Reform

Popular support has always played an important role in successful reforms, but there is a noticeable shift in the nineteenth century in the structures that serve as a means of galvanizing popular support and promoting bonding. Until then collective action to further reform and the intellectual solidarity on which it is predicated were promoted by kinship groups, regional networks, and religious congregations. The goals were specific and parochial, with the action typically arising from particular circumstances and ceasing when the specific objectives had been achieved. From the nineteenth century on, the role of these groups was increasingly taken over by governments, political parties, firms, or unions and involved long-range, sometimes cosmopolitan, goals. Realizing such goals required a permanent organization and planned action and often involved either coercion or reward for the participants. Already in the eighteenth century, major social and economic reforms were introduced from above, through the agency of "enlightened despots" like Frederick the Great of Prussia (r. 1740–1786) and Joseph II of Germany (r. 1764–1790). The civil service they created to implement the reforms may be seen as a harbinger of the developments in the nineteenth century, which saw a large number of reforms passed through legal channels and mediated by politicians and political parties. Indeed, "reform" became the watchword of socialist parties and was generally associated with their platform. In England, for example, the Tories who were dominant between 1770–1830 were opposed to reform, whereas the Whigs promoted and enacted a succession of reforms (for example, the Reform Act of 1832, which expanded suffrage). In the twentieth century reform was associated in Britain with the Liberal government before 1914 and the Labour government after 1945. In the United States, administrative reforms were seen as the result of the Progressive movement in the nineteenth century and associated with the Democratic Party and more specifically with the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) in the twentieth century. In the USSR the term "reform" was applied to Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to restructure key state institutions and to bring about a fundamental change in social values through glasnost.

In the second half of the twentieth century, however, reform movements began to transcend class and party lines as well as other traditional groupings and increasingly signified personal choice and self-identification (for example, as gay, disabled, or black). On a broader level, reformers appealed to the communal good and a global human fellowship (for example, environmental, disarmament, anticonglomerate, and civil rights movements). The move from adherence to a cause determined by incidental membership in a group (class, gender, nationality) to a cause that was personally meaningful and from reform initiated by political parties to nonaligned protest organizers or organizations (for example, Ralph Nader, Greenpeace) was accompanied by a shift of authority from "without" to "within." This shift may be seen as a consequence of two recognized social trends in the twentieth century: the encouragement of individualism and the rejection of ritualization.