Ideological Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Early Modern discourse incorporated a wide variety of concepts of corruption, ranging from the distortion of judgement and the abuse of office due to personal gain, gift giving or bribery, through to generalised fears of physical or moral decay1 We argue in this chapter that the volume of discourse about corruption reached a peak in Britain in the eighteenth century, and that much of this discourse came to focus more tightly on public office corruption. Although the idea that public office corruption might be a symptom of a more general, degenerative form of corruption was still very much alive, complaints about public office corruption became louder and more common. As a consequence, understandings of corruption underwent significant refinement, and along with them, understandings of what a properly functioning polity should look like