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The Politics of Moral Capital
It is often said that politics is an amoral realm of power and interest in
which moral judgment is irrelevant. In this book, by contrast, John Kane
argues that people’s positive moral judgments of political actors and
institutions provide leaders with an important resource, which he
christens ‘‘moral capital.’’ Negative judgments cause a loss of moral
capital which jeopardizes legitimacy and political survival. Studies of
several historical and contemporary leaders – Lincoln, de Gaulle, Man-
dela, Aung San Suu Kyi – illustrate the signiWcance of moral capital for
political legitimation, mobilizing support, and the creation of strategic
opportunities. In the book’s Wnal section, Kane applies his arguments to
the American presidency from Kennedy to Clinton. He argues that a
moral crisis has aZicted the nation at its mythical heart and has been
refracted through and enacted within its central institutions, eroding the
moral capital of government and people and undermining the nation’s
morale.
john kane is the Head of the School of Politics and Public Policy at
GriYth University, Queensland. He has published articles in such jour-
nals as Political Theory, NOMOS and Telos, and is also co-editor of
Rethinking Australian Citizenship (2000).
Contemporary Political Theory
Series Editor
Ian Shapiro
Editorial Board
Russell Hardin Stephen Holmes JeVrey Isaac
John Keane Elizabeth Kiss Susan Okin
Phillipe Van Parijs Philip Pettit
As the twenty-Wrst century begins, major new political challenges have arisen at

John Kane
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
First published in printed format
ISBN 0-521-66336-9 hardback
ISBN 0-521-66357-1 paperback
ISBN 0-511-03398-2 eBook
John Kane 2004
2001
(Adobe Reader)
©
For Kay
A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Mount
T’ai or it may be as light as a goose feather. It all depends on the
way he uses it.
Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Han shu
Contents
Acknowledgmentspageviii
Introduction1
PartIMoralcapital5
1Moralcapitalandpolitics10
2Moralcapitalandleadership27
PartIIMoralcapitalintimesofcrisis45

me with one of the best teaching experiences of my life. It is to the
twenty-two members of that class of ’96, then, that I owe my Wrst debt of
acknowledgment. It was their boundless enthusiasm, more than anything
else, that caused me to believe there might be suYcient interest in the
topic to make an extended study worthwhile. It would be invidious to
name individual names, but I hope that all will remember with as much
pleasure as myself the semester in which we Wrst tested the concept of
moral capital on a range of political leaders past and present.
I must also thank colleagues and post-graduate students at Yale for
many stimulating discussions in which I was Wrst forced to defend and
clarify the notion of moral capital. In particular, I would like to mention
Leonard Wantchekon, Eric Patashnik, Rogers Smith, Don Green, Steven
Smith, Norma Thompson, Casiano Hacker-Cordo´n and Courtney
Jung. Above all, I must thank Ian Shapiro for his unfailing encourage-
ment and always useful commentary. Back home in Australia, I received
further valuable critique from a number of colleagues: Elizabeth van
Acker, Patrick Bishop, and especially Haig Patapan, whose generous
viii
readings of various drafts and long discussions on the nature of the topic
have contributed more to the Wnal shape of this book than any other
inXuence. The responses of Carol Bois, both positive and negative, were
also a very signiWcant aid in my attempts to clarify the nature of my
authorial task. And I must thank two anonymous Cambridge readers
whose penetrating comments improved my appreciation of the problems
involved. Whatever virtues the book possesses is due in large part to these
people. Its shortcomings are, of course, entirely my own.
A further special debt is owed to GeoV Stokes, without whose unstint-
ing, often selXess encouragement and support over many years this book
would never have been written. Finally, I must thank wholeheartedly my
beloved wife, Kay, whose belief is constantly nourishing and whose

executive head of the United States of America commanded necessary
respect. If Mandela’s moral standing enabled him to relate (as he insis-
ted) on equal terms with Clinton, and to assert a genuine independence,
it was nevertheless clearly gratifying to the South African to be so cor-
dially embraced by the chief of the most powerful nation on earth. And if
Clinton, for his part, enjoyed the prestige that preponderant power be-
stowed, he was nevertheless glad to bask for a while in the cleansing light
… Washington Post, 28 March 1998,p.A01.
1
of Mandela’s moral halo (and on many a later occasion he would re-
kindle this glow by referring to the valuable life-lessons he had learned
from Mandela). In short, Mandela, despite his saintly status, was not,
and could not be, indiVerent to the facts of power, while Clinton, for all
his power, could not be indiVerent to public perceptions of his moral
inWrmity.
The connections and divergences between temporal power and moral
standing so oddly Wgured in this meeting mark the central theme of this
book. The idea it introduces and examines is that moral reputation
inevitably represents a resource for political agents and institutions, one
that in combination with other familiar political resources enables politi-
cal processes, supports political contestants and creates political oppor-
tunities. Because politics aims always at political ends, everything about
political agents and institutions – including their moral reputation – is
inevitably tied to the question of political eVectiveness. Virtue, though a
Wne thing in itself, must in the political arena be weighed for its speciW-
cally political value. This political value I explore using the concept of
moral capital.
To gain an intuitive, preliminary grasp of the idea, consider the case of
George Washington. During the American War for Independence
Washington acquired a towering reputation as leader of the victorious

later of its primary political oYce, the presidency. It is part of the argu-
ment of this book that there exists a dialectical relationship between the
moral capital of political institutions and that of individuals. In the case of
established regimes that are widely regarded as legitimate, incumbent
individuals generally gain more moral capital from the oYces they occupy
than they bring to them, but the process always works, in principle, both
ways. Loss or gain of personal moral capital will have an eVect on the
institutional moral capital of an oYce, and vice versa.
Washington was mistaken about the eVects of breaking his vow, for the
public could see it was broken for honorable purposes. His fears were not,
however, unreasonable. He ended his second presidential term a deeply
disheartened man, having found that a shining reputation is exceedingly
hard to maintain in the strenuously partisan, bitterly competitive, end-
driven world of politics. If his foundational actions showed the potential
force of moral capital as a political resource, his later experiences revealed
its vulnerability.
All politicians, even the most cynical, become intensely aware during
their careers of both the value and vulnerability of moral capital. Vulner-
ability is a consequence of the fact that moral capital exists only through
people’s moral judgments and appraisals and is thus dependent on the
perceptions available to them. But perceptions may always be wrong or
mistaken and judgments therefore unsound. Furthermore, politicians
have a vested interest in manipulating public perceptions to their own
advantage, which is why, in the modern age, they seek the help of expert
political advisers. They know that to survive the political game they must
strive constantly to maintain or enhance their stock of moral capital, to
reinstate it when it suVers damage, and to undermine their opponents’
supply of it whenever they can. Yet the inevitable gamesmanship involved
in this has, in the long run, the contrary eVect of undermining the
credibility of politicians generally, and arousing public cynicism about

1
Because of the central role of knowledge and information in modern
economies, some writers point to the importance of intellectual capital as
the key to the future success of businesses.
2
Then there is the well-known
concept of social capital postulated by Robert Putnam to capture theor-
etically the social networks of trust that individuals form and which
allegedly serve quite broad and beneWcial functions.
3
Social capital has
been argued, for instance, to be an important determinant of a person’s
ability to progress upward in a job and to obtain higher rates of pay,
4
and
been used to hypothesize signiWcant eVects that the ‘‘social glue’’ charac-
teristic of particular societies (the relative tightness and robustness of
their social institutions) may have on their political and economic health.
5
… R. Burt, ‘‘The Social Structure of Competition’’ in N. Nohria and R. G. Eccles (eds.),
Networks and Organizations: Structure, Form and Action (Boston, Harvard Business School
Press, 1992), pp. 57–91. See also G. Becker, Human Capital (New York, National Bureau
of Economic Research, 1975); and Rita Asplund (ed.), Human Capital Formation in an
Economic Perspective (Helsinki, Physica-Verlag, 1994).
  See Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (London,
Nicholas Brealey, 1997).
À Robert D. Putnam (with Robert Leonardi and RaVaella Y. Nanetti), Making Democracy
Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press, 1993).
à See Burt, ‘‘Social Structure,’’ p. 58; P. V. Marsden and N. Lin (eds.), Social Structure and
Network Analysis (Beverly Hills, Sage, 1982); and M. Higgins and N. Nohria, ‘‘The

consideration for political resources generally. When people speak of
power politics they usually think of big bullies pushing little bullies
around, outcomes being determined in the end by the sheer size and
strength of the protagonists. Political power, on this view, boils down to
the extent (observable, in principle) of the organizational, institutional,
economic, electoral or military resources at one’s command. And it is no
doubt natural enough that we should expect power measured quantitat-
ively to be a decisive factor: as a wise gambler once observed, the race may
not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the safe
way to bet. Nevertheless, giant and apparently invulnerable corporations
are occasionally brought low by the marketing success of tiny rivals;
superpowers sometimes suVer humiliating defeat at the hands of rag-tag
colonial armies in small and undeveloped, but canny and tenacious,
nations. The strategic use of available resources is often more important
than their relative abundance.
6
As with all resources, so with moral capital. It is not enough to be
good, or morally irreproachable, or Wlled with good intentions, or highly
and widely respected. It is necessary to have the political ability to turn
Capital, Sogo Shosha, and Spillovers,’’ Working Papers (Cambridge, MA, National
Bureau of Economic Research, 1996).
ΠSee Alan Stam, Win, Lose or Draw: Domestic Politics and the Crucible of War (Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan Press, 1996).
7Moral capital
moral capital to eVective use, and to deploy it in strategic conjunction
with those other resources at one’s disposal that make up one’s total
stock of political capital. It may be well or foolishly, fortunately or
unfortunately invested, it may bring large returns to oneself or one’s
enterprise or it may be wasted and dissipated – and in politics there are
always opponents with a vested interest in doing everything they can to

have political eVects. When they are positive they inspire trust, belief and
allegiance that may in turn produce willing acquiescence, obedience,
loyalty, support, action, even sacriWce. In other words, they give rise to
moral capital, an enabling force in politics for both individual politicians
and political institutions. When such judgments become consistently
negative, on the other hand, moral capital declines and individuals and
8 Moral capital
organizations face severe problems of legitimacy, perhaps of political
survival.
The question is, what kind of moral judgment counts in the formation
of moral capital in politics? The answer to this is closely bound up with
the nature of the political Weld itself, and how it is possible, despite the
diYculties of the terrain, for moral capital to gain any traction there at all.
This forms the subject matter of Chapter 1, where I argue that moral
end-values are integral to any politics, and that in the perceived relation-
ship of political agents and institutions to these we Wnd the basis for
attributions of moral capital. Chapter 2 will then discuss the signiWcance
of moral capital for political leaders and their constituencies, and also
examine the relationship between personal and institutional moral capi-
tal. In closing this chapter, I will outline some things that may be learned
from case studies of moral capital in action, thus setting the scene for the
remainder of the book.
9Moral capital
1 Moral capital and politics
Friendships that are acquired by a price and not by greatness and
nobility of spirit are bought but not owned, and at the proper moment
they cannot be spent.
Machiavelli, The Prince
Politics is about power, and power has attractions and uses independent
of its necessity for achieving legitimate social goals. It is not surprising,

constantly contested arena of politics, political leverage and political
ascendancy can be gained by a variety of means – an eYcient electoral
machine, a surety of numbers in the party or legislature, the support of
key players, occupation of a political oYce and consequent access to
institutionalized levers of power, the possession of timely intelligence, a
superior organization capable of coherent action, powers of patronage, an
incompetent or divided opposition, a record of success, a booming econ-
omy. Such factors make up the stock of what we usually call an agent’s
political capital. They are the things to which we ordinarily look when we
seek to understand political processes and outcomes. Moral capital dis-
places none of them but is usually entangled with each of them, for it
generally undergirds all the systems, processes and negotiations of politi-
cal life. Often, its crucial supportive role is not clearly seen until it is lost
and individuals or institutions face consequent crises of legitimacy and
political survival.
This book, then, uses the concept of moral capital to investigate one
aspect of the real force and movement of moral judgment in political life.
Its theoretical premise is (to reiterate) that politics seeks a necessary
grounding in values and ends, and that people’s moral judgments of
political agents and institutions with respect to such values and ends have
important political eVects. It thus rejects overly cynical views, both popu-
lar and academic, that typically suppose politics to be an inherently
amoral realm. In such views, moral judgments in politics are thought to
be at best naıve and irrelevant, at worst hypocritical and pernicious. Or if
moral judgments are relevant at all, they are understood to be formed
beyond the realm of politics itself and applied to it – forced on it, as it were
– from the outside. The action of politics is conceived to be, in this
respect, akin to the action of markets, whose sole internal principle is the
amoral law of supply and demand. If eVective demand exists for slaves,
drugs or child pornography, suppliers will invariably arise to meet it.

aims, and, on another, a contest for political advantage among people
with opposed objectives. These political objectives may be either narrow-
ly speciWc or broadly general. At their broadest, they may aim at the
preservation of existing social, political and distributive arrangements, or
at their reform and restructuring, or even at their complete dismantle-
ment and replacement (to cover the traditional spectrum from conserva-
tism to revolutionism).
While politics aims at ends, the political process is endless, for life is
endless and the possibility of change and challenge always present.
Change may be exceedingly slow, permitting islands of historical stability,
or it may be very rapid, throwing even long-prevailing social and political
relations into Xux. Though political action generally strives for stable
ends, it necessarily occupies uncertain ground between the existently real
and the conceivably possible. Its aim may be preservation of the already
existent or, alternatively, its alteration. Thus political ends may embody
present interests or may envisage the annihilation of such interests and
the creation of altogether new ones (and there is nothing to stop a
nihilistic politics from pursuing the extermination of all human interests
whatsoever).
Political ends and interests are seldom uncontested, and champions of
12 Moral capital
opposing ends and interests must be either accommodated, neutralized
or defeated. Though compromise is possible – and indeed sometimes
lauded as a central political virtue – the game is generally played to be
won, particular outcomes being determined by the Xuctuating balance of
political power and the relative exercise of political skill. Compromise –
the settling for less than all one wanted – marks an acceptance that
opposing forces are too strong to be utterly defeated and too weak to be
utterly victorious. Politics is contestation, and contests are about winning
and losing, even if wins and losses may often be only partial. This

desired end at the expense of our good name. ‘‘What proWteth it a man if
he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’’
Yet the political version of Jesus’ question is surely ‘‘What proWteth it a
13Moral capital and politics