ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some thoughts about the sort of phenomena scandals are, the conditions under which they are most likely to arise, what influence they can have, and why they are interesting to observers of past and present. Corruption has received extensive analysis from historians and political scientists, less so scandal. Scandals mostly, and almost necessarily, involve public people: either politicians, public officials, and/or people in positions of public trust, in the sense that their positions involve them being trusted by substantial numbers of others and being assumed to deploy high standards of personal conduct. Scandals, because they are public events, and because they often involve morally marginal behaviour, tend to arise in particular sorts of circumstances and contexts. Scandals often arise when, and indicate the fact that, public standards and values are shifting. Connectedly, scandals require the presence of some means of spreading information about the revealed behaviour to large numbers of people.
