Reform

In Western societies, political reform comprises attempts to expand the reach of politics. Social and economic progress is said to depend on the repoliticization (reform) of productive and distributive outcomes, which, since the Enlightenment, have been subject mainly to individual, entrepreneurial, and market-driven decision-making criteria. Consequently, reform is an assertion of the efficacy of collective, deliberative, and democratic efforts to ameliorate, transform, or disrupt the processes and the tendencies implied by an unregulated capitalist “mode of accumulation.” The possibilities of reform presuppose that political development and political capacities are not as “structurally” constrained by economic conditions as radicals and political pessimists have feared. Reform, therefore, elevates political will, Machiavellianism, and sedulous institution building to an importance admitted by neither its liberal nor radical opponents. Its ...