#Lobbying Used to Be Illegal: A Review of Zephyr Teachout’s New Book on the Secret History of #Corruption in America
▻https://medium.com/@matthewstoller/in-america-lobbying-used-to-be-a-crime-a-review-of-zephyr-teachouts-new-book
(Novembre 2014)
Teachout points out something fairly obvious, but not recognized today — the theoretical underpinning of the American revolution was that a corrupt government had no legitimacy to govern. This is something the founders well recognized. The debates they had — Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, and people in the culture at large — reflected a divide between political philosophers Thomas #Hobbes versus Baron de #Montesquieu. Hobbes’s vision, echoed today among the Chicago school’s law and economics scholars, was that corruption as a concept made no sense. Life was a brutal competition among selfish actors. In such a paradigm, a revolution would simply be a question of raw power, rather than any set of principles.
The founders roundly repudiated this view, adopting Montesquieu’s arguments that there is such a thing as a public interest and that people could orient themselves around it given sufficient personal virtue and adequate structural incentives to do so. Montesquieu is best-known for his promotion of the concept of different branches of government, but that concept came from his moral view of human nature. Teachout shows that questions of bribery were fairly insignificant in the dialogue over the structure of the new republic, whereas anti-corruption as a Montesquieu-influenced deliberative design principle was the key animator of the shaping of the country.
#Etats-Unis
