Abstract

Any serious research about corruption, and instruments to fight it, needs a definition of the very concept and some reconstruction of its relationships with other concepts, such as democracy and "rights" - relationships less obvious than one could usually think. On this theoretical background, the paper sketches three strategies to fight corruption: a moral or moralistic one, oriented to promote the civic virtues and a culture of legality; a legal, or a legalistic one, multiplying prohibitions in order to pursue all the ramifications of such a phenomenon; finally, a political or institutional one, opposing to the corrupted powers a system of checks and balances. In my view, this third strategy is the most effective one, if only because it esta¬blishes the minimal conditions for the effectiveness of the other two.