Conceptualising Corruption in Office
This chapter tracks the evolution of the word and concept of ‘corruption’. Having explored personal, institutional and systemic types of corruption, the next two sections outline key influences on pre-modern ways of thinking about it, highlighting the role of religion and civic humanism or the ‘republican tradition’. These influences put different emphases on personal, institutional, and systemic corruption, even if they shared a common moral purpose. Focus on that moral dimension leads to a discussion about the relationship between corruption and sexual immorality, and between anti-corruption and campaigns for the reformation of manners. The second half of the chapter focuses on the legal framework to show changes in the legal definitions of corruption, which increasingly defined corruption in terms of various forms of monetary forms of crime.