ABSTRACT
This collection of essays re-examines ideas of change and movements for change in early modern Europe without presuming that "progressive" change was the outcome of "reforms".
"Reform" today implies rational, incremental change to public institutions and procedures. "Improvement" has a more general application, emphasising the positive outcome to which "reform" is oriented. But the language of reform is today used of historical personalities and movements that did not themselves use the term, and who in many cases were not necessarily seeking the progressive change that we would understand today. The activities of "reform" were embedded in contemporary politics, and while "improvement" was part of a contemporary vocabulary, its real presence has been obscured by the range of natural languages in which it was expressed. Contributors to this volume seek to establish what was meant by contemporary usage. Bringing together scholars of Russia, Southern, Western, Central and Northern Europe, this collection sheds new light on both common and divergent features of a political process too often treated as a uniform movement towards modernity.
This volume is a useful resource for students and scholars interested in Enlightenment studies, intellectual history, and conceptual history in early modern Europe.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|116 pages
Rethinking Key Concepts of Political Economy
chapter 3|21 pages
The Evolution of the Concept Verbesserung and the Anonymous German Discourse of Improvement 1
chapter 4|21 pages
“Changes to preserve everything the way it always was”
chapter 5|27 pages
“Changes Are Harmful to the State”
chapter 6|24 pages
Reform and Utopia in Early Modern Italian Political Economy
part II|130 pages
Agents and Ideas of Improvement and Reform in Context