governmental "fishy financial practices" at all levels had always skirted the finer points of legality (135). But in the 1980s and 1990s, what had always been covered up was now investigated and publicized. Adut explains that a primary reason was cohabitation and the strengthening of the power of parlement. The liberalization of the French economy, privatization, and the weakening of pampered monopolies all reduced the power of the center, boosted competition, and increased the costs and profits of "scandalmongering" (139).

Scandals...