Reform

In modern usage reform is linked to innovation, a concept that is also used to validate it. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, however, the idea of innovation lacked the positive connotation it acquired later on. In classical Latin the expression cupidus rerum novarum (keen on new things) was an idiomatic expression for "rebellious" and was invariably used in a deprecatory sense. Innovation was seen as dangerous, an assessment that remained the norm even in the Renaissance. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), for example, emphasized the dangers of changing the status quo and described the process of establishing a new order of things as risky and therefore to be avoided. In the premodern age, and as long as tradition remained a powerful validating principle, would-be reformers therefore shied away from associating their cause with innovation. Instead, they regularly claimed to revert to a preexisting condition and restore a corrupt state to its original pristine state. Innovation was openly advocated only in utopian literature. There, reform proposals were presented in a whimsical or paradoxical manner and given a deliberately eccentric or unrealistic setting. This device, employed by authors from Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 B.C.E.) to Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), was often used to circumvent censorship and to air ideas in closed societies, which offered no effective legal channel to bring about change. Incentives to resort to satire and utopian fiction were especially strong when stable political and institutional alignments protected the status quo.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century, epitomized by Martin Luther, evinces the typical characteristics of a successful reform movement: a well-developed ideology, a conscious intention of overthrowing the status quo, and, given the stigma attached to innovation in early modern Europe, an appeal to a preexisting condition and a promise to restore the corrupt church to its original state. The Reformation also exemplifies the political circumstances favoring success. It enjoyed broad popular support and benefited from an unstable political climate. This allowed Protestants in Germany and Huguenots in France to align themselves with dissenting secular authorities. In Germany, the reformers were supported by cities and principalities that opposed the centralizing tendencies of the Catholic emperor. In France, Huguenots benefited from the power struggle between court factions in the dying days of the Valois dynasty. Similar crisis conditions allowed reformers and reforming groups in the seventeenth century to realize their goals. A new idea, however, emerged at that time and came into its own in the eighteenth century: the idea that the common people had not only duties but also rights. This was the theory underlying the 1649 Leveler's Agreement of the People and was the basic assumption of the 1776 Declaration of Independence as well as the French charter of rights drawn up in 1789. Its slogan, "freedom, equality, brotherhood," associated reform/revolution with freedom from religious and secular hierarchical power.

Although the revolutions of the eighteenth century shared with the sixteenth-century Reformation the rejection of traditional authority and references to individual responsibility, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries appealed to reason rather than the divine will as the source of life-structuring norms. René Descartes (1596–1650) first presented the reductionist theory that dictated rejection of values based on tradition and experience unless they could be fitted into a rational context. His thought supplied the basic motivation for reform until Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) substituted material and economic conditions as initiating factors. Even they, however, presented reform as a rational attempt to achieve change.

It was only in the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, that the negative connotation of innovation was overcome. The French philosophes unabashedly offered new ideas, which were taken up by European rulers, especially in Prussia and Austria, and found their way into parliamentary debates.