Political Reason and the Language of Change

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".

Adriana Luna-Fabritius is the President of the European Society for the History of Political Thought and University Researcher at the University of Helsinki. She studies early-modern languages of republicanism, natural law and political economy in the Spanish monarchy: Naples, Catalonia and New Spain. Her research is grounded on the transformation of imperialism through scientific, legal and political practices of its communicating networks. Ere Nokkala is a University Researcher at the University of Helsinki. His main research interests are in eighteenth-century German and Swedish intellectual history. He is the author of From Natural Law to Political Economy. J.H.G. von Justi on State, Commerce and International Order (2019). Marten Seppel is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Tartu. His main interests of research include: the spread of German cameralist teaching, Eastern Europe serfdom, and hunger relief policies in early modern Europe. He is the editor (with Keith Tribe) Cameralism in Practice: State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe (2017). Keith Tribe is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tartu. He is an economic historian and translator who has published widely in the history of economic discourse. His most recent book is Constructing Economic Science. The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950 (2021).

1. Introduction: Reform and Improvement in Early Modern Europe Part 1: Rethinking Key Concepts of Political Economy: Reform and Improvement 2. Reform: Elements for a Conceptual History 3. The Evolution of the Concept Verbesserung and the Anonymous German Discourse of Improvement 4. "Changes to preserve everything the way it always was": the Idea of Reform and the Slow Disintegration of the Old Regime 5. "Changes are harmful to the state": The Concept of Reform in Russian Political Thought, 1700-1790 6. Reform and Utopia in Early-Modern Italian Political Economy: Historicising a Tension Part 2: Agents and Ideas of Improvement and Reform in Context 7. Projects for the Improvement of Constitutional Order: Late Cameralists as Advocates of Political Change 8. Joseph von Sonnenfels and the Political Codex (1763-1817) 9. The Translation, Adaptation and Mediation of Cameralist Texts in Austrian-Habsburg Lombardy's "Age of Reform" (Alexandra Ortolja-Baird) 10. How Undiplomatic Memoirs Shaped Enlightenment Reform: Melchor Rafael Macanaz's Memorias & Contexts of Change in Bourbon Spain 11. Making and Trading Metals: A Narrative of Swedish Improvement 12. National Economics in Sweden: Reform and the Political Economy of Industrial Progress 1800-1850 13. Epilogue