Which social arrangements have a history of fostering progress and prosperity? One quick answer, falsely attributed to Adam Smith, holds that we are guided as if by an invisible hand to do what builds the wealth of nations. A more sober answer, closer to what Smith said and believed, is that if the right framework of rules—plus decent officiating—steers us away from buying and selling monopoly privilege and steers us toward being valuable to the people around us, we indeed will be part of the engine that drives human progress and the wealth of nations.

The corruption of the rule of law is an ambiguous phrase. It can refer either to the corruption of the value of the rule of law or to the corrupting effect that the commitment to the rule of law produces. This essay explains how both can be the case. The rule of law is one of a cluster of values that liberal political theory requires a morally legitimate government to exemplify. Thus, the rule of law is a component part of a just political structure. However, the phrase "the rule of law" is often used colloquially to refer to most or all of the cluster of liberal values. When used in this way, a duty to obey the law often attaches itself to the concept of the rule of law. It is the association of this duty with the concept of the rule of law when used in its narrow, literal sense to refer to only one of the liberal values that corrupts both those who are committed to the rule of law and the respect for the value itself.

In one broad construal, corruption consists of deriving benefit from power over others in morally objectionable ways. The charge that capitalism is corrupt is usefully understood as a claim that modern capitalist economies inevitably and pervasively generate corrupt gains, in this sense, through conduct that does not transgress capitalist norms for individuals’ economic conduct. Modern capitalism has two features that would figure prominently in such an indictment: gains from the inferior bargaining power of most workers and gains from the superior political influence of those in the best economic situations. The taint of corruption should be reduced by political measures that move capitalist commerce toward Adam Smith’s commercial ideal of gains from exchanging help for help and that show appreciation of the equal importance of everyone’s presumed desire to have a life shaped by directives that he or she willingly accepts. Through such measures, capitalism could, in principle, become non-corrupt. In practice, unequal political influence will prevent this. Ending the corruptness of capitalism is an unattainable yet productive goal of reform.

This essay lays out three kinds of corruption—personal, structural, and civic—stressing the differences among these phenomena. It then explores civic corruption via the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson. Civic corruption occurs when the citizens of a republic lose interest in defending their shared institutions, and pursue their private wealth alone; avoiding it, according to Ferguson, requires placing limits on these private pursuits and getting citizens to participate in the public realm instead. By way of a comparison with Ferguson’s contemporary and friend Adam Smith—who agreed with Ferguson on many issues, although not on what was corrupting about the acquisition of wealth—the essay argues that Ferguson, for all his emphasis on participatory government, was a liberal, not a collectivist. With that in mind, the essay endorses many of Ferguson’s suggestions from a liberal perspective, and argues that, to preserve liberal republics, it is often necessary to expand what governments do, so as to maintain the commitment of citizens to their public institutions. This prescriptive implication brings out sharply how civic corruption differs from personal corruption, which may best be limited by shrinking the role of government, rather than expanding it.

This essay challenges conceptions of political corruption that rely on standards external to politics and explores an understanding of corruption as something that is part of the internal policing of politics. The essay draws attention to the multiple, conflicting ideas and principles that contribute to our understanding of corruption but argues that these often generate over-moralized and over-generalized claims and can become corrosive of the compromises and procedures that are central to political rule. The essay shows that recent accounts of political corruption often have highly attenuated understandings of “politics” and are over-expansive in their normative commitments, and argues that how we understand and talk about the corruption of politics is of major significance for the stability and effectiveness of the political orders of Western societies.

This essay explores those in pre-modern Britain (chiefly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) who were accused of corruption and yet denied their guilt and made defenses, disavowals, justifications, protests, vindications or at least sought to explain away, rationalize, or legitimize their behavior, both to themselves and to others. Six, sometimes overlapping, categories of rationales are identified. Focusing on the strategies and arguments used by the allegedly corrupt has both historical and philosophical value. Thinking about such cases helps both the state and its citizens to be as clear as possible about how to define integrity, and judge whether there was, or is, an intention to break, subvert, or manipulate moral codes. Thus it is not merely the legislator or the law court, but also the court of public opinion, that decides such matters; and debates about the acceptability of such defenses are an important part of a process of public debate about where society has drawn, or does now draw, ethical lines. There are degrees of corruption that need careful evaluation. Thinking about the past also raises interesting questions about whether corruption can be judged across time, culture, and space by a set of universal values. I argue that what appear to be universal values evolved over time as a result of particular cultural circumstances and contests over historical scandals. Contesting corruption allegations was an inherently political process: corruption is not just an economic issue but also a political and moral issue that demands contextualization. That process must include an understanding of national histories.

The corruption of public officials and institutions is generally regarded as wrong. But in what exactly does this form of corruption consist and what kind of wrong does it imply? Recent proponents of the “institutionalist approach” to political corruption have concentrated on those occasions when incentive structures distract institutions from their essential purpose and weaken public trust. The corruption of individual public officials has been less relevant to their work, except for when it leads to the erosion of the functioning of institutions. From this perspective, a clear emphasis has been put on the consequences of corruption. In contrast, I argue that political corruption, whether individual or institutional, can be more fundamentally understood as a form of political injustice in which someone has violated the logic of mutual accountability that undergirds all relations of justice in rights-based systems. In this sense, political corruption occurs when public officials use their entrusted power of office for the pursuit of an agenda whose rationale may not be vindicated as coherent with the terms of their mandate. By focusing on the inherent qualities of corrupt political relations, I lay out a novel relational and deontological understanding of the inherent wrongness of political corruption as a form of unaccountable action.

The more obvious forms of corruption are often preceded and explained by the etiolation of a practice: as its participants lose track of the point of their activities, their moral immune system is disabled. The argument is developed via a case study, philosophy itself. After advancing the hypothesis that philosophy is in the first instance the machine tool industry of the intellect—that its task is making the intellectual tools that make the intellectual tools—we consider what becomes of such an enterprise when this objective slips out of focus.

This essay develops a notion of “functional corruption,” adapted from sociology, to note that the harm of corruption appears to be contingent. In a system of dysfunctional institutions, corruption can improve the efficiency and speed of allocative mechanisms of the bureaucracy, possibly quite substantially. The problem is that this “short run” benefit locks in the long run harm of corruption by making institutions much more difficult to reform. In particular, a nation with bad institutions but without bureaucracy may be much more open to reform than a nation with similarly bad institutions but with “efficiently corrupt” bureaucrats. The idea of a “long run” is developed using the North, Wallis, and Weingast conception of open access orders. Corrupt systems are likely to be locked into closed access orders indefinitely, even though everyone knows there are better institutions available.

Corruption of public officials is the silent killer of the U.S. economy, and we should reflect carefully on how it might be reined in. That’s the thought behind campaign finance laws. But broad grants of discretion to authorities, which might work in New Zealand, are more likely to be abused in low-trust America, and campaign finance laws are one example of this. First Amendment free speech rights, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, represent its reflection on the American character and the possibility of abuse when Congress tries to restrict political speech. So conservatives are apt to think, and not entirely without reason.

This essay defends deliberative democracy by reviving a largely forgotten idea of corruption, which I call “cognitive corruption”—the distortion of judgment. I analyze different versions of this idea in the work of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bentham, and Mill. Historical analysis also helps me rethink orthodox notions of corruption in two ways: I define corruption in terms of public duty rather than public office, and I argue that corruption can be both by and for political parties. In deliberative democracy, citizens can take off their party hats and may be more influenced by the force of the better argument than in party democracy.

In this essay I argue that adversarial institutional systems, such as multi-party democracy, present a distinctive risk of institutional corruption, one that is particularly difficult to counteract. Institutional corruption often results not from individual malfeasance, but from perverse incentives that make it the case that agents within an institutional framework have rival institutional interests that risk pitting individual advantage against the functioning of the institution in question. Sometimes, these perverse incentives are only contingently related to the central animating logic of an institution. In these cases, immunizing institutions from the risk of corruption is not a theoretically difficult exercise. In other cases, institutions generate perverse or rival incentives in virtue of some central feature of the institution’s design, one that is also responsible for some of the institution’s more positive traits. In multi-party democratic systems, partisanship risks giving rise to too close an identification of the partisan’s interest with that of the party, to the detriment of the democratic system as a whole. But partisanship is also necessary to the functioning of such a system. Creating bulwarks that allow the positive aspects of partisanship to manifest themselves, while offsetting the aspects of partisanship through which individual advantage of democratic agents is linked too closely to party success, is a central task for the theory and practice of the institutional design of democracy.

In this essay I take issue with the problem of institutional corruption. A number of scholars have recently established a discontinuity thesis, according to which an institution may be corrupt even if its members are not. Against this view, I defend a continuity thesis and argue that institutional corruption can always be traced back to the blameworthy corrupt behavior of individual agents. Certain instances of corrupt behavior spread their effects and tip in a way that subvert (and not simply violate) the public rules that govern an institution. This occurs, I argue, following either summative, morphological, or systemic modalities. I show that such a taxonomy of institutional corruption is useful for the purpose of disentangling and understanding the variety of mechanisms that generate the phenomenon. Most importantly, the taxonomy allows for a more nuanced way of attributing responsibility for political corruption, including collective responsibility. I conclude that a continuity approach offers the tools for diagnosing institutional corruption, but also facilitates the task of formulating answers to political corruption, both from a backward-looking and from a forward-looking perspective.

Is corruption merely a flaw of character, or is it more fundamentally related to the institutional environment? Scholars from various disciplines mainly side with the narrative that, ultimately, corruption is a problem of character flaws. Policy prescriptions around the world are designed based on this understanding. In this essay, I challenge this understanding, arguing that it is at best incomplete, and misleading at worst. I argue that we should focus instead on three aspects of how the prevalence of virtuous acts is profoundly tied to people’s institutional environment and the incentive structure that derives from it. First, I observe that there is a difference between virtue and acting virtuously, and that even with the aid of moral education and coercion, virtue itself is hard to come by. Second, I discuss how formal institutions and social norms influence people’s propensity to perform virtuous acts rather than engage in corruption. Finally, I explore how institutions that increase the transaction costs associated with everyday life also increase the prevalence of corruption. Based on these three explorations I derive some public policy guidelines that, if followed, might increase the probability of success of anticorruption programs.