Corruption and the Modernisation of the State: Ideas, Discourses and Practices in the Pre-Modern Era and Beyond (1600-1930)

Tagung im Lyrikkabinett, 7./ 8. April 2022

07.04.2022

corrupt_quad As the notion of corruption can be traced to the late-medieval period posing questions about how we should frame corruption within the processes of modernization allows social scientists to revisit chronology, reconsider interpretations, and seek new definitions. In this sense, this workshop considers corruption to be a long-term object rather than a moral category that arose in 1789 to legitimise or castigate previous, foreign, or current societies. One can find in the past models of both prevarication, nepotism, or concussion and efforts to curb corruption and control abuses of power (together with an awareness of the common good) in colonial communities and societies outside the liberal-capitalist framework. In order to stress the continuities, ruptures, and turns regarding political corruption during the premodern era and beyond, this workshop intends to reflect on the articulation between State-building process and the discourses and practices of both corruption and anticorruption by taking into account how political, economic, and social agents dealt with corrupt scandals, denunciation of corrupt practices and the conceptualisation of corruption within their societies.