The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions

There are several competing definitions of political corruption and a number of interpretations of their practical relevance. This paper argues that in order to be politically relevant the idea of corruption must be, on the one hand, distinguished from moral notions referring to the corruption of character and vice (loss of purity or integrity) and, on the other hand, from figurative uses of the term to indicate the spoiling of institution and the departure from some moral (pre-political) standards. In order to be practical relevant, the notion of corruption cannot indicate, generically, the malfunctioning of institutions or the fact that they are unjust, or poorly designed, or weak, nor can be identified as a general feature of non-ideal societies. The paper defends instead the idea that corruption should be treated as an ‘internal enemy’ of institutions in a well order society. So understood, corruption is not constitutive of the rules of institutions a society, but designates a particular wrong that occurs in the functioning of institutions, which are well ordered, just and legitimate in their constitution. Corruption concerns primarily the corruption of public officers who abuses their entrusted power for the pursuit of a surreptitious agenda. Corrupt behavior represent a specific ways of failing to ensure that institution fulfill their statutory duties. And in so doing appropriately mediate the relationships among citizens as free and equals. Two important implications can be drawn from this understanding of political corruption. First of all, in order to identify corruption it is necessary to commit to a specific normative idea of politics and of the public order (Philps 1997). Moreover a pure institutional approach to political corruption that focus on institutional reform in order to contrast the degeneration and decay of institution cannot be successful in contrasting political corruption, which is instead is primarily a matter of individual public behavior and responsibility. There is no institutional designed that can insure us against political corruption.