ABSTRACT
Reform economics seems perpetually slipping: between political power and academic life, government and opposition, East and West. Economic and political reforms ought therefore to display antifeudal features: they should create a workable market economy, through reprivatization and the dismantling of state controls, and a pluralist political system, by transforming the authoritarian and/or oligarchic nature of the Party-state. Secularization has in turn helped refine the applied economics of the reform in scientific terms: based on the original combination thesis of plan and market, the reform concepts have become more and more complex and systematic. The literature of reform economics looks fragmented, unbalanced, and eclectic from the standpoint of the different fields of economic theory as well as from that of countries and periods of time. In Eastern Europe even the fragmented liberal traditions of economic thought have not been fully reconstructed, and the civilizing effects of neoclassical economics are still extremely weak.
