HISTORICALLY, MOST societies that have possessed a sufficient amount of permanent public authority to be deemed a state have also been governed by other principles of authority based on patronage and clientage systems that were, of course, also closely intertwined with kinship. Societies such as these intertwine the “private” interests of particular individuals and their networks of kin, clients and patrons into the formal administrative organs of the “state.” This, of course, had been the case in Western societies until relatively recently. The notion that someone ought not to profit from an office in an individual sense would have been unintelligible to most people who have ever lived in a state. The issue of profit here must be understood carefully. To say that an individual profits from his office by rent seeking is not a “corruption” of an individual or an entire system. The fundamental functioning of the system depends on systems of patrons and clients because it is through these networks that power is expressed and exercised. It is the grease that keeps the gears of the system running.

To take the ancient Roman example: from the beginning to the end of the empire, the political system—both administrative and military—was based on intertwining networks of kinship and clientage. Indeed, the Roman Empire itself was a consequence of the extension via many different mechanisms of Roman senatorial clientage networks over the entirety of the Mediterranean world and then some. When we speak of the Roman provincial administration, what we are referring to are the great Roman families governing provinces through local elites who were tied into the broader system of clientage. So while the Roman army may have created the empire in one sense, it was only through the drawing of other elites into the orbit of the great Roman senatorial families that Roman rule was actually conducted and sustained. When Romans confronted barbarians, they dealt with them in exactly the same way because there was no other alternative: Roman authority depended, ultimately, on the networks of patronage and clientage (occasioned with violence, of course) with various barbarian groups and therefore through relationships of dominance and control that both sides instinctively understood. In this context, to say that Caesar or Pompey or Crassus or any of the other Roman senators out to make a name and fortune for themselves “profited” from their office is to misunderstand what that really means. What was actually going on was that individuals and their networks used their own resources gained through long careers of office holding to enhance the power and dignity of the Roman people and their republic and later empire. The public interests of the state were completely dependent on the proper functioning of “private” networks based on clientage. Roman patrons had to profit from their offices because if they did not they would have been unable to carry out their duties as Roman patrons and thus to be useful agents of the Roman state. There cannot, therefore, be “corruption” in a strict sense in a society whose public and private authority structures are infused with kinship and clientage networks. It is quite simply the way things are done.

A FURTHER illustration of this point is granted by taking another famously “corrupt” place: India. Any attempt to understand corruption in India must begin with the recognition that the fundamental unit of analysis there is kinship, understood in a broad sense. In India the language of kinship infuses both public and private discourse. It is the measure of ethical conduct and propriety. It is the standard by which an individual’s worth is adjudicated. All aspects of Indian social organization are infused by kinship and its precious networks, including the economic sphere (something that has been very much noticed bythe Economist) and of course the public sphere.

Indian social organization is also fundamentally defined by a variety of group identities that have become increasingly corporatist in nature and increasingly embedded into the fundamental way in which power is exercised. India, of course, began independence with a deeper experience of European institutions (outside those of the settler colonies) than any other society in the colonial period. And it therefore emerged with the best administrative inheritance in the postcolonial world. While the generation that led India to independence sought to create a rational-legal bureaucratic state, its leaders did not foresee the extent to which the state that they inherited (including its noncorrupt elite Indian Civil Service administrative structures and personnel) would become permeated by the authority patterns of the society, including the establishment of patrimonialism within the administrative organs of the state itself. And these patrimonial tendencies have only grown stronger since independence. Once the founding generation passed away, much of the value system that had underpinned the clean and relatively efficient administration in the early years gave way to increasingly strong dynastic and clientage networks. The fact that Rahul Gandhi is not the current prime minister of India is simply one of the more amusing puzzles of contemporary Indian politics: it is positively odd that he is not. And so the problem in India is not fundamentally a problem of administration; it is a problem of authority. “Corruption” is what makes the whole system work: without it the Indian state would be unable to placate all of the noisy constituencies demanding a cut of the patronage pie. The Indian state is the principal arena in which a vast network of patron-client and kinship relations mediates how the spoils of the system are distributed. Being powerful in India requires being able to deliver goods to family, friends and dependents: it is the very currency of power. Not using your office in this way means to deliberately alienate the networks of power and dependency upon which normal life depends.

It is also important to emphasize that the West tends to fixate on the inefficiencies and often-tragic outcomes that this system produces but fails to recognize the significance of the phenomenon as a whole. Indian political conflicts are mediated through patronage networks. The system can, therefore, be viewed as a species of conflict resolution. It is by offering rewards to powerful individuals and constituencies within the Indian body politic that the Indian state navigates its treacherous communal, regional, linguistic and, of course, religious cleavages. The fact that India has survived as a democratic state—let alone a “united” state—is a testament to the abilities of a system like this to produce relative stability. One of the few positive consequences of this system is that the Indian state has always been able to deploy its vast reservoir of patronage powers and status to bind to it those who would otherwise be potential opponents of its existence. One way to understand just how important this is for the overall stability of the Indian state is to consider what happens when these networks fail to function properly. The Sikh insurgency in the state of Punjab in the 1980s was in some sense (though not completely) a consequence of a failure to come to an agreement over the relative distribution of spoils in the greater Punjab area. And most of the violent regional conflicts that have simmered and occasionally flared since independence have a dimension of failed patronage distribution. The Indian state has to confront its problems with the tools that it has and pay due attention to established and legitimate mechanisms of conflict resolution. It is a terrible and tragic outcome of this logic that India cannot produce a Western-style administrative state. But this is a consequence of a deeper problem of authority. The bureaucracy is itself a mechanism used to solidify and tie important constituencies to the state; given that India is poor, there are never enough resources to fully operate the system. As a result, many populations are starved of patronage, and these then become potential and active opponents of the Indian state.

While India has indeed grown richer and more powerful over the past two decades, none of that progress is the product of a change in authority structures. Quite the contrary. The dynastic tendency in India and the system of patronage have simply grown larger and flashier, but the system remains unchanged and many hundreds of millions of people are the victims of this fact. But it must be understood that the patrimonial system that is India cannot simply be seen in moral terms (although it can, of course, also be viewed through a normative lens). This system does not exist because of “bad” people. Its existence is the result of the numerous compromises that the Indian state had to reach with the many potential opponents of the Indian experiment. And, more importantly, the elite have had no incentive to change it until recently. What is potentially revolutionary in India is not the public denunciation of corruption but rather the fact that the society is simultaneously shifting away from older patterns of kinship and association. In other words, if India is to become like the West in this respect it will be because the authority structures that sustain these practices have lost their legitimacy in a constituency that can do something about it. But it is very important to understand that what sustains this system is that it is in fact a legitimate and accepted way in which to conduct social relationships. The point is that it is a stable system, which is not to say that it is a “good” system.

Image: Pullquote: Rather than viewing corruption as a pathology, it is better to understand it as a type of currency used to establish and manage power relationships under certain systems of authority.Essay Types: Essay