MODELS OF REFORMMONGERING.

The article explores whether formal reasoning can make a contribution to the understanding of how economic reforms may be brought about. The authors take as starting point a situation in which reform can be achieved legally only if parts of both conservative and progressive groups in the constitutional decision-making body join forces to vote for it. The authors suppose that the reform can be graduated, that is, can be more or less sweeping and assume at this stage that progressives prefer the more sweeping to the less sweeping reforms, all the way, while the opposite holds of course for the conservatives. How much reform can be achieved without prior revolution may be subject to considerable differences of judgment, but one may assume the existence of some degree of sweepingness which undoubtedly requires prior revolution. The definition of progressives implies then that they are unafraid of revolution and that they in fact welcome it, not for its own sake, but because it permits the realisation of the more sweeping reforms that are inconceivable without revolution.