Tag: Justifying Corruption

Essay Series

Because corruption plays a role in the larger life of a society, and a central one, it has its legitimacy. Condemnable or not, corruption can not so easily be erased from the map. If it has survived through so many centuries, in so many forms and in all societies, corruption must represent a necessity, it must answer to a set of needs that human societies have developed. Instead of echoing always the same condemning stances, it is time for philosophy to look at corruption. It is time that it faces this practice so central in human societies, to try, at least for a start, to discuss its name and its nature, and, perhaps to finally suggest a model to explain why it is so necessary, and why all other alternatives never truly succeeded.

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Introduction
What have in common an Indian mole in Pakistan, an international arms agent and an alcohol mogul in North India? This rhetoric is clumsy but the point is even more evident: many, many would be all those who have corruption as their common denominator. A classical target of the utopian dreams of the Enlightenment Century, corruption is, four hundred years later, ubiquitous, present in multiple and complex forms all around the globe…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 1
“The mafia doesn’t care about generating revenue for the government. In my case, I care a lot about the government. I run this business and add huge sums to the state exchequer.” — Ponty Chadha

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 2
Indeed ― corruption often finds a comfortable seat at the forefront of the democratic machine, when a widespread capitalist economy can be disguised as a market benefitting the socialist needs of the state. Other major areas of developments, entirely initiated by the state, can boost markets worth thousands of crores, and thus call for its own respective profit-oriented economic actors…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 3
An agent who changes suits. We are not very far from the imagery of secret agents, of James Bonds and other Mata Haris. And there is an easy connection: the use of illegal means to obtain information. In a way, the diplomatic field of agents under cover is today at par with international public-private economies such as the aforementioned defence: in both cases, the ultimate means of the intermediary is information…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Conclusion
In such a light, the game seems particularly rigged, between an economic model that has found no major alternative in the last half a millennium, and deeply constitutive bureaucratic architectures. In both cases, corruption is not an abnormal evil but a necessary mechanism to make up for the incredibly idealistic principles of their common origin: the humanism of Europe’s Enlightenment…