ABSTRACT
The introduction links “reform” and “improvement” as related but distinct ideas of political change, emphasising the relative stability and continuity of usage of “improvement” as compared with “reform”, which developed its modern sense of deliberate progressive change only in the course of the nineteenth century. While accounts of the European Enlightenment have sometimes treated “reform” as a central organising idea, and by extension as a means of linking Enlightenment ideas to the emergence of political economy, it is argued that, like “reform” itself, the political economy of the nineteenth century had little real connection with eighteenth-century discussion of wealth and welfare.
