Notes on the Historical Study of Corruption

Abstract

Over the last fifteen years, the field of corruption studies underwent a historical turn. Social scientists added a historical dimension to their traditional concern with corruption and political and economic development. Historians joined the debates and brought a constructivist approach to the study of corruption, one that examines this phenomenon in its historical context. The present article examines the most important issues in the historical studies of corruption: the way in which the understanding of corruption transformed throughout the centuries, the precise moment the modern understanding emerged and the factors that triggered this transformation. Historians and social scientists tend to agree on the importance of the period around 1800 as the moment when corruption came to designate the abuse of the public office for private gain. At about the same time, various activities which were hitherto tolerated – gifts to officials, patronage, exploitation of the office for private gain – lost any legitimacy and became illicit, i.e., corruption in the modern sense. The factors which contributed to the change were the crises of the modernization process and the obsession with clear-cut categorization specific to the modern thought.