II. Challenging Orthodox Ideas of Corruption

There is a large literature on the meanings of “corruption.”^{Footnote 17} Rather than reviewing the whole literature, I address challenges to orthodox ideas of corruption.

Orthodox accounts define corruption as “the misuse of public office for private gain,” or something similar, for example “abuse” not “misuse,” “benefit” not “gain,” and so on.^{Footnote 18} I do not reject this idea—far from it. Public-office corruption can be extremely damaging. It can be particularly harmful to poor people and women.^{Footnote 19} It can kill.^{Footnote 20} Understanding, explaining, and reducing it are literally vital.

But the orthodox idea has often been questioned. One concern is the public/private dichotomy.^{Footnote 21} This is challenged especially often by scholars studying corruption in non-Western contexts, including Africa, India, and the communist/post-communist space.^{Footnote 22}

We should also expand corruption beyond private gain alone. Johann Graf Lambsdorff includes “benefits for relatives and friends,” while Joseph Nye prefers to talk of “private-regarding” gains, including close family and private cliques.^{Footnote 23} And—crucially for this essay—a small but significant number of scholars include party gain.^{Footnote 24} There is not a world of difference between a politician funneling government money into her bank account or her party’s bank account, nor between a party leader changing a policy in exchange for a bribe or for party funds. If the last of these feels different it may be partly because we have not been calling it corrupt when we should.

A related expansion of orthodox understandings of corruption involves the object that is corrupted. Modern discussions of corruption are often individualistic,^{Footnote 25} but historically, corruption was also seen non-individualistically: the corruption of a state, of a body politic, of the people.^{Footnote 26} Tocqueville even discusses the democratic process itself being corrupted.^{Footnote 27} Hayek attacks the corruption of democracy by parties bribing voters with tax cuts or welfare payments.^{Footnote 28} This too is a misuse of public office for party gain. Parties corrupt democracy.

Corruption is a “derivative” notion: one’s broader normative commitments affect what one sees as corrupt.^{Footnote 29} What norms underpin corruption? The answer seems to be some kind of impartiality,^{Footnote 30} equality,^{Footnote 31} or political equality.^{Footnote 32} Particularly important in relating corruption to political equality is Warren’s use of the Habermasian idea of proportionality of influence (a variant of political equality) to conceptualize corruption as “duplicitous exclusion.”^{Footnote 33} Warren is explicit that democracy can be corrupted,^{Footnote 34} and explains that on his account, “speech is corrupt not when it is wrong or untrue but when it is strategically duplicitous—manipulative—intended to deflect, dissimulate, distract, or otherwise obscure the claims of those who speak, in order to secure gains that could not be justified to those who pay for them or are otherwise affected.”^{Footnote 35} I take Warren’s Habermasian impulse in a different direction: I worry about the corruption of democratic thought and speech by the subversion of the Habermasian goal of being convinced by the force of the better argument. This involves corruption not as an intentional, duplicitous violation of political equality, but the undermining of impartiality, whether intentional or not.

Impartiality need not entail disinterestedness: self-interest can be part of common goods.^{Footnote 36} The point is to accept the force of the better argument whether or not the outcome would be in one’s interest. In certain contexts, we have a democratic duty to open-mindedly consider other views, arguments, and evidence; if we ultimately endorse our original views, that should be because they convince us, not because they are ours. I thus endorse Kurer’s conceptualization of corruption as a violation of impartiality,^{Footnote 37} although I base it on a public-duty rather than a public-office conception, and although I reached this position not via Kurer but via Hobbes.^{Footnote 38}

And it was Hobbes who inspired the last and most important way in which I am broadening the orthodox understanding of corruption, an idea I have called “cognitive corruption.”^{Footnote 39} The term is new although the idea is not; aspects of it are visible in ancient Greece.^{Footnote 40} But this notion remains rare.^{Footnote 41}

I define cognitive corruption as “the distortion of judgment.” This general idea can be fleshed out in many ways, as with other political definitions (such as freedom as “non-constraint”). “Judgment” could refer to reason, emotion, belief, and/or other aspects of inference; “distortion” could mean small or large deviations from what is seen as normal, desirable, reasonable, and so forth. Just as we can disagree about which actions constitute public-office corruption, so too we can disagree about what cognitive corruption involves.

Cognitive corruption is not necessarily related to political corruption (that is, public-office or public-duty corruption), as with a corrupt computer disk or a language becoming corrupted over time. But cognitive corruption becomes particularly interesting where it overlaps with political corruption, as I now explain by discussing four classic thinkers: Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), and John Stuart Mill (1806-73).

III. Machiavelli

Machiavelli, while best known for the “Machiavellianism” of The Prince, was also an influential civic republican, alongside Aristotle, Cicero, Rousseau, and others. Machiavelli’s civic republicanism aimed at freedom, the common good, greatness and glory, through good institutions/practices (ordini), education, and the civic virtue of citizens and leaders. Civic virtue is gendered: virtue was historically seen as the quality of a vir, a man; lacking virtue made men “effeminate.”^{Footnote 42} Below, I follow the convention of maintaining historical authors’ gender-language; for example, I say “men” where Machiavelli does, to avoid masking his gender assumptions.

For Machiavelli and many others, corruption was the opposite of civic virtue, and was the chief threat to freedom and the common good. Corruption hugely worried civic republicans,^{Footnote 43} and is unsurprisingly prominent in Machiavelli’s republican writings, especially the Discourses and the History of Florence.

Machiavelli sometimes depicts corruption cognitively. His play The Woman from Andros describes a man whose “mind” is so “corrupted” by passion or lust that he wants to marry a non-Athenian.^{Footnote 44} Cognitive and political corruption overlap: the man neglects his public duties because of corrupt judgment. This corruption precedes the neglect of public duties: his corrupt mental state then makes him neglect his duties.^{Footnote 45} Similarly, Machiavelli depicts Romans being uncorrupt and thus rejecting bribes: “if such a people had been corrupt, it would not have refused the [bribe].”^{Footnote 46} Machiavelli sometimes uses a visual metaphor, for instance, Caesar could “blind” Romans so they did not spot him enslaving them.^{Footnote 47}

Machiavelli sometimes mentions corrupt judgment in political contexts: people seeing modernity as better than ancient times,^{Footnote 48} making faulty generalizations about who should rule,^{Footnote 49} and—again overlapping with political corruption—making biased judgments about who owned the profits to a mine, perhaps because they had been “corrupted by a party.”^{Footnote 50}

This last comment overlaps with the most common idea of corruption in Machiavelli’s writings: corruption as a state of political decay, sometimes with connotations of moral decay too. For example, the Florentine Histories contains a stinging critique of “corrupt cities” and their irreligiousness, moral depravity, cruelty, selfishness, “love of party and the power of parties,” and “avarice and ambition.”^{Footnote 51} Political decay reflects neglect of public duties for non-public gain.

I say “non-public gain” rather than “private gain,” but some Machiavelli scholars anachronistically address private gain only. For Sara Shumer, Machiavellian corruption is “the privatization both of the average citizen and those in office. In the corrupt state, men locate their values wholly within the private sphere and they use the public sphere only to promote private interests.”^{Footnote 52} This is right, but Machiavelli also discusses ends that are neither public nor private, such as partisan/factional ones. Pitkin does mention factions, but talks more of “privatization,” dichotomously contrasting communal/non-corrupt ends with individualistic/corrupt ones, as does Hannah Arendt.^{Footnote 53} Quentin Skinner, by contrast, gets the emphasis right: Machiavellian corruption is the reverse of “placing the common good above the pursuit of any individual or factional ends.”^{Footnote 54} “To be a corrupt citizen is to place one’s own ambitions or the advantages of a party above the common good. It is . . . always private or factional forces ‘that ruin a free way of life’.”^{Footnote 55}

Machiavelli is addressing such things as the strife between Guelfs and Ghibellines in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, through which “the whole city [of Florence] was corrupted.”^{Footnote 56} In such situations, “laws are made not for the public but for personal utility . . . not in accordance with free life but by the ambition of that party which has come out on top,” and “wars, pacts and friendships are decided not for the common glory but for the satisfaction of [the] few.” Today, we typically contrast the “rule of law” with the “rule of men,” but Machiavelli here distinguishes between a “city that prefers to maintain itself with sects rather than with laws.”^{Footnote 57} Likewise, he bemoans reforms made not for “the common good” but for “the strengthening and security” of the group behind them, and condemns councils which do not serve “the well-being of the city” but “can by means of parties (sette) be demoralized (corrompere).”^{Footnote 58} (Corrompere is probably better translated as “corrupted,” and sette perhaps as “sects.”^{Footnote 59})

Today, Machiavelli would criticize laws made for partisan rather than common benefit. Party policies are sometimes insincere, motivated by external considerations such as personality, keeping a divided party together, causing problems for another party, and so on.^{Footnote 60} Such motivations should worry us to the extent that we want decisions made according to the force of the better argument.

Of course, Machiavelli and even some deliberative democrats have overly straightforward notions of the common good.^{Footnote 61} Indeed, “the common good” is sometimes more rhetorical than substantive.^{Footnote 62} At least since Mandeville we know that self-interest can lead to public goods. Self-interest can be part of common interests, as noted earlier, and Machiavelli also implies this: individual liberty benefits everyone.^{Footnote 63} So, Skinner is too strong in using Machiavelli to argue that we should “place our duties before our rights.”^{Footnote 64} I stress these points to deflect Rosenblum’s fear that some criticisms of parties reflect a holistic attachment to a mythical common good.^{Footnote 65}

One last insight. For Machiavelli, indolence/laziness is corrupt: civic virtue requires a readiness to serve.^{Footnote 66} (The young Bentham said the same.^{Footnote 67}) Today, many of us accept party democracy because we have other things to do. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, direct democracy takes too many evenings. But deliberative mini-publics are far less time-consuming, involve fewer people, and allow opting out. They offer broadly representative microcosms of society, discussing matters open-mindedly and autonomously, without the corrupting influence of parties—and without requiring the level of civic dedication Machiavelli sought.

IV. Hobbes

Hobbes is often read forward: How, if at all, could we escape a state of nature?^{Footnote 68} But he can also be read backward: What prevents a return to the state of nature?^{Footnote 69} Reading Hobbes backward helps explain why he, like many of his contemporaries, is so worried about corruption, which subverts order. Note that some scholars think Hobbes does not or could not have an account of corruption.^{Footnote 70} However, such claims do not fit with Hobbes’s many comments on corruption.^{Footnote 71}

Hobbes particularly feared corruption of legal processes—again, a common concern in his day.^{Footnote 72} Even non-Hobbesians know what can happen if people distrust legal processes, say due to judicial corruption. Thus Hobbes decries “frequent corruption and partiality of Judges,” and juries whose decisions are “corrupted by reward.”^{Footnote 73} As Noel Malcolm notes, Hobbes wants “to curb the arrogance of the mighty”; a strong state protects citizens from not only outsiders but also “potential oppressors within the state”^{Footnote 74} (hence Hobbes’s concern about rich men who “adventure on Crimes, upon hope of escaping punishment, by corrupting publique justice, or obtaining Pardon by Mony, or other rewards”^{Footnote 75}).

A key value here is equity—“the equall distribution to each man, of that which in reason belongeth to him.” A judge who is “partiall in judgment,” however, encourages people to take the law into their own hands “and consequently . . . is the cause of Warre.”^{Footnote 76}

Some of Hobbes’s comments on corruption of legal processes are partly or wholly cognitive, such as a judge being “corrupted by human nature” if he would stand to benefit from one or other party winning a case, “for hee hath taken (though an unavoydable bribe, yet) a bribe; and no man can be obliged to trust him.”^{Footnote 77} Likewise, testimony against relatives is “corrupted by Nature”: a witness’s feelings contaminate his judgment.^{Footnote 78} Fascinatingly, Hobbes realizes that greed is not the only corrupting emotion: judges can be “corrupted by gifts, influence or even pity.”^{Footnote 79}

Hobbes also describes what Robert Brooks has called “auto-corruption,” where you corrupt yourself.^{Footnote 80} This idea, incidentally, also matters because some people, including Bentham, define corruption in terms of a corruptor and a corruptee.^{Footnote 81} But unless one adds that the corruptor and corruptee can be the same person, such definitions exclude cases that most people call corrupt, such as bureaucrats stealing public funds. Cognitive auto-corruption is relevant for this paper: corrupt judgments do not require active, intentional, external influences.

Hobbes makes a deliciously offensive comment about cognitive auto-corruption when discussing counsel (advice), an important and controversial seventeenth-century concern.^{Footnote 82} Hobbes loathed the way that gentlemen were taught that civic virtue involved them counseling sovereigns.^{Footnote 83} Such practices, he claimed, had helped cause the civil war.^{Footnote 84} He also argued, albeit unconvincingly, that counsel using rhetoric was inherently self-interested, such that those counseling rhetorically “are corrupt Counsellours, and as it were bribed by their own interest.”^{Footnote 85} It was surely a calculated insult to call rhetorical counsel corrupt—the opposite of civic virtue.

Hobbes wanted a counselor to “tye himself . . . to the rigour of true reasoning.”^{Footnote 86} We need not accept Hobbes’s position fully: a purely reason-based, non-rhetorical deliberative democracy is implausible and undesirable.^{Footnote 87} But deliberative democrats often under-emphasize the quality of argumentation. For example, Joshua Cohen’s focus on “reasoning” primarily addresses reasons, especially reasons that others could accept.^{Footnote 88} Cohen is not explicit about whether this also includes arguments that are logical, coherent, and supported with evidence. Of course, democratic deliberation may fall short in this respect too, as discussed above.

I now return to cognitive auto-corruption, and to a distortion of judgment that particularly vexed Hobbes: corruption of mathematical reasoning.^{Footnote 89} This may sound distant from the corruption of democracy, but it underpins a stunning Hobbesian insight.

Hobbes often criticizes the corruption of mathematical doctrines, for example through error or ignorance. In the 1630s he had been one of Europe’s leading mathematicians, although he was a mathematical laughing-stock by the end of the 1650s.^{Footnote 90} Perhaps it was Hobbes’s judgment that was really corrupted! Intriguingly, he sometimes implies that such corruption reflects self-interest.^{Footnote 91} The start of Hobbes’s Elements of Law makes a similar point. This book, written a decade before Leviathan, is a clear nod to Euclid’s Elements of Geometry,^{Footnote 92} and claims to base the study of politics and ethics on mathematical reasoning. Yet Hobbes adds that “as oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason.”^{Footnote 93} In other words, self-interest can distort judgment, consciously or subconsciously. So too with party interest. I support deliberative democracy partly because it helps decision-makers focus on the merits of a case, not on whether a policy helps a leader’s image, how the media would respond, and so on.

Obviously, we all hold opinions that it suits us to hold, due to confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, and so on. But when are such opinions most likely to be open-mindedly reconsidered? Not at election time, where echo chambers can deafen. Not in most public legislative debates, where legislators typically support their parties, make arguments that appeal to their supporters, and so on. Deliberative democracy offers a relatively calm, relatively nonpartisan environment where we can privately or publicly change our minds. Many of us won’t, but some will—even on difficult moral matters. The proportion of deliberators modifying or significantly changing their views can be very high.^{Footnote 94} The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly saw little change in views on underlying norms but significant change in views on which electoral systems best manifested those norms.^{Footnote 95} Even Hobbes, who hated group deliberation, would have been impressed by some real-world deliberation.

V. Bentham

Bentham writes so much about corruption, in so many places, that I only offer a sample of his ideas here. In particular, I sidestep his comments on corruption and the “public opinion tribunal,” despite their importance from a deliberative democracy perspective.^{Footnote 96} Note too that while Bentham sometimes talks of corruption cognitively—for instance, the “moral” or “intellectual” parts of one’s “mental frame” being “vitiated and corrupted”^{Footnote 97}—more often he uses a public-duty or public-office conception: corruption as sacrificing the universal interest to a partial interest.^{Footnote 98} But as we will see, there is a mental component to this: the replacement of one person’s will by another. And this kind of corruption is closely linked to what Bentham calls delusion, which is clearly cognitive.

Corruption was perhaps “the single most important political issue of the eighteenth century” in Britain.^{Footnote 99} Corruption worried many writers in this period, including Bolingbroke, Burke, and Paine. Bentham’s approach to corruption derives, of course, from his utilitarianism, whose ethical basis, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, has political offshoots: a theory of representation and, thus, a theory of corruption. Members of Parliament (MPs) are entrusted with power to maximize the greatest happiness. An MP violates this trust by placing the happiness of fewer people than the greatest number, potentially including his own happiness, above the universal interest. “Sinister interest,” in particular, means self-interest trumping the universal interest.^{Footnote 100} Corruption is thus “the sacrifice of the universal interest to [an individual’s] personal or other particular interest.”^{Footnote 101} So, corruption involves public officials placing self-interest above the common good of utility-maximization.

This theory of representation sits alongside a psychological theory even more developed than Hobbes’s, and an associated theory of corruption. Bentham discusses what we call autonomy: one’s actions are one’s own if they are authentic products of one’s genuine will. Minds should be changed only by another’s understanding influencing one’s own. This is akin to the Habermasian idea of being convinced by the force of the better argument. Bentham indeed talks of “the force of argument,”^{Footnote 102} although he does not have a fully Habermasian account of preference-change through deliberation.^{Footnote 103}

One’s will can be distorted in at least two ways: indirectly, via delusion (false understanding), and directly, via corruption.^{Footnote 104} Delusion and corruption are “[i]ntimately connected.”^{Footnote 105} Delusion is “the production of erroneous conceptions” which make us accept “the sacrifice of the universal to the sinister interest.”^{Footnote 106} The Church of England and the monarch are the great deluders, lulling “the subject many” into a “state of habitual dependence,” unable to enjoy “a true conception of their own interest.”^{Footnote 107} It was Bentham, not Engels, who first talked of “false consciousness.”^{Footnote 108}

Whereas delusion works directly on the understanding, and only indirectly on the will,^{Footnote 109} corruption is the direct but improper influence of will on will, through hope or fear.^{Footnote 110} Bentham compares this to bribery and “terrorism,” which are essentially equivalent: both produce a “spuriousness of the will,” such that “the will . . . of some other person,” not an individual’s own will, motivates his actions.^{Footnote 111} Corruption means “any act or state of things, by which, by means of its operation on his will, a functionary is induced to act on a course, deviating in any manner from the path of his duty.”^{Footnote 112} Note that this is a public-duty idea of corruption.

Who corrupts whom? In Britain, the monarch corrupts the will of ministers, representatives, and peers with tools of patronage—sinecures, pensions, jobs (“places”), and bribes—such that with a few exceptions “the general and habitual course of government” is merely the monarch’s will.^{Footnote 113} Aristocrats and monarch combine to create “Monarch and Co.”^{Footnote 114} Bentham frequently calls the monarch “Corrupter-General.”^{Footnote 115} That term could easily fit modern UK prime ministers.^{Footnote 116} Bentham parodies our supposedly “Matchless Constitution,” featuring “monarchy and aristocracy above: sham democracy beneath—a slave crouching under both.”^{Footnote 117} This is insulting to actual slaves, but the metaphor is powerful and important. “Sham democracy” is a particularly significant notion: so-called “democracy” today falls so far short of the ideal that it arguably does not deserve the name.^{Footnote 118} Giving it this name increases our rulers’ power by making them sound more legitimate than they are.

Corruption can also be systemic.^{Footnote 119} Corruption of MPs by the monarch sometimes “has its source not in the mental texture of this or that individual, but in the political texture of the system or frame of government itself.” (Bentham soon forgets this and accepts that both are relevant.) Yet we typically only spot the former, even though the latter is often far more widespread.^{Footnote 120} Bentham disparages as “shameless” and “transparent” the “hypocrisy” that bribe-taking is punished while place-holding is held in honor.^{Footnote 121} Bentham, like Machiavelli, would see modern party democracy as fundamentally corrupt.

Corruption may be completely unintended. Bentham’s systemic corruption sounds like what we now call Pavlovian or classical conditioning. MPs are “[h]abituated to receive and enjoy the effects of the corruption,” like a baby who salivates on seeing a cake,^{Footnote 122} or a cat who comes to the door on hearing the cat-food supplier ring the doorbell: the cat knows he will soon get food, paid for by his owner.^{Footnote 123} The cat is the MP, the owner is the prime minister, and the cat-food supplier is the monarch supplying patronage for his minions to dispense.

Unfortunately, “to overcome the force of interest by the force of argument” is as likely as converting the Pope to Protestantism, or successfully besieging a city with “peas blown out of a pea-shooter.”^{Footnote 124} Bentham does want less corruption, though. Grappling with the classic problem of independence versus dependence, he denies that making politicians independent means they will maximize the universal interest rather than their own self-interest: independence means “irresponsibility.”^{Footnote 125} Rather, MPs must be dependent on the people.^{Footnote 126} Bentham’s Constitutional Code thus proposes a unicameral legislature, elected annually, with MPs removable within their term of office should they fail to do as required. There is neither a separation of powers nor institutional checks and balances on this “omnicompetent” legislature.^{Footnote 127}

Bentham’s suggestions here are at times frankly bizarre: to stop the Prime Minister and the Justice Minister colluding, they should live as far apart as was conveniently possible, and should be accompanied by a trumpeter so that everyone would know if the two ministers were meeting.^{Footnote 128} Bentham did not live in the age of telephones or emails, but he did live in the age of letters and minions. His proposal would rank highly on a list of the Top Ten Impractical Idiocies By Famous Philosophers, even above Hayek’s embarrassingly constructivist rationalism in recommending that only forty-five-year-olds should have the vote.^{Footnote 129}

Deliberative democracy is often contrasted with aggregative democracy, where democracy primarily involves aggregating votes in elections. Bentham is not the unthinking aggregative democrat that some writers imply,^{Footnote 130} but his ideas only overlap to some extent with deliberative democracy.^{Footnote 131} Like Hobbes he preferred other solutions, but I suspect he would have seen some merits in deliberative mini-publics because they increase independence and impartiality, and facilitate “the force of [the better] argument.” How much it fosters the greatest happiness is unclear, but on some issues and under some conditions, citizens may make better decisions than professional politicians and bureaucrats, if only because they are likelier to make decisions on the merits of the case.

Three last points. Like Machiavelli, but unlike Hobbes and Mill, Bentham sometimes has a gendered account of corruption and virtue. Many MPs were lawyers. “The Morals of the Bar become the morals of the House. Learn manly virtue at the Bar, learn female at Drury Lane,” he writes.^{Footnote 132} The latter comment refers to acting, which he seems to have viewed as effeminate (see Section III for corruption and “effeminacy”). If representatives are actors, voicing others’ lines, the implication is that Bentham wants autonomous decision-making through sincere deliberation.

Relatedly, Bentham has a small but important insight about the randomness of party politics. He always saw lawyers and judges as deeply corrupt.^{Footnote 133} Echoing the widespread seventeenth-century fountain-of-corruption metaphor,^{Footnote 134} Bentham writes that it is from the Bar—“that perennial fountain of moral contagion”—that “the corruption of party becomes worse corrupted”: the two-party system precludes rational argument, because if one side supports a motion, the other often has to oppose. It is essentially random which side argues which, Bentham notes.^{Footnote 135} This highlights the irrationality of much party politics, very distant from the force of the better argument.

Bentham, indeed, approvingly quotes Hobbes: “When Reason is against a man, the man will be against Reason.” But Bentham goes further: being “against Reason” even means opposing the faculty of reason itself, firing “a storm of hatred and contempt.” Reason “finds herself pelted by a volley of words, in which there is nothing determinate, nothing intelligible,” aiming at “rendering her an object [of] hatred or contempt.”^{Footnote 136} So-called post-truth politics is not so new.

VI. Mill

Although Mill more often talks of political corruption,^{Footnote 137} he also has fascinating insights about cognitive corruption. Today, when we say that power corrupts, I suspect we mostly consider temptation by governmental resources. Mill has a far more interesting explanation.

I start with Mill on corruption and religion. The Church of Scotland went from “the people’s church” to “the church of the aristocracy” because “corruption crept in”: the church was not exempt from “the evil tendencies of human affairs in general,” including “the tendency of power to concentrate itself in few hands.”^{Footnote 138} Meanwhile, the Church of England was “corrupted, by the secular interests of its ministers . . . because these ministers spring from the aristocracy.”^{Footnote 139} Again, this is corruption as non-public gain, not private gain: the interest is sectional, not personal.

But Mill is most incisive on how power corrupts cognitively: inequalities of power corrupt those with and without power. As Wendy Donner explains, especially in relation to gender inequalities,

The key point for this essay is the Hegelian idea that those with power are corrupted, not just those without. On Liberty mentions this briefly: Should we agree that “the strong man of genius” should take power “forcibly” and make people do what he sees as good? Mill rejects such “hero-worship,” because coercion contradicts “freedom and development” and is also “corrupting to the strong man himself.”^{Footnote 141} Mill reiterates this elsewhere: slavery, which is “repugnant,” is also “corrupting to the master-class.”^{Footnote 142}

This idea is developed most powerfully in The Subjection of Women, with its “shrewd and devastatingly insightful analysis of corrupt power, oppression, despotism, and tyranny in gender and family relations.”^{Footnote 143} Mill bemoans “the corrupting effects of the power” of husbands over wives.^{Footnote 144} This relationship corrupts the husband more than the wife: having “almost unlimited power . . . over at least one human being” means that “this power seeks out and evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his nature.”^{Footnote 145} It creates “self-worship”: husbands are “taught to worship their own will,” which fosters selfishness, whereas women are “universally taught that they are born and created for self-sacrifice.”^{Footnote 146} Mill’s comments evoke the Hobbesian fear of being bribed by one’s own interest. Hobbes wanted to restrict counselors’ opportunities for auto-corruption; Mill likewise sought legal reform to remove husbands’ power and thus temptation.

This insight is most incisively stated in Considerations on Representative Government’s oft-overlooked discussion of “the meaning of the universal tradition, grounded on universal experience, of men’s being corrupted by power”:

Richard Blaug’s fascinating discussion of corruption in hierarchies confirms Mill’s insight:

Mark Philp makes a similar point: the “arrogance of power” corrupts because the “personal anxieties, passions, and irrationalities [of those in supreme office] inevitably feed their vision and guide their judgement.” The corruption of political leaders is less about “turning the state into a private domain,” and more about hubris, “coming to believe that one’s office, confers . . . the right to act as one sees fit.”^{Footnote 149}

This provides support for deliberative democracy: open-mindedness is likelier in non-hierarchical discussions featuring people who are not senior, professional politicians. But note that Mill’s explanation of power corrupting rests on two “evil dispositions”: preferring selfish interests over common interests, and preferring immediate/direct interests over remote/indirect interests.^{Footnote 150} It is not clear how much deliberative democracy helps in either respect.

Mill’s comments imply another challenge for deliberative democracy. Especially in Considerations on Representative Government, Mill depicts power as exaggerating one’s importance and promoting close-mindedness. This is less likely in less hierarchical situations, but still possible, especially where people are already self-important. And it might be likelier for men.^{Footnote 151} So, the background cognitive corruption that Mill decries in The Subjection of Women may hamper open-mindedness in deliberative democracy. Mill knows this:

Getting deliberative democracy right is insufficient: participants’ dispositions also matter. Education is thus crucial, and is indeed significant for Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bentham, and Mill. This is ultimately beyond the scope of this essay, but one point may help. The original proposals for citizenship education in the UK included twelve-year-old children having to defend an ethical position with which they disagreed. This is hard, even for adults. But it matters for deliberative democracy, as does empathy more broadly. Other-mindedness, and open-mindedness about norms, are of course crucial for Mill. They can be built into deliberative democracy practices.^{Footnote 153} But they are best learned earlier.

VII. Conclusion

This essay has argued that historical perspectives broaden our understanding of corruption and strengthen our account of democracy. Of course, any idea can be thought afresh: historical analysis is never necessary. But it has helped me think through these issues. Eight ideas are particularly important:

1. 1) cognitive corruption—the corruption of judgment;

2. 2) auto-corruption, and impartiality potentially being corrupted by having a stake in something;

3. 3) corruption not as misuse of public office for private gain, but neglect of public duty for non-public gain;

4. 4) corruption for party gain;

5. 5) a system of party corruption;

6. 6) the arbitrariness of party policy positions, with decisions often made on inauthentic grounds rather than being driven by the force of the better argument;

7. 7) deliberative democracy as a non-hierarchical method of making decisions where citizens remove their party hats; and

8. 8) the importance of getting the right dispositions, not just the right institutions/procedures.

I will conclude with one last historical insight, partly to deflect the fear that my notion of corruption is too broad—that “corrupt” judgment is better described as “distorted” or “polluted,” and that the term “corruption” is best kept for actions which are wrong and should be prohibited. On this view, we should not describe misuse of public office for party gain as corrupt, since some such actions should be tolerated, and we should say at most that parties undermine democracy, not corrupt it.

In one sense, the disagreement is only semantic: what matters most is normative—that we do discuss distorted judgment, misuses of public office for party gain, and parties undermining democracy. Such views are rare in the literatures on corruption and deliberative democracy, though: historical analysis has helped me make valuable connections.

There is a more important reason to deflect the above objection: implicit in much contemporary discussion of corruption, and most historical uses of the term, is the view that corruption is necessarily wrong and should necessarily be prohibited. Of course, many writers have denied this. David Hume accepted some degree of some kinds of corruption.^{Footnote 154} Although 1960s economistic defenders of corruption ultimately fail to convince,^{Footnote 155} they are right that some corruption may sometimes be beneficial, even if only because eliminating corruption may have undesirable side-effects,^{Footnote 156} such that we should look for optimal levels of corruption.^{Footnote 157} We should certainly ask if corruption is as worrying as bad governance.^{Footnote 158} Context matters: bribing Nazi guards in concentration camps is hardly evil.^{Footnote 159}

Understandably, though, the overwhelming implication of much contemporary writing is that corruption is always wrong and must be prohibited. This doubtless reflects not only the weight of history and the difficulty of seeing when to permit corruption, but also the recent legalization of corruption discourse, due to bodies like Transparency International and practices like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the United Nations Convention against Corruption, and the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions. Such organizations and laws, which have been so important in tackling corruption, could not say that parties corrupt democracy, given political niceties. Still, one does not need to be a poststructuralist or a critical theorist to ask: Who does the dominant language of corruption benefit, and who might lose out if we revisit some largely forgotten historical ideas of corruption? The answer, I have suggested, is parties and party leaders. It is thus in your interest, and mine, to rethink our ideas of corruption.