Liberalisms facing corruption: a Rawls - Nozick comparison

Abstract

This paper begins by acknowledging that liberal democracies face forms of corruption that go beyond the mere violation of legal norms, as highlighted by recent academic work on systemic corruption. Accordingly, rather than focusing on individual and unlawful acts, we adopt a definition that conceives corruption as the degradation of the normative principles that legitimize a political model. Based on this premise, we analyse how structural forms of corruption might emerge within the frameworks proposed by Rawls, who advocates a redistributive state grounded in fairness, and Nozick, who defends a minimal state focused on the protection of individual rights. We argue that, while both models face specific vulnerabilities, the Rawlsian approach offers more robust institutional mechanisms to prevent phenomena such as state capture, whereas Nozick’s libertarian model appears less equipped to address corruption arising from the concentration of economic power.