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The Corruption of a State*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

J. Patrick Dobel
J. Patrick Dobel*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Dearborn
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Abstract

This article presents a theory of corruption which unifies the moral, political, economic and social causes and patterns of corruption in one theoretical framework. The theory is constructed from the scattered insights about the “corruption of the body politic,” building in particular upon the work of five theorists–Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau. Corruption is defined as the moral incapacity of citizens to make reasonably disinterested commitments to actions, symbols and institutions which benefit the substantive common welfare. This extensive demise of loyalty to the commonwealth comes from the interaction of human nature with systematic inequality of wealth, power and status. The corruption of the polity results in certain identifiable patterns of political conflict and competition. The central feature of these patterns is the emergence of quasi-governmental factions and an increasingly polarized class system. The politics of the factions leads to an undermining of the efficacy of the basic political structures of the society and the emergence of systematic corruption in all aspects of political life. The theory advanced in this article identifies several crucial prescriptions to stave off the tendency towards corruption. Among these are an extension of maximum substantive participation by all citizens in all aspects of political life and a stringent control over all sources of great or permanent inequality in the polity.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 958 - 973
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1978

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Political Science Association convention at Chicago in 1976. Since then, the paper has benefited immensely from the help of many individuals, notable among them ate Donald Anderson, Dennis Dutton, Jamieson Doig, Fritz Kratochwil, Arlene Saxonhouse, Lea Vaughn and Frank Wayman. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the anonymous referees whose invaluable help enabled me to rectify many of the original shortcomings. For the weaknesses that remain, the responsibility is mine.

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