Systemic Corruption

Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic

Camila Vergara

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691208732
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

A bold new approach to combatting the inherent corruption of representative democracy This provocative book reveals how the majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers. Systemic Corruption argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the actions of corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative systems.Camila Vergara provides a compelling and original genealogy of political corruption from ancient to modern thought, and shows how representative democracy was designed to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful to the detriment of the majority. Unable to contain the unrelenting force of oligarchy, especially after experimenting with neoliberal policies, most democracies have been corrupted into oligarchic democracies. Vergara explains how to reverse this corrupting trajectory by establishing a new counterpower strong enough to control the ruling elites. Building on the anti-oligarchic institutional innovations proposed by plebeian philosophers, she rethinks the republic as a mixed order in which popular power is institutionalized to check the power of oligarchy. Vergara demonstrates how a plebeian republic would establish a network of local assemblies with the power to push for reform from the grassroots, independent of political parties and representative government.Drawing on neglected insights from Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, Systemic Corruption proposes to reverse the decay of democracy with the establishment of anti-oligarchic institutions through which common people can collectively resist the domination of the few.

PART I

Systemic Corruption and the Material Constitution

1

Corruption as Political Decay

I BEGIN this book from the premise that liberal democracy, as any other political regime throughout history, is flawed and perfectible, a product of fallible human thinking. Of the many deficiencies of our current regime form, perhaps the most problematic is its inability to effectively combat corruption. According to Transparency International, corruption is a serious problem. In 2016 only two countries—Denmark and New Zealand—out of 176 states surveyed scored above percentile 90 (equivalent to an A in political cleanliness), and over two-thirds scored below 50 percent, which indicates that the majority of representative governments¹ suffer from “endemic corruption,” a kind of “systemic grand corruption [that] violates human rights, prevents sustainable development and fuels social exclusion.”² Even if the Corruption Perceptions Index attempts to explicitly account for systemic corruption—as opposed to mere cash for votes, quid pro quo corruption—the current definition of political corruption does not yet allow for an accurate measurement of its structural layer because it remains blind to the role procedures and political institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning. In this chapter I argue that we are working with an imperfect, reductionist explanation of political corruption that, even if it allows for quantitative research and generalizations based on discreet observable variables, does not capture the broader, more intractable and pernicious form of systemic corruption that ancient and modern political thinkers wanted to avoid.

The predominant definition of corruption as “illegal actions concerning public officials” is narrower and departs in significant ways from the meaning that was attached to corruption in earlier periods of Western thought.³ Our current understanding of political corruption is positivist and individualistic, which has served well the research model that became hegemonic in the social sciences in the 1990s, which demanded the development of concepts that could be easily measured and plugged into large N models. Corruption has thus been conveniently reduced to its most visible and clear expressions: illegal acts involving public officials (e.g., bribery, fraud, nepotism). But even if the reduction of political corruption to a discreet set of expressions serves the reliable measurement of the phenomenon, this account can be only partial since it is clear that political corruption is a slow-moving process, where meaningful change in the dependent and independent variables occurs only over the long run, tending then, in practice, to fall off the radar within this type of quantitative methodology.⁴

Despite a recent renewed empirical interest in systemic corruption and the most effective ways to counter it,⁵ the concept is yet to be adequately defined and understood. The bulk of research on corruption is policy oriented, aimed at ameliorating the negative economic consequences associated with corruption, especially in the developing world.⁶ “Corruption is thus presented as if it were a matter of misconduct on the part of public officials who are seen, especially in poor countries, as pursuing their own private interests and likely to act corruptly in return for money and other favours, thereby undermining economic development.”⁷

In conformity with the individualistic model that undergirds the current conception of corruption but acknowledging the limitations of analyzing corruption only through its narrow definition, the different organisms aimed at combating corruption have relied on individuals’ perception of corruption as a way to complement the tallying of individual illegal acts as a proxy for the rate of corruption in society. This is of course very problematic. If there is no working definition of corruption beyond the legal, on what evidence are respondents of these surveys basing their perceptions? Corruption conceived in this way is guilty of moral relativism and legal positivism because it does not consider an independent standard to judge the law and thus could even end up legalizing the most prominent means of corruption (e.g., campaign finance, donations, lobby).⁸ In our current juridical conception of corruption, for example, there is no way to account for legal corruption, for laws and policies that promote the interests of a few against the common good, what the ancients would understand as the gradual decay of good government.

The few attempts at engaging with the concept at a theoretical level fall short of fully conceiving the fundamentally systemic nature of political corruption,⁹ or adequately grounding it on intellectual history and its contexts,¹⁰ and thus these attempts are potentially liable to anachronism through what Quentin Skinner has identified as “mythologies of doctrines.”¹¹ This chapter contributes to this emerging literature by providing a contextualized theoretical analysis of a type of political corruption that seems a systemic feature of all constitutional popular governments. Systemic corruption, which encompasses structural forms of corruption such as legal and institutional corruption, not only is different from the actor-based meanings of the term—the bending and breaking of the law by a clan or class for their own benefit, or the buying of political influences by private interest¹²—but also differs from definitions of corruption as the undermining of the rule of law.¹³ Systemic corruption is a term that seems to directly address the nature of the superstructure itself, and not the manipulation or dismantling of a structure that is seen as the normative ground for neutrality.

Systemic Political Corruption in Ancient Thought

Even though today we associate corruptionov with illegal action, the etymological origin of the word has a far more complex meaning. The Greek ancestor of the word corruption has been traced to phthora (φθορά), which meant destruction, decay, and “passing away” as correlative to genesis—the beginning of a process.¹⁴ While in early pre-Socratic texts the word was used only to denote the moral degradation of women and youth, and the ruining of crops from bad weather, the concept appears to acquire a decisively abstract meaning in the sixth century BC. The theoretical conception of phthora was first developed, according to Aristotle, by Thales of Miletus, the founder of the school of philosophy that studies unchangeable elements in nature, principles that are “neither generated nor destroyed, but persist eternally.”¹⁵ The Physicists—as Aristotle called this school of thought—attempted to understand how plurality in the cosmos could be generated from matter as a “single underlying substance.” Anaximander argued matter was governed by a “diversifying antithesis” in which matter is constantly being generated through “condensation and rarefication,” and that phthora was the natural process through which things returned to the original, indefinite principle.¹⁶ Empedocles and Anaxagoras assigned a direction to this poietic process of generation. While for Empedocles generation of matter was circular, always coming back to its starting point, for Anaxagoras this movement was spiral, never repeating itself.¹⁷

The concept of corruption acquired a political meaning when it was first attached to the constitution of the state by Plato, and then furthered analyzed by Aristotle in the Politics—work explicitly dedicated to the analysis of the corruption (φθορᾶ) and preservation of constitutions. I would argue both authors developed their conception of corruption responding to their own sociopolitical context, and thus we should analyze their ideas on political corruption as inhe...