Political Corruption and the Concept of Dependence in Republican Thought
| Author | Robert Sparling |
| Published date | 01 August 2013 |
| Date | 01 August 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591713485371 |
| Subject Matter | Symposium: The Republican Inheritance Reconsidered |
research-article2013
Symposium: The Republican Inheritance Reconsidered
Political Theory
41(4) 618 –647
Political Corruption
© 2013 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591713485371
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of Dependence in
Republican Thought
Robert Sparling1
Abstract
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.
Keywords
corruption, depencence, republicanism, Pettit, Harrington, Locke
1CRÉUM, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Robert Sparling, CRÉUM, Université de Montréal, C. P. 6128, succ. Centre-ville, Montréal,
Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada.
Email: robsparling@hotmail.com
Sparling
619
Lawrence Lessig thinks that the American political system is suffering from
a serious illness: dependence. In a recent, persuasive attack on systemic
corruption in U.S. politics, Lessig makes an argument that has origins in
eighteenth-century republican discourse: the most dangerous type of cor-
ruption for a republic is the corruption of “dependence”—a dependence of
political representatives upon forces other than “the people” (the electors).
Whereas seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers worried most about
parliamentary representatives being corrupted by the court’s power of
patronage and appointment, today those forces are large corporations and
wealthy donors. Unlike those who see corruption merely as instances of
individual abuse of public office, Lessig thinks that there is a more perni-
cious form of corruption that is due to a systemic misalignment of depen-
dence. To use one of his favourite metaphors, the framers of the U.S.
constitution meant for representatives to be dependent on the people alone,
just as a compass is dependent on the earth’s magnetic field. But the current
system is akin to a compass in which the casing has been magnetized caus-
ing the needle to deviate from north—there is a miscalibrated dependence.1
Lessig is thus able to express the alarming view that the republic has been
“lost,” and he calls for a (limited) return to origins, with a new constitu-
tional convention.
That republics are undermined by dependence will come as no surprise to
readers of contemporary republican political theory, for republicanism has
been given fresh life by a group of writers—Quentin Skinner, Maurizio
Viroli, and Philip Pettit—who define republican liberty precisely as the
absence of dependence. The manner in which Skinner puts it is that one is
free when one is not dependent on the will of another: “neo-roman writers
insist . . . that to live in a condition of dependence is in itself a source and a
form of constraint.”2 Pettit agrees: “Being unfree consists rather in being sub-
ject to arbitrary sway: being subject to the potentially capricious will or the
potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another. Freedom involves emancipa-
tion from any such subordination, liberation from any such dependency.”3
But if modern republicanism has opposed relationships of dependence,
republicans have differed on just what such dependence entails and just how
it undermines liberty. This article examines the use of the concept “depen-
dence” in the “neo-Roman” republican theory articulated by Skinner, Viroli,
and Pettit. The article argues that the term “dependence” in republican dis-
course has two quite distinct inflections, one relating to outright domination
(subjection to arbitrary power) and the other relating to a condition of mate-
rial subordinacy (corrupting dependence). Corrupting dependence was a
dominant concern of the modern republican tradition, from Machiavelli,
through Harrington to Sydney, Bolingbroke, Cato’s Letters, and the American
620
Political Theory 41(4)
Founders—this is the tradition to which Lessig’s argument belongs. But this
concern about corrupting dependence is insufficiently prominent in today’s
new republicanism, particularly in its Pettitian formulation, which focuses on
the dependency at the heart of relationships of domination.
The essay, then, will disaggregate these two related but distinct concep-
tions of dependence in modern republican discourse, dominating dependence
and corrupting dependence. The first, the dependence that comes of the sub-
jection to absolute, arbitrary power, is the situation of the courtier or subject
who must bow his head lest he lose it. This is the type of dependence that is
synonymous with domination. The second is the dependence that derives
from a condition of material subordinacy (corrupting dependence). This is
the type of dependence at issue in systemic corruption. The authors gathered
together by Skinner, Pettit, and Viroli under the title “republicans” worried
about both of these forms of dependence—domination and corruption—but I
will insist that they are distinct phenomena and the degree to which each is
emphasized illuminates a great deal about the type of republic being advo-
cated and the conception of liberty such a republic embodies.
In what follows, then, I will indicate the two different inflections given to
the term “dependence” in the authors who are cited as the inspiration behind
the current interest in republicanism. I will begin by exploring the term as it
is used by Skinner and Pettit: I will argue that Quentin Skinner’s more capa-
cious understanding of “dependence,” which captures worries about domi-
nating and corrupting dependence, is somewhat more faithful to the modern
republican tradition than the limited but more analytically rigorous deploy-
ment of the term in the work of Pettit. Pettit’s definition of republican liberty
distracts him from the danger of systemic corruption that modern republicans
thought dependence would bring. The essay will illustrate the distinction
between domination and corrupting dependence by contrasting Locke and
Harrington, two thinkers occupying prominent places in the new republican
pantheon. I will devote significant attention to Harrington’s worries about
dependence. I will proceed, very briefly, to illustrate the manner in which this
concern informed other writers whom Pettit presents as his heirs in the tradi-
tion, Rousseau and two of Harrington’s intellectual descendents, Lord
Bolingbroke and the authors of Cato’s Letters, Trenchard and Gordon, writers
for whom corruption was the central political problem.
In the final section, I will argue that worries about corrupting dependence
do not necessarily have egalitarian implications. The argument that economic
dependency undermines republican liberty by rendering people unfit for civic
office can be employed to foster greater systemic equality, but it can equally
be employed to justify the exclusion of the economically subordinate. As we
will see, in Harrington it served both purposes.
Sparling
621
What is at stake in this debate is the tenor of contemporary republican
discourse. Civic republicanism had a rebirth of sorts in Anglo-American
political thought in the latter half of the twentieth century under the influence
of philosophers and revisionist historians who saw in republicanism some-
thing that ennobled politics and answered the communitarian longings of dis-
enchanted liberals. The current vogue for republicanism is attempting a kind
of synthesis, overcoming the dichotomies that had rendered so lively the
debate between liberals and civic republicans. Since being republican
appeared to lump one in with the oppressive “positive liberty” of Berlin or
with Constant’s “liberty of the ancients,” republicanism seemed to many
more a provocation than a viable public philosophy.4 Skinner and Pettit
changed this by reassessing the Berlinian dichotomy between positive and
negative liberty, rearticulating the claims of republican liberty in a manner far
more individualistic than had typically been done.5 Republican liberty, these
newest republicans insist, takes a middle path. It is not to be confounded with
radical communal projects in which people are “forced to be free”; republi-
can liberty is a negative freedom, but it still differs from the strict Hobbesian
version of liberty by which I am free if I am not impeded in my actions. On
this new reading, republicanism offers a more robust account...
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