Book Reviews

You may not have realized it, but if you are reading this, you are most likely WEIRD, that is, a member of a culture that is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The features of WEIRDness can be summed up in the following sentence from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012):  "The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships."

One section of Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012) is entitled "We Are All Intuitive Politicians." The section begins with a recognition of the centrality of accountability not just in government, but in all our relations with people. "Human beings," he says, "are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability.

In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt identifies one of the biggest obstacles to government ethics in the U.S.:  the fact that we have an individualistic society, placing individuals at the center, rather than the more common sociocentric society, which subordinates the needs of individuals to the needs of groups and institutions.

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012) is a book that does not, from its title, appear to have much value for government ethics. But Haidt's approach to morality, and his look at how people approach morality, provides a lot of food for thought about government ethics, enough to fill nine blog posts.

Moral Systems

I recently read Judith N. Shklar's book The Faces of Injustice (Yale U.P., 1990). This excellent essay about the difference between misfortune and injustice would not appear to have much to do with government ethics. But there turns out to be much relevant food for thought.

University of Maryland Law School professor Deborah Hellman recently put the draft of her law review article, "Defining Corruption and Constitutionalizing Democracy" (forth. Mich. L. Rev (Vol. 111)), on SSRN. The core argument of her paper is that defining legislative corruption requires a theory of the legislator's role in a democracy. Hellman sets out three such theories, and I add a fourth.

Corrupt Cities: A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention, a book by Robert Klitgaard, Ronald Maclean-Abaroa, and H. Lindsey Parris (Institute for Contemporary Studies, 2000), is an excellent study and analysis of municipal anti-corruption efforts primarily outside of the United States. Much of what the authors recommend is of use in the U.S., as well.

The great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' 2006 novel, The Eagle's Throne, translated from the Spanish by Kristina Cordero, is one of the best political novels I've ever read. I highly recommend it. The novel also happens to contain some great quotes that touch on government ethics. The government may be Mexico's, and national rather than local, but that won't get in the way of enjoying these wonderful quotations, which you'll find by clicking on the post title or book cover.