Sascha Ferber
Why do some societies flourish while others decline? Honesty, Fairness and Corruption in European History, Volume 1 answers that question with a single claim: honesty, fairness and corruption are not abstract moral labels. They are historical forces of the first rank. They decide whether a society grows rich or hollow, whether its institutions hold or decay.Dr Sascha Ferber, in this second, revised and substantially expanded edition of September 2026, grounds the claim in European history and in modern institutional research. The classical starting point is Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations belong together: markets work only where sympathy, mutual recognition and the impartial spectator already shape conduct. That line runs through Max Weber, German ordoliberalism, Amartya Sen, Edward Freeman, Douglass North, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and Robert Putnam. Formal rules matter, but they work only on an ethical foundation.The historical core sets six paths of decline against six of ascent. Late Rome, the Ottoman Empire, southern Italy and the Mafia, Habsburg Spain, Ancien Régime France, and Poland-Lithuania, Russia and Habsburg Austria show how office-selling, inherited privilege, monetary decay and captured regulation drain a polity from within. The Hanse, the Italian city-republics, the Dutch Republic, England after 1688, the German line from the Prussian reform civil service to the social market economy, and the Nordic and Swiss cases show the opposite: trusted law, open competition, sound money and a citizenry able to correct its rulers.From these constellations Ferber draws four mechanisms of decline and their positive mirrors, a causal chain from institutional substance to economic performance, and a political asymmetry: destroying integrity is faster than building it, and pathology spreads more readily than trust. The lesson is substantive rather than procedural business ethics. Compliance routines cannot replace a society’s ethical constitution.Appendix A tests the thesis against thirty further cases, from classical Athens to Iceland in 2008. A bibliography and an index of persons, subjects and places close the volume. Volume 2 will carry the same argument into present-day corruption and institutional capture. Geography, population and natural resources are real, but they take effect only through an institutional order that a society is willing to build and able to defend over many centuries in Europe.
