For the Good of the Prince: Government and Corruption in Germany During the Eighteenth Century

Robert Bernsee ()
Additional contact information
Robert Bernsee: University of Goettingen

Chapter Chapter 11 in The War Within, 2018, pp 257-280 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In eighteenth-century Germany, corruption, defined as harming the common good by self-interested actions, was understood quite differently from today. The princely servant had to be loyal to the prince or otherwise he was deemed to have acted in a corrupt manner. Simply using administrative resources for one’s own purposes, was not generally seen as a corrupt practice. As long as his actions did not harm the honour of the ruling family or cause unrest among the subjects, they were viewed as being in accordance with this concept of common good. In the late eighteenth century a new understanding of the common good eventually appeared in political discourse. Its proponents now classified the administrative system of the ancien régime as entirely corrupt und demanded bureaucratic reforms.

Keywords: Common good; Administrative practices; Corruption; Monarchy; Germany; Bavaria; Prussia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-3-319-98050-8_11

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783319980508

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-98050-8_11

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().