“A central task of the political philosopher is to render lucid that which is inchoate in political concepts” (16). So writes Robert Sparling in his thorough and illuminating Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality. This counsel is more than a passing aside in Sparling's analysis. Indeed, it reveals the twofold tasks of his book: to render lucid the nebulous concept of political corruption and to examine the purposes of political philosophy. Sparling is largely successful on both accounts and his work warrants attention from scholars of corruption and theorists seeking a model for thematic political thought.

The book opens with an extensive review of corruption studies that spans all subfields of political science. These pages outline the justification for Sparling's intervention: in public and scholarly discourse, the concept of corruption is disappointingly opaque. While many associate political corruption with vices such as bribery, nepotism, partiality, and duplicity, attempts to define the concept must recognize its flexibility and contingency. Some communities deem corrupt those social practices that favor kinship ties and the gift economy. In his resistance to English rule, by contrast, Gandhi castigated such legalism as responsible for corrupting Indian society (15). One community's corruption, it seems, is another's order. Like interlocutors of a Socratic dialogue, Sparling's readers grow increasingly perplexed as his scrutiny disarms many attempts to establish a fixed, universal definition of corruption. In fact, he counsels against such efforts (viii).

Yet this is no exercise in moral equivocation or historical relativism. Instead, Sparling persuasively highlights an all-too-neglected feature of corruption: “corruption is always the reverse side of the tapestry that is the good regime” (187). The discourse of corruption, in other words, belies competing conceptions of the ethical and political good. This is true of even modern theorists whose thought is avowedly anti-perfectionist. Sparling maintains this argument throughout his impressive exploration of seven thinkers—Erasmus, Machiavelli, La Boétie, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Kant (and Robespierre), and Weber—whose inclusion is justified by their “distinct and important deployments of [corruption] that have contemporary analogues” (98).

Sparling's book offers two contributions to our understanding of corruption. First, while corruption always exhibits “the abuse of public office for private gain,” what constitutes abuse and private gain can be variously conceptualized. Each of Sparling's chapters highlights one such “mode” of conceptualization: leadership ethics, republicanism, transparency, political nostalgia, liberal moderation, revolutionary purism, and the bureaucratic ethic. By exploring each “mode” with a different thinker, the reader leaves the text with a rich and nuanced sense of what may constitute political corruption. Second, modern theorists of corruption often commit a “terminological contradiction” by offering accounts of corruption while being reluctant to offer a vision of the good life or best regime. The contemporary discourse of corruption, Sparling would have us note, simultaneously incorporates and shuns notions of the good. To rectify this confusion, Sparling counsels normative political theory to embrace the “classical model of seeking an account of the healthy constitution in which rule is in the interests of the ruled” (191). The first step toward grasping the nature and curtailment of corruption, he suggests, is to reinstate the analysis of the best regime as a central purpose of political philosophy.

Sparling's ambitious pursuit of these contributions does not disappoint. If anything, his expeditious engagement with primary and secondary sources leaves the reader gasping for air. This prowess is most evident in the Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Weber chapters.

Machiavelli's “republicanism of distrust” demonstrates one manifestation of the republican conceptualization of corruption. While civic character fortifies the republican regime against corruption, Machiavelli counsels the cultivation of this character through the agonistic impulses of ambition and distrust. This character cultivation, however, belies a tension that is “profoundly modern”: as Sparling notes, “Machiavelli speaks the teleological and moral language of corruption, but without anything approaching or even replacing an Aristotelian conception of the realized human life. It is teleology without telos” (47). This tension is also evident in Sparling's treatment of Weberian bureaucracy. For Weber and modern bureaucracy, corruption entails the breaking of rules and norms of pure, impartial administration. To achieve this, “Weberian bureaucracy, too, engages in the crafting of character, for bureaucracy requires a particular type of character” (175). Thus, two modern theorists of corruption—Machiavelli and Weber—present a paradox: in order to resist corruption, we must cultivate citizens of a certain character. Nevertheless, both thinkers are thoroughly anti-perfectionist. The result is a perplexing “soulcraft for the soulless” (47).

If Machiavelli and Weber exhibit certain tensions in modern political thought, Montesquieu may offer the best hope for their reconciliation. By engaging in the regime analysis Sparling lauds, The Spirit of the Laws offers an “extremely fruitful reconciliation of particularity and universality” often lacking in notions of corruption (121). On the one hand, particularized corruption corrodes the animating principle of a specific regime—citizens’ affective relation to the public good. Thus, just as the corrosion of honor threatens a monarchy, the decline of public-spirited virtue threatens a republic; corruption is, in this sense, regime-dependent. On the other hand, the universal corruption of political society is despotism, which “is essentially corrupt, for fear is its ‘principle,’ and fear is an essentially corrupting principle” (127, emphasis original). To resist this universal corruption, all political communities must embrace moderate government—the vigilance necessary to resist despotic tendencies. Moreover, to effectively curtail both forms of corruption, communities must cultivate leaders and citizens inclined to their regime's animating principle. Nonetheless, Montesquieu's account of character cultivation presents no perfectionist imposition. His “flexible” notion of human nature proposes a low bar for cultivation—citizens may live as they please so long as they remain capable of resisting both particularized and universal tendencies of corruption. Montesquieu's account, then, forms a possible bridge between classical and modern analyses of political corruption.

These chapters feature Sparling's work at its best—elucidating various modes of understanding corruption while examining larger tensions of modern political thought. But if anything is compromised by Sparling's approach, it is the clarity of his overarching narrative. For example, the argument concerning the inherent tensions of modern thought—and the benefits of classical thinking—makes sporadic and disparate appearance. The Erasmus chapter counsels “classical regime analysis,” La Boétie offers an affinity for “classical civic friendship,” and elements of classical political thought are said to be evident in Bolingbroke's resistance to the modern bureaucratic fiscal state (though precisely which elements is unclear). If Sparling wanted to write a book clarifying the tensions of modern political thought, this is a curious route to take. Similarly, scholars of corruption will not leave this work with a straightforward model or framework for identifying and assessing corruption.

Yet the reader's experience of Socratic aporia is also a great merit of Sparling's analysis. His text offers astute observations concerning the relation of classical and modern political thought without embracing a partisan affinity for either. His analysis of corruption is also nobly modest. Each thinker he examines “has something to offer to the analysis of current civic disease in apparently consolidated democracies—just as each has its own deficiencies” (191). Thus, in a manner that is all too rare in contemporary political thought, Sparling exhibits the Socratic principles of examination and modesty throughout his interrogation of corruption. Political Corruption: The Underside of Civic Morality is, at its core, an “apology for the activity of normative political theory on the classical model,” and a genuine invitation for the pursuit of political philosophy (191).