The language of political corruption is the default invective of our jaded age. For all our disposition to believe the worst, however, Beltway knavery has only rarely been the object of sustained historical consideration. Most corruption writing, for reasons of journalistic necessity, focuses on particular scandals or individual rogues. TV shows on the subject, meanwhile, assure us that vice is simply a Washington constant; that it saunters along the streets of the capital today with the same easy, untroubled gait as it always has.

The true student of misgovernment knows that the story is grander and more complicated than that. Washington isn’t simply a Place of Wickedness, throbbing with sin at all times and always in the same way. The misdeeds of Iran-contra did not much resemble the turpitude of, say, the Crédit Mobilier episode, even if they did have a great deal in common with the screw-ups of the George W. Bush years. And so the most ambitious chronicler of political misbehavior looks for something higher: a theory, a dialectic, a telos of scandal.

Surprisingly few have been able to pull this off. There was the muckraker Lincoln Steffens, who called himself a “graft philosopher” as he traveled from city to city studying political machines at the turn of the last century. There was the historian Matthew Josephson, whose 1938 masterpiece, “The Politicos,” traced the marriage of money with politics from its dalliances during the Grant administration until its final, grotesque consummation in William McKinley’s electoral triumph of 1896.

And now comes Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham University Law School and a candidate in this year’s Democratic primary for governor of New York. Her entry into the field, “Corruption in America,” includes plenty of the juicy stories that make the genre so much fun to read. We learn, for example, about a diamond-studded snuffbox that Louis XVI gave Benjamin Franklin, then our ambassador to France, and how the Revolutionary generation regarded this gift — the result of a noncontroversial custom in Europe — as a possible threat to republican virtue. We read about an officer of the Turkish government in the 1870s who agreed to sell the products of an American arms manufacturer to his government in exchange for a small consideration, and who then, having duly moved the units, went to court to have the deal enforced. Good stuff, all of it. You have probably heard pundits say we are living in an age of “legalized bribery”; “Corruption in America” is the book that makes their case in careful detail.