From Republicanism to Liberalism: Corruption and Empire in Enlightenment Political Thought
Debates about the relationship between empire and corruption were prominent in eighteenth century British political thought. Some of these debates were framed within classical Republican or Civic Humanist discourses, of which Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson were emblematic exemplars. Within the terms of this discourse, corruption represented a collective moral failure, and was closely connected to a supposed cycle of imperial greatness and decline. Yet, similar fears of empire motivated the articulation of more modern, proto-liberal notions of corruption as forms of activity that blurred the boundaries between private interests and public responsibilities. In his analysis of the economic distortions and trading monopolies caused by empire (especially the East India Company), Adam Smith articulated and pioneered this proto-liberal concept of corruption. Between Smith’s proto-liberal and Montesquieu/Ferguson’s Republican concepts of corruption, however, stood the work of Edmund Burke. Motivated in part by concerns about empire, Burke shared Smith’s strong opposition to the EIC, an organisation he considered to be corrupt and corrupting. Emerging from his work, then, was an understanding of corruption that shared the Republican emphasis on moral decay, but also anticipated a proto-liberal concern with keeping distinct the boundaries between public (political) and private (economic) activity. In the work of these four thinkers corruption thus emerges as a central concept in the transition from Republican to Liberal political thought in the late eighteenth century.
Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Corruption: a Critical Genealogy
Attempting to determine a relationship between any independent variable and the phenomenon termed “corruption” is difficult, given the nebulousness of the concepts and the difficulties in establishing causation as opposed to correlation (Ali & Isse 2003). When dealing with the concept of “liberalism”, covering the spectrum from political to economic freedoms, it becomes an even more delicate endeavour since “Liberalism is about as slippery as a political term can be” (Crouch 2011) and “liberty” is more often than not a rhetorical device. However, since it is the dominant political and economic framework of contemporary society, a critical overview of how it can be understood in relation to corruption is illuminating. For the purposes of this essay, “corruption” will be defined as a problematic conflict-ofinterest between the individual’s obligation to themselves, the state and the market. These overlapping fields, however, will be examined closely in light of liberal thought and tradition.
Household economy and gendered labor in the 17th centurya.d. on Guam
Abstract The gendered division of labor in household economies is well known in documentary accounts of many societies, although archaeological evidence for it is often elusive. Our study compares ethnohistorical accounts of household organization with archaeological patterns at a 17th-century village on the island of Guam in the Marianas archipelago to determine if these different sources of evidence provide similar insights. We investigated archaeological assemblages from two latte (megalithic) buildings to document their economic activities. Unexpected differences in their assemblages revealed that economic activities varied between the two latte buildings. They were domiciles of a single economically integrated household, but their disparate functions likely signaled a gendered division of labor. This study reveals aspects of gendered labor that documentary accounts do not fully describe. Our findings suggest that the assumption that domestic buildings were functionally redundant in traditional societies must be tested on a case-by-case basis.