Any serious research about corruption, and instruments to fight it, needs a definition of the very concept and some reconstruction of its relationships with other concepts, such as democracy and “rights” – relationships less obvious than one could usually think. On this theoretical background, the paper sketches three strategies to fight corruption: a moral or moralistic one, oriented to promote the civic virtues and a culture of legality; a legal, or a legalistic one, multiplying prohibitions in order to pursue all the ramifications of such a phenomenon; finally, a political or institutional one, opposing to the corrupted powers a system of checks and balances. In my view, this third strategy is the most effective one, if only because it establishes the minimal conditions for the effectiveness of the other two.
