Revisionist Approaches to Corruption: From “Cynical Conservativism” to Radical Realism

Abstract

This paper considers the genealogy of the “revisionist” approaches to corruption. The core of the approaches is the idea that practices deviating from formal rules or “accepted norms” with the objective of serving private ends may have a positive aggregate-level impact. No less important, the approaches are skeptic about anti-corruption attempts. In interrogating the revisionist approaches, the paper demonstrates that corruption studies have ignored important ideas, causing it to remain intertwined with moralism, despite proclamations otherwise. The paper thus argues that incorporating revisionist ideas might ease the discontent in corruption studies and improve public integrity.

Keywords:

• Anti-corruption
• corruption
• judgment
• moralism
• realism

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Arendt’s realism, including the influence of Machiavelli on her thought, is explored in Owens (2008). Vogler and Tillyris (2021) deal with her realistic ideas about political judgment.

2 Mark Philp adopted a realistic political theory in his later writings about corruption (Philp & David-Barrett, 2015). In his earlier work mentioned here, however, he wrote in a style that I describe here as moralistic.

3 Fran Osrecki (2017) examined the sociology of corruption from the 1950s until the early 1970s with a focus on the writings of Samuel Huntington and James Scott. Some of Osrecki’s insights are incorporated into this paper. The attempt here is to invoke the literature published also between the late 19th century and the 1950s. Even 1960s revisionist texts have been discussed only to support the presumption that corruption is entirely harmful (Thompson, 2018, p. 503; Warren, 2004, p. 328). One need only consider the recent rebuke by Persson et al. (2019) of Marquette and Peiffer’s (2018) postulation that corruption might persist because it solves problems.

4 Regarding my choice to adopt a genealogical approach to understanding the revisionist approach to corruption, I benefited from Prinz and Raekstad (2020).

5 According to a recent interpretation, the Federalist papers “implicitly create a collaboration imperative” (Bingham & O'Leary, 2011). Revisionist suggest that there was no collaboration without corruption.

6 Zephyr Teachout (2014) argued that the American constitution carries within it an anti-corruption principle. It seems, however, that the doctrine of limited government is a better way to describe it. The problem was not that men were corrupt. Rather, as Edward Banfiled suggested following James Madison, “it arose from the diversity of faculties” (Banfiled, 1985, p. 10). Furthermore, Alexander Hamilton, based on David Hume, held revisionist attitude towards corruption (Savage, 1994, p. 179). What is of importance for our purpose, however, is that revisionists argued that the separation of powers and the constitution more generally encouraged, unintendedly, corruption.

7 Woodrow Wilson followed Ford in observing that corruption, bossism, and “other unseemly aspects of party politics” were essential to political integration (Stid, 1994, p. 559). At least partly because of Ford, Wilson came to believe that “The only possible means of integration lies outside governments…and is extra-legal…[I]t is the system which is to blame, not the politicians…We have created the situation and must either change it or abide by its results with such patience and philosophy as we can command” (1910, pp. 591–592).

8 Interestingly, Lippmann used the example of Tim Sullivan, a powerful boss at Tammany Hall who was engaged in different sorts of corruption, including criminal activities. Around 1907, the print media labeled Sullivan “the king of the Underworld” (Welch, 2008, p. 107).

9 The focal point of the paper is decline and corrupt polity, and not a positive view about corruption.

10 In a footnote, Nye mentioned that the second part of the definition had been taken from Banfield (1961, p. 315).

11 The same is true for the early writings of Myron Weiner, who had been collaborating with Huntington and other scholars stigmatized as “developmentalists” since the mid-1960s (Almond, 2004, p. 32).

12 For Heidenheimer (1970, p. 480), not all writers who attributed some positive function to corruption should have been considered “functionalists.” It would have been more accurate to suggest that not all of them accepted the functional-structuralism approach. In fact, Leys and Scott, among others, rejected both it and the Parsonian concept of “pattern variables” (Parsons & Shils, 1951).

13 The final clause of Nye’s definition derives from Banfield (1961, p. 315).

14 As far as I can tell, Banfield did not change his attitude towards corruption. He had always been a sophisticated conservative who believed that the root cause of corruption is popular government, which means, corruption was unavoidable. His classical paper from 1975 is in no way a plea for anti-corruption crusade. Rather, it is a skeptical perspective on what he conceived as “the spate of social welfare programs initiated by the Great Society and, for the most part, continued and expanded by the later administrations” (Banfield, 1980/1985, p. 127).

15 The attack on revisionists and commentary against corruption conform to what Stephen Gill (1998) has called New Constitutionalism, which involves “mak[ing] governments more responsive to the discipline of market forces and correspondingly less responsive to popular-democratic forces and processes” (5). David Graeber (2014) explained why and how under neoliberalism, the left defended bureaucratic public institutions.

16 For example, if the U.S. Secret Service was made to pay as much as $1185 a night to stay at properties belonging to former president Donald Trump, and the former president profited “from his protection details in and out of office” (Stein, 2022), no revisionists would suggest that this is beneficial or functional.

17 The scholarship has generally only superficially represented the crucial differences between Scott’s revisionism and that of Huntington (e.g., Osrecki, 2017). In an interview, Scott recalled that at the Association of Asian Studies, “there were huge demonstrations over Huntington’s work, and I was very much a part of that” (http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/DO/filmshow/scott2_fast.htm).