The Philosophy of Corruption and the Corruption of Philosophy

‘He’s been corrupted by a book or by Prodicus or some windbag or other.’
Aristophanes, Fragment 490 cited in Conversations of Socrates.

Week 1. Plato             Apology – the corruption of youth

Week 2. Plato             The Republic – the corruption of the state form

Week 3. Plato             The Sophist – the corruption of the philosopher

Week 4. Aristotle       On Generation and Corruption – On generation and corruption 1

Week 5. Averroes       The Incoherence of the Incoherence – On generation and corruption 2

Week 6. Augustine     Confessions – The Fall as the corruption of man

Week 7. Machiavelli Discourses – what to do if the Best are just the corrupt rich?

Week 8. Mandeville   Fable of the Bees (1714) – what if corruption wasn’t so bad?

Week 9. Schelling     The State and the corruption of the world

Week 10. Wollstonecraft                   Vindication of the Rights of Women – patriarchy & corruption 1

Week 11. Firestone    The Dialectic of Sex – patriarchy & corruption 2

Week 12. Sortition, Machiavellian and Platonic democracy: anti-corruption in theory & practice (can the aleatic replace the eternal?)

What is corruption? No doubt this is a current and urgent question, but it is not a new one. It is also inherently double: something can both be corrupt and be corrupting; it is unclear whether something can be one, without the other. It may also feel like a problem (as did the movement of the planets) that has escaped, or left behind, philosophy. Isn’t corruption, we might wonder, just an economic, legal, administrative, problem? Unlike the movement of the planets, the mundanity of corruption does not put it past or below philosophy. Arguably, without corruption, there is no European philosophy, at least, not one that we would recognise as such. The death of Socrates on the charges of corrupting the youth (and impiety, but nobody cares about that) shaped European political philosophy (Arendt) but also made the problem of Socrates, the problem of corruption: what is it, what to do about it?

Corruption is one of those multi-valent philosophical concepts that is not content to remain in one domain. Plato and Aristotle begin the demonstration of this claim. Of the two charges brought against Socrates, it is corrupting the youth that has remained fascinating. But corruption isn’t just a problem of-and-for the young. It is also the primary problem of political statecraft. The analysis of the three forms of the state, their inevitable corruption, their conversion into a new form, and the repetition of this very cycle, from which only the philosopher-kings can break, constitutes the climax of the Republic. Finally, there is the figure of the Sophist, who is not merely a corrupt philosopher, but, as The Eleatic Stranger shows, the one who corrupts the distinction between Socrates and the sophist, or sophistry and philosophy itself (or so Deleuze claims, in Difference and Repetition). In Plato, then, the problem of corruption already spans the domains of pedagogy, politics, and philosophy. In Aristotle, we have those same problems again, with the addition of a recognition of corruption as a problem in natural philosophy and the philosophy of nature. Augustine provides us with corruption’s explicitly theological positioning. After the Fall, man (indeed, all of nature) is corrupt; all virtues are now glittering vices and only grace is salvific. 

Machiavelli and Mandeville make a glorious pairing. Whilst Machiavelli is often thought to be quintessentially modern (the pragmatism! the cynicism!) in his concern with corruption and the necessity of virtue to combat it, he is strikingly traditional. Rather, it is Mandeville who must take that dubious plaudit of ‘modern’. Before Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, it was Mandeville’s ‘Fable of the Bees’ that attempted to de-moralise corruption. What if, Mandeville asks: private vices had public benefits? Does that mean that corruption is good, now? Of course, this stark private/public divide (at the heart of all liberalism) is vigorously contested by feminist thinkers (and we could even suggest that the very public/private distinction is corrupting of certain emancipatory political projects). Before we turn to feminism’s interventions in this problem, we will have a look at Schelling’s final flowering of naturphilosophie and its thinking of the problem of corruption. With the final two thinkers, Wollstonecraft and Firestone, we have feminism’s reworking of, and novel contribution to, the problem: patriarchy as both inherently corrupt and therefore corrupting.

The final week addresses Machiavelli from a different standpoint. If, for Aristotle and Plato, one response to the problem of corruption was the positing of something incorruptible because eternal (or rather, eternal and therefore incorruptible), McCormick’s reading of Machiavelli proposes a turn to the aleatoric (aleatory: a dice throw, the element of chance) as a solution to the practical problems of political corruption. If nothing is predictable or permanent, then can anything then be corrupted? Perhaps surprisingly, we will have to return to Plato, but the Plato of the Laws, not the Republic and another Stranger, this time from Athens, to end this investigation into the uses of sortition as a strategy of counter-corruption.

absolutely unnecessary readings:

As Plato was (probably not) the first to point out: modern technology is corrupting the youth of today. The written word enfeebles and corrupts the memory, so I cannot consistently recommend any reading. As a general rule, my courses neither require, nor need, you to have read any of these texts, this one is no different.

If, however, you wish to embrace your corruption, then I’d have a look at these:

1. Plato Apology – the corruption of youth

• Bartlett, Adam John. 2011. Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths. Edinburgh: Edinburgh university press.
• Bartlett, Adam John, and Justin Clemens. 2017. What Is Education? Edinburgh: University Press.
• Plato. 2010. The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo. Translated by Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin.

2. Plato The Republic – the corruption of the state form

• Bloom, Allan. 2016. ‘Interpretative Essay’. In Republic of Plato, by Plato. New York: Basic Books.
• Ladikos, A. 2002. ‘The Ancient Concept of Corruption : A Platonic Interpretation’. Acta Criminologica : African Journal of Criminology & Victimology 15 (2): 141–46. https://doi.org/10.10520/EJC28718.
• Plato. 2016. Republic of Plato. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books.

3. Plato The Sophist – the corruption of the philosopher

• Cassin, Barbara. 2019. Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis. Translated by Michael Syrotinski. First edition. New York: Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823285778.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. ‘Chapter One: Difference in Itself’. In Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press.
• Rowe, Christopher. 2015. Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047036.

4. Aristotle On Generation and Corruption – On generation and corruption 1

• Aristotle. 1984. ‘On Generation and Corruption’. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by H. H. Joachim, The Revised Oxford Translation. One Volume Digital Edition. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
• Haas, Frans A. J. de, and Jaap Mansfeld, eds. 2004. Aristotle On Generation and Corruption, Book 1: Symposium Aristotelicum. Oxford ; New York: Clarendon.
• Irma Kupreeva. 2005. ‘Aristotle on Growth: A Study of the Argument of On Generation and Corruption I 5’. Apeiron 38 (3): 103–60. https://doi.org/10.1515/APEIRON.2005.38.3.103.

5. Averroes The Incoherence of the Incoherence – On generation and corruption 2

• Averroes. 2016. Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut: (The Incoherence of the Incoherence): Volumes I and II. Edited by Simon van den Bergh. London: Gibb Memorial Trust.
• Butterworth, Charles E. 1992. ‘The Political Teaching of Averroes’. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 2 (2): 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423900001636.
• Moad, Edward. 2023. Coherence of the Incoherence: Between Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd on Nature and the Cosmos. Gorgias Press. https://doi.org/10.31826/9781463244989.

6. Augustine Confessions – The Fall as the corruption of man

• Augustine. 1998. Confessions. Edited and translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Augustine, Saint. 1897. The City of God. Translated by Marcus. Dods. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
• Hoffmann, Tobias. 2022. ‘Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus on the First Cause of Moral Evil’. Quaestio 22 (January):407–31. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.QUAESTIO.5.133419.
• Wetzel, James. 2012. ‘Augustine on the Origin of Evil: Myth and Metaphysics’. In Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, edited by James Wetzel, 167–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139014144.010.

7. Machiavelli Discourses – what to do if the Best are just the corrupt rich?

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1975. The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli. A new ed. with introduction and Appendices by Cecil H. Clough.[First published 1950]. Vol. 1. Routledge Library Editions. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315002606.
• Maher, Amanda. 2020. ‘The Power of “Wealth, Nobility and Men:” Inequality and Corruption in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’. European Journal of Political Theory 19 (4): 512–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885117730673.
• McCormick, John P. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ritner, Scott. 2011. ‘The Concept of Corruption in Machiavelli’s Political Thought’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1808959.
• Sparling, Robert. 2017. ‘The Concept of Corruption in J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment’. History of European Ideas 43 (2): 156–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2016.1198074.

8. Mandeville Fable of the Bees (1714) – what if corruption wasn’t so bad?

• Allen, Danielle. 2010. ‘3 : Burning The Fable of the Bees: The Incendiary Authority of Nature’. In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, 74–99. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226136820-005.
• Balsemão Pires, Edmundo. 2015. ‘Mandeville and the Eighteenth-Century Discussions About Luxury’. In Bernard de Mandeville’s Tropology of Paradoxes: Morals, Politics, Economics, and Therapy, edited by Edmundo Balsemão Pires and Joaquim Braga, 25–47. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19381-6_3.
• Bernard Mandeville. 1989. The Fable of the Bees. Edited by Phillip Harth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.
• Guion, Béatrice. 2015. ‘The Fable of the Bees: Proles Sine Matre?’ In Bernard de Mandeville’s Tropology of Paradoxes: Morals, Politics, Economics, and Therapy, edited by Edmundo Balsemão Pires and Joaquim Braga, 91–104. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19381-6_7.

9. Schelling The State and the corruption of the world

• Habermas, Jürgen. 2004. ‘Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History’. In The New Schelling, edited by Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman. London: Continuum. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472547675.
• Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, C. (1978) 2001. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Virginia: The Universi1y Press Of Virginia.

10. Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Women – patriarchy & corruption 1

• Howard, Carol. 2004. ‘Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on Slavery and Corruption’. The Eighteenth Century 45 (1): 61–86.
• Sapiro, Virginia. 1992. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. University of Chicago Press.
• ———. 1997. ‘A Woman’s Struggle for a Language of Enlightenment and Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment “Feminism”’. In Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History. Routledge.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1970. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11. Firestone The Dialectic of Sex – patriarchy & corruption 2

• Firestone, Shulamith. 1971. The Dialectic of Sex : The Case for Feminist Revolution. Bantam rev. ed. New York ; London: Bantam Books.
• Merck, M., and S. Sandford, eds. 2010. Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone. New York, UNITED STATES: Palgrave Macmillan. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=652558.

12. Sortition, Machiavellian & Platonic democracy: anti corruption in theory & practice (can the aleatic replace the eternal?)

• McCormick, John P. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• McGlew, James. 2018. ‘Equality and Sortition in Plato’s Laws’. In Thinking the Greeks, 159–69. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315616711-12/equality-sortition-plato-laws-james-mcglew.
• Plato. 2005. The Laws. 2 edition. London: Penguin.