1 Coady, C. A. J., “Politics and the Problem of Dirty Hands,” in Singer, Peter, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford:Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar, 373 (emphasis added).

2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Les mains sales (Paris:Gallimard, 1948)Google Scholar, 104. A free translation might be as follows: “How fond you are of your purity! How afraid you are to dirty your hands Purity is an idea for holy men. The rest of you, you intellectuals, middle-class anarchists, you use it as a pretext for doing nothing: to do nothing, to rest immobile, to hold your elbows in close to your body, to wear gloves. Me, I have dirty hands. Up to the elbows. I plunged them into shit and blood. And what of it? Do you imagine that one can govern innocently?” Hoederer also says, more succinctly, “Tous les moyens sont bons quand ils sont efficaces” (193).

3 The masculine pronouns are used because the dirty hands problem is historically gendered, making the use of “she” anachronistic or at the least, so counterstereotypical as to suggest an unintended irony. The masculine pronoun is also much more faithful to the typical extension of ideas of masculine physical prowess and the aesthetic of heavy physical effort to the (male) leader's onerous task of strategizing and planning—probably to lend charisma for the followers. Thus male executives can be portrayed as sweating while only thinking, while this would seem quite odd in the case of a woman.

4 Thompson, Dennis F., “Mediated Corruption: The Case of the Keating Five,” American Political Science Review 87 (1993), 369–381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Braybrooke, David, Traffic Congestion Goes Through the Issue Machine (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974);Google ScholarBraybrooke, David and Lindblom, Charles E., A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process (New York:Free Press of Glencoe, 1963);Google ScholarLindblom, Charles E. and Cohen, David K., Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1979);Google Scholar and Braybrooke, David, Brown, Bryson and Schotch, Peter K., Logic on the Track of Social Change (Oxford:Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy,CrossRefGoogle Scholar forthcoming).

6 Hollis, Martin, “Dirty Hands,” British Journal of Political Science 12 (1982), 396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Ibid., 398.

8 Assassination is a subject for Albert Camus, notably The Just Assassins, in Caligula and Three Other Plays (New York:Knopf, 1958)Google Scholar; the judges problem is from Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford:Blackwell, 1974);Google Scholar the torture example is taken up in Donagan, Alan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1977), 184–189;Google Scholar and the jungle parable is developed in Williams, Bernard, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, Bernard, eds., Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, 98. But see also Williams, ’ “Politics and Moral Character,” in Hampshire, S., ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978), 55–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The authors’ various scenarios have taken on a life of their own. Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972-1973), 160–180,Google Scholar perhaps contains the most direct discussion of the possibility of living a moral life as a public figure. In real life, the defence presented by the former Vichy government official, Paul Touvier, in his 1994 trial for crimes against humanity half a century earlier, was that he had saved 93 Jewish prisoners by designating seven for execution. See Webster, Paul, “Touvier Trial Goes Easy on Vichy,” Manchester Guardian Weekly (Manchester), April 10, 1994, 4.Google Scholar

9 Rossiter, Clinton, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modem Democracies (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1948)Google Scholar, viii.

10 Hirschman, Albert O., The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 93. The description of democracy as a “maudlin enthusiasm” that could destroy the institutional creations of centuries of “wise heads” is from the debates leading up to the Second Reform Act of 1867 in Britain.

12 Benn, Stanley I., “Private and Public Morality: Clean Living and Dirty Hands,” in Benn, S. I. and Gaus, G. F., eds., Public and Private in Social Life (London:Croom Helm, 1983).Google Scholar

13 Braybrooke and Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision, vii.

14 “The [contemporary] executive… is neither more nor less than what is left of government… when legislatures and the courts are removed” (King, Anthony, “Executives,” in Greenstein, F. I. and Polsby, N. W., eds., Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 5 [Reading, Mass.:Addison-Wesley, 1975]Google Scholar, 181).

15 See Buffat, Marc, Les mains sales de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris:Gallimard, 1991), 163–171.Google Scholar

16 At first Sartre tried washing his hands of the whole business, declaring that the play's fate in the world represented an “objective” path that had nothing to do with him. But by 1952, a declared critical sympathizer of Communism, he was refusing to authorize the play's production in certain cities, “des points neVralgiques.” This semi-ban lasted until the mid-1960s (ibid., 167–71).

17 Ibid., 166, quoting Michel Contat and Rybalka, Michel, Les Ecrits de Sartre (Paris:Gallimard, 1970), 178–179:Google Scholar “I make everyone right: the old ‘realist’ leader of the proletarian party, who, because he makes some provisional concessions with the reactionary party, sees himself portrayed by opportunists as a traitor to society, is correct. And so also is the young disciple, lost in idealism, whom the hard-liners have sent to execute he [Hoederer] who was once his idol.”

18 Sartre, Les mainssales, 194 (emphasis added). Hugo: “You will see one day that I am not afraid of blood.” Hoederer: “red gloves, that's elegant. It is the rest of it [i.e., the merde] that frightens you. That's what stinks to your little aristocratic nose.”

19 Ibid., 191. Minutes later he says, “Pour moi ca compte un homme de plus ou demoins dans le monde.”

20 Buffat, Les mains sales de Jean-Paul Sartre, 69.

21 The apparently chauvinist conception of Jessica's role, while it may date the play, is unimportant. There are serious women in the party, such as the one who is charged with the responsibility of deciding whether Hugo must be killed, a task to which she seems equal.

22 Ibid., note 17.

23 As Gadamer insists, the fissure that time creates means that meaning must bereconstructed, and, being reconstructed, is different from what went before (“alienated”). The past is remade socially in a mediation with the present. See Weinsheimer, Joel C., Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1985), 131–134.Google Scholar

24 On self-authorship and authenticity see Carr, David, Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1986), 80–99.Google Scholar In Carr's terms, Hugo's choice of the timing of his own death can be seen as his clinging to authorship: hemakes the issue of what social meaning is to be given Hoederer's death the summation or, perhaps, rounding out, of his own “project.” Carr notes that Heidegger and Sartre “share the same ideal of authenticity as self-authorship: it is simply that Sartre, with tragic pathos, believes the ideal unattainable” (84). In the same place, Carr says that to suppose that one can take complete charge of the stories in which one figures, or to work oneself up into a sense of tragic regret that one cannot do so, “is to succumb to the illusion of being or desiring to be God.”

25 See, for a recent exploration of democracies as communities of inquiry capable of intelligent collective adaptation, Anderson, Charles W., “Pragmatic Liberalism, the Rule of Law, and the Pluralist Regime,” in Elkin, Stephen L. and Edward Soltan, Karol, eds., A New Constitutionalism: Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 106. An important source for such treatments is Dewey, John, Liberalism and Social Action (New York:Putnam, 1963).Google Scholar

26 Braybrooke, and Lindblom, , A Strategy of Decision, vii.Google Scholar

27 Carr, Time, 60–65.

28 Thompson, “Mediated Corruption,” 378.

29 Herman Finer, “Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government,” Public Administration Review1 (1940/1941), 335–50.

30 Thompson, “Mediated Corruption,” 377.

31 We are familiar with the standard of majority rule. In his 1987 book, Thompson develops an argument to the effect that morally justifiable decisions can be assessed against three additional sets of standards: generality, autonomy and publicity. Very briefly, “Standards of generality require that legislative actions be justifiable in terms that apply to all citizens equally.... Standards of autonomy prescribe that representatives act on relevant reasons.... Standards of publicity require that an intervention take place in ways that could be justified publicly.” See Thompson, Dennis F., Political Ethics and Public Office (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 4. The concept of mediated corruption is distinguishable from the publicity standard in that it specifically considers the form and requirements of the system, rather than simple exposure of a deed.

32 Hollis, “Dirty Hands,” 391.

33 Ibid., note 5.

34 Foley, Michael, The Silence of Constitutions (London:Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar, 68. Benn notes that to lie for the government's survival can be acceptable, if embarrassing to its supporters when found out. Nixon's error was to keep on lying when there were no grounds for believing that lying was in the public interest (Benn, Public and Private Morality, 166).

35 Young, Hugo, “If This Is the New Ethical Order, It Stinks,” Manchester Guardian Weekly (Manchester), January 17, 1993, 5.Google Scholar

36 Coady, “Dirty Hands,” 373. Lewis Lapham has identified a kind of social pathology in his nation's life, in that in many American narratives the violent man is the hero, and he unerringly discovers evil in “even the most rudimentary attempts at civilization.” Complementarily, the villains always form part of “the system” which even the little children know to be corrupt (Lewis Lapham, “Burnt Offerings,” Harpers, April 1994, 11–15).

37 See, for a description of the inquiry, Sutherland, S. L., “The Al-Mashat Affair: Administrative Accountability in Parliamentary Institutions,” Canadian Public Administration 34 (1991), 573–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Government documents since released to Ken Rubin, an access investigator, suggest the hypothesis that the Privy Council Office, having perhaps initially misinterpreted some of the technical aspects of the case and of the modalities available to bring a foreign national into the country, carried a battle, which it may have seen as one for its writ in national security matters, into External Affairs, where it easily became focused upon the person of the associate undersecretary, Raymond Chrdtien, because such a focus was attractive to the Conservative partisans. But even if PCO did play a role in directing the partisan dynamic in the inquiry and the subsequent demoralization of one of the important ministries of government, the political responsibility belongs to the prime minister and the other relevant ministers. The damage that this episode did to the Canadian public service ethos lost its profile when the Conservative party was left with only two MPs after the subsequent national election. Its legacy is a public service conviction that ministers will henceforth claim a right to victimize arbitrarily public servants rather than to test their political skills in providing answerability in the representative institutions.

38 Actually, two memoranda had gone to the current minister of external affairs through the career advice stream of Chretien's shop, both from Tony Vincent, a senior official, dated March 8 and April 2, the latter a reminder along with press lines. These memoranda were released to Ken Rubin as part of a larger information request. No trace was found of any warning of the minister of immigration before the fact of Al-Mashat's entry, other than a draft memorandum that was turned back to its author and never revised.

39 Brecht, Bertolt, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (London:Eyre Methuen, 1976Google Scholar). The play was only produced in Britain in 1967, and published there in 1976. Later the BBC made an excellent film with Nicol Williamson as Ui.

40 Ibid., 12.

41 Ibid., 91.

42 Ibid., 95.

43 Ibid., epilogue, 96.

44 Elkin, Stephen L., “Constitutionalism's Successor,” in Elkin, and Soltan, , eds., A New Constitutionalism, 124.Google Scholar

45 “Willingness to get one's hands dirty in politics expresses an orientation toward thinking in terms of welfare at the expense of principles of right. It is permanently Simpson, “Justice, Expediency and Forms of Thinking,” abstract of a paper delivered at the “Dirty Hands” Workshop at York University, December 12,1993).

46 Wolff, Jonathan, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State (Oxford:Polity Press, 1991), 28–30.Google Scholar