Anti-Corruption in History

It is highly refreshing and indicative of the present robust intellectual health of political history that this collection largely avoids many of the habitual pitfalls of conference proceedings edited by multiple scholars. It is a cohesive and stimulating investigation of the shifting perceptions of corruption in moral, civic and political terms and the strategies and alternative modes of public behaviour that have been attempted to deal with this ongoing problem of modern societies of all political hues. The editors, Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, are each experts on a different chronological period and so have been able to direct individual authors, while all three, as members of the University of Amsterdam (where the original conference was held in September 2015) have clearly been able to co-ordinate the structure of the text. Most importantly, the collection is designed around a central, conceptual chapter, written by Jens Ivo Engels, which examines the idea, still apparent in most studies of modern corruption, that there was a shift in attitude and behaviour among European polities at some point between the American Revolution and the passing of the Great Reform Act in Britain. Normative practices such patronage, embezzlement, venality and partiality on the part of public servants were increasingly challenged from within and without governing systems. Historians have variously asked whether the stimulus for this was the spread of ideas of the Enlightenment across Europe, the impact of military defeat (or near-defeat) at the hands of Napoleon’s better-motivated and -organised armies, the rise of a bourgeois class frustrated by aristocratic selfishness or a religious revival which questioned the morality of key features of the existing economic, political, religious and administrative systems. Engels’ answer is that militarily powerful and mercantile societies provide many opportunities for corrupting the virtuous and keeping the lazy and the exploitative in power, but that the dramatic failure by the state (as in Britain in 1783, Prussia in 1806 or Denmark in 1813) can expose the limitations of any political economy which is not founded upon the ‘Common Good’—what Douglas North et al. term a ‘closed-access society’. There is, therefore, no simple process of political evolution towards Weberian bureaucracies and the fight against corruption will be ‘never-ending’ in societies that are both capitalist and democratic. Ironically, it emerges from most of the chapters in the collection that, prior to its gradual removal from the recruitment process, patronage was a far better means of identifying and appointing virtuous public servants than public examination proved to be

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