The concept of dependence is central both to the study of modern republicanism and to the study of systemic corruption. Recently, Lawrence Lessig has described American politics as suffering from “dependency corruption,” a type of institutional corruption about which eighteenth-century republican writers were extremely worried. This article examines the use of the concept “dependence” in the current “neo-roman” republican theory stemming from Quentin Skinner, Maurizio Viroli, and particularly Philip Pettit. The article argues that the term dependence has two essentially distinct (...) inflections, one relating to outright domination (subjection to arbitrary power) and the other relating to a condition of material subordinacy (dependency corruption). If liberty is the “the absence of dependence on the will of others,” it is extremely important to determine just what independence entails. This article suggests that dependency corruption was a dominant concern of the modern republican tradition, but it is a concern that is largely ignored in today’s new republicanism. By way of a foray into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources employed by the new republicans, the article attempts to revive a manner of thinking about corruption that risks being lost to view. (shrink)

Johann Georg Hamann was a German philosopher who offered in his writings a radical critique of the Enlightenment's reverence for reason. A pivotal figure in the Sturm und Drang movement, his thought influenced such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder. As a friend of Immanuel Kant, Hamann was the first writer to comment on the Critique of Pure Reason, and his work foreshadows the linguistic turn in philosophy as well as numerous elements of twentieth century hermeneutics (...) and existentialism. Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project addresses Hamann's oeuvre from the perspective of political philosophy, focusing on his views concerning the public use of reason, social contract theory, autonomy, aesthetic morality and the politics of 'taste, ' and the technocratic ideal of enlightened despotism. Robert Alan Sparling situates Hamann's work historically, elucidates his somewhat difficult writing, and argues for his relevance in the ongoing culture wars over the merits of the Enlightenment project. (shrink)

Dans les études sur la corruption politique, on trouve fréquemment des retours au lieu commun que les problèmes d’abus de charge publique en vue d’un intérêt privé ne peuvent être réglés sans la magie du leadership (l’anglicisme malheureux s’impose ici), cette qualité énigmatique de commandement qui saurait mettre en place les dispositifs d’incitatifs, de surveillance et de contrôle nécessaires pour contrer les abus. Mais un tel argument mène à une aporie, car les études qui placent ainsi leur confiance dans cet (...) énigmatique leadership sont également traversées par l’idée, aussi un lieu commun, que toute autorité qui n’est pas sujette à la surveillance et au contrôle aura tendance à être corrompue. Dans cet essai, je propose de lire Le Prince de Machiavel comme une méditation sur le paradoxe suivant : l’autorité du principe est à la fois la source de la purification politique et la cause principale de la corruption. Le Prince, souvent considéré comme un texte fondateur des « leadership ethics », sera mal compris s’il n’est pas lu à la lumière de la préoccupation centrale de Machiavel républicain : la corruption. (shrink)

This article considers Pablo Gilabert’s attempt to defend against libertarian critics his ambitious argument for basic positive duties of justice to the world’s destitute. The article notes that Gilabert’s argument – and particularly the vocabulary of perfect and imperfect duties that he adopts – has firm roots in the modern natural rights tradition. The article goes on to suggest, however, that Gilabert employs the phrase ‘imperfect duties’ in a manner that is in some tension with the tradition from which it (...) is derived. Indeed, Gilabert’s novel deployment of the phrase contains a number of radical possibilities that are not pursued in his text. The article suggests that Gilabert would do better to break more decisively from a tradition that insists on the essential distinction between justice and charity. (shrink)

Étienne de La Boétie (1530–63) is a central, if enigmatic, figure in modern French political philosophy. While his name is most famous for his friendship with Montaigne, his Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse of Voluntary Servitude) is a tour-de-force of humanist political writing, a youthful paean to liberty arguing that subjection to tyrants is the result of popular corruption. This article argues that the text can be read as a reflection on the perils and promise of transparency. Reading La (...) Boétie helps us see two radically different ways in which members of a polity can be known to one another – two models of transparency – and it offers an important, but ultimately unsettling, political ideal based on a classical conception of civic friendship. The article draws out the importance of this ideal for modern anti-corruption efforts. (shrink)

Given the difficulties of Pierre Bayle’s writing—its occasional nature, its digressive and wandering style, and its sheer size—it is no small task to present him as an author of a coherent metaphysical doctrine. But Todd Ryan does just that in this cogently-argued analysis of Bayle’s encounters with, among others, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibniz, and Spinoza. We are thus invited, as the subtitle indicates, to “rediscover early modern philosophy” by way of Bayle’s philosophical engagements.The main fault line in Bayle scholarship concerns (...) the sincerity of the philosopher’s religious and philosophical commitments, and scholars have had recourse to biographical and contextual scholarship to solve some of these problems. Ryan sidesteps context, simply approaching Bayle’s texts as coherent arguments and analyzing them philosophically—a fruitful approach generally. That said, he periodically finds himself drawn into the debates about Bayle’s intentions, since he wishes to insist upon a single coherent interpretation of the philosopher as a Cartesian, something that requires one to confront instances where Bayle expresses doubts about Cartesian principles. Ryan’s strategy is to insist that Bayle takes evidence to be “a matter of degree. (shrink)

SUMMARYIn the scholarship on the concept of political corruption, one frequently encounters the lamentation that the manner in which the concept is deployed in liberal modernity is insufficiently attuned to the richer sense in which the term was employed in the ‘civic humanist’ tradition. In these lamentations, the usual point of reference is J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, a work that made corruption the central term of art in a political language stretching from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century and (...) beyond. Certainly there is something quite attractive today about the ‘Machiavellian’ inflection of the term—our era is replete with the very things the protagonists of Pocock's story decried: debt, dependency, oligarchy, standing armies and the diminution of civic duties. But to what extent is Pocock's classic text a reliable guide for those studying the concept of corruption? This article suggests that Pocock uses the term in an excessively capacious manner, which both weakens his book's utility for understanding eighteenth-century political thought and undermines its power as a foundation for political critique by civic-minded anti-corruption reformers. (shrink)