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only by reference to a law. The law is treated as an exogenous constraint on individual
behavior.
But anti-corruption laws vary widely in different societies. Distinguishing
between a gift and a bribe requires thick cultural knowledge of the particular society in
question (Offer 1997; Smart 1993). Further, many of the societies at which the new anti-
corruption discourse is aimed do not have clear cut rules delimiting the boundary
between public good and private interest in specific transactions such as hiring family
or using a government post to generate extra private income; judging such societies as
“corrupt” means deploying standards drawn from the more “developed” world.
As Peter Euben has pointed out in a critique, Nye’s discussion of the costs and
benefits of corruption for “development” carries with it an implicit normative judgment
about the desirability of modernization. “A good society is a modernizing one; a
corrupt society is one that inhibits ‘development.’ But because the ends of modernity
are regarded as inevitable, impersonal, and/or rational, they cannot themselves be the
subject of rational dispute or ‘subjective’ prescriptions” (Euben 1989, p. 244). The
dominant values of modernity become reified. In the anti-corruption discourse, and in
the governance discourse more generally, this often boils down to valorizing economic
growth – measured in terms of gross domestic product – as the end toward which
public officials must strive. This not only inhibits critical political debate over the ends
of the political community, but also leaves little room for agency as the conscious,
willed reproduction of those values in daily life, and the moral self-restraint that this
would imply.
Convention