Forthcoming, September 2021
Understanding and Combating Global Corruption: A Reader (First Edition) is a far-ranging collection of essays by accomplished scholars and thinkers from around the world. The essays will challenge readers to think through the issues associated with global corruption, in both commerce and government, with reference to particular forms of corruption, such as bribery and fraud, as well as to systemic or systematic abuses of power or authority. David E. McClean opens the anthology with an Introduction that immediately calls for readers to construe the meaning of the word “corruption” much more broadly than may already be the case, arguing that corruption is not limited to quid pro quo transactions only, but often involves betrayals of trust and failures to render honest services on behalf of stakeholders. With a focus on (primarily) the U.S. context, the book provides a good deal of historical background concerning the forms of corruption that have presented over the country’s history, and how that corruption was mitigated or ablated by government officials acting in the public interest. There are also examples (cases) from other countries, with Brazil and Nigeria being representative. The Conclusion takes a philosophical turn, and in it McClean suggests that, in order to attack corruption effectively, “a whole-of-society approach” must be employed, especially in countries where corruption is both pervasive and deeply embedded in government and commercial operations. That whole-of-society approach McClean, with an eye toward Aristotle and contemporary communitarians, refers to as anti-corruption “soul-making.”
About the Editor
David E. McClean is the founder and President of Business and Government Ethics International (BGEI.net), and has been a consultant to financial services firms since 1992 in the areas of enterprise risk and regulatory compliance, through his consultancy The DMA Consulting Group (dmacgroup.net). He is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Business and Professional Ethics at Rutgers University, Newark (New Jersey), where he teaches business and professional ethics, general ethics, environmental philosophy and ethics, and other courses. He is the author of Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism (2014), Wall Street, Reforming the Unreformable: An Ethical Perspective (2015), and he is the editor of The Integrated Ethics Reader: Reconnecting Thought, Emotion, and Reverence in a World on the Brink (2020).
