For example, the British East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company long effectively ruled large areas of India and Canada respectively. The point is reflected in the history of corporate charters.

As political scientist Samuel Huntington makes a narrower point, “Corruption is behavior of public officials which deviates from accepted norms in order to serve private ends.”5 But not all corruption is political. They might therefore equally be said to be corrupt forms. In their original Greek setting, Aristotle’s three “degenerate,” “digressive” or “perverted” (παρεκβάσείς, parekbasis) forms of government, viz., tyranny, oligarchy and (extreme) democracy, are regarded as degenerate precisely because they deviate or “swerve” from proper concern with the common good. Corruption, in a secondary sense, is a matter of departure or deviation from an original, or from what is pure, ideal or correct, as in “corruption of a text,” and “corruption of computer files”-where no moral evaluation need be involved.

This background is reflected both in the call on moral standards involved in the condemnation and prosecution of corruption and in the broader usages of the word. The etymological source of the English word “corruption” is theological Latin,4 which followed traditions of translating ancient Greek moral and political thought.

Corruption of champions cheats names