ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how political corruption relates to the several schools of thought within modern geography. A persistent and fundamental feature of geographical scholarship is a concern for place, for what constitutes place, for what makes place characteristics and place differences. A complementary focus arises from the simple fact that place differences provide differences of both need and opportunity for corruption. There is room also for humanistic and idealist accounts of corruption within geography and more generally; some will pursue this path only in terms of collective ideas and material situations, others in more individual terms, but in each case seeking to get as far as possible inside the minds and motives of the participants. The domain of post-modernism and its acceptance of the plurality of cultures and discourses raises other problems in the corruption context. Some post-modernist writing appears curiously arrogant on this point: ‘there is no longer terra incognita in our political geography'.
