nepotism

The phenomenon of nepotism belongs to the almost unknown aspect of the Hungarian county administration, although familial and personal ties represented crucial elements of political culture in the early modern period. State and local offices became ideal places for applying such personal ties and relations into practice. The state maintained a neutral attitude towards nepotism until the first half of the 18th century and no intervention was made against it in the county administration.

Perspectives of what is corruption have been changing with the development of the society and according to the shifts of its values. The study examines not only activities that were considered morally wrong and corrupted in the middle ages and early modern period, but also those forms of behaviour that started to be generally considered corrupted only later. Anachronistic as this approach might seem, it gives us better insight into the slow process of changing attitudes towards some forms of corruption.

The author introduces the main conceptual points of view and theories of corruption prevailing in social scientific research in the past four or five decades. Vörös analyse the problematic aspects of the traditional definitions, which regard to the place/sphere of occurrence of corruption (public office sector) and its legal demarcation as the main criteria for the defining of corruption.