Political Corruption in Historical Perspective

The conference aims at putting concepts of corruption from the social sciences in a historical perspective. Thereby it attemps to inaugurate a dialogue between current juridical, sociological, politological and economic research into corruption on the one hand and historical studies in corruption on the other. The main objective is an interdisciplinary pooling, joint reformulation and examination of definitions and models of corruption across the disciplines. These debates as well as the theoretical, analytical and empirical investigations are situated within the framework of two key models: one refers to the possible functionality of corruption mechanims, in that the latter may have been conducive to social progress and may have enhanced the integration of particular groups; the other model is based on the assumption of the inherent dysfunctionality of corruption and therefore suggests its strict criminalisation and banning from social interaction. The final discussion is supposed to illuminate, to what extent the grey zone between legality and illegality or the borderline, beyond which certain practices are labelled as corrupt in the first place, can satisfactorily be captured in a more general model.