Corruption as value judgment

Corruption is a value judgment about deep social injustice, often in a given context, but an important issue with regarding to defining the word or, more importantly, identifying particular instances as displaying corruption, is whether this normative assessment can be defended at some level of universality. That would require accepting an ethic, which in this case, could be solidarity. Solidarity presents itself as the bare social fact of community but is also rarely operable as such over sustained periods. The hegemony (of community) that it implies could for instance be probed for the extent and types of power formations and resulting violence. The origin of corruption is the deepening of injustice that proliferates across society, beyond such an extent that further pretexts of solidarity cannot be sustained. It implies fracture at compound sites or neatly into narrow oligarchies and the rest, but the recognition of this of fissure could itself take generations.