Conclusion

Abstract

In this book, we have sought to chart some of the predominant conceptualisations of the term ‘corruption’ from the classical period to the end of the eighteenth century. As others have noted before us,¹ the meaning of the term ‘corruption’ is one of the most contested in the history of Western political thought. Scholars have sometimes distinguished between broad ‘classical’ definitions, emphasising dangers to the polity of any behaviours that weakened political virtue (of both rulers and subjects), and more restricted ‘modern’ definitions that emerged in the eighteenth century and focussed on specific activities that threatened to subvert the integrity of public office (most notably through bribery, patronage and electoral fraud). By contrast, we have shown that the conceptual history of corruption was marked, for much of its history, not so much by a discursive shift towards more restrictive definitions, but by a continual oscillation between narrow, public office corruption and more expansive, degenerative corruption. Our contention has been that corruption was always a capacious term incorporating a range of discursive possibilities, right up until the end of the eighteenth century, when it finally became narrowed and refined, most notably in British and Anglophone discourse (and practice) of the eighteenth century.