And yet, I said, it is unreasonable to suppose that anything can perish from without through affection of external evil which could not be destroyed from within by a corruption of its own?
Consider, I said, Glaucon, that even the badness of food, whether staleness, decomposition, or any other bad quality, when confined to the actual food, is not supposed to destroy the body; although, if the badness of food communicates corruption to the body, then we should say that the body has been destroyed by a corruption of itself, which is disease, brought on by this; but that the body, being one thing, can be destroyed by the badness of food, which is another, and which does not engender any natural infection-- this we shall absolutely deny?
Why should he watch the hideous
corruption of his soul?
One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption. An hereditary monarch, though often disposed to sacrifice his subjects to his ambition, has so great a personal interest in the government and in the external glory of the nation, that it is not easy for a foreign power to give him an equivalent for what he would sacrifice by treachery to the state.
Hence it is that history furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalency of foreign corruption in republican governments.
For the modernist, corruption is a carryover from a traditional society.
What I want to state is that corruption is not a lie or pathology.
I want to begin by arguing that corruption is a form of knowledge.
In fact, between the idea of rights and markets we literally seem to exhaust the imagination of how to reform corruption. Manmohan Singh and earlier Kaushik Basu showed the possibilities of this imagination which sees corruption as a market with a demand and supply side, a transaction between bribe giver and bribe taker.
