The perfectibility of human societies, between utopias and reforms

The English ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 took place with practically no bloodshed and, albeit marking a radical change in the political order, producing no drastic break in continuity for the English institutions. On the contrary, the French Revolution of 1789, and especially the radicalisation it subsequently went through, once again, and in dramatic terms, faces social scientists with two crucial issues. First, can a change in institutions lead to a better society, also – and perhaps above all – as far as material life is concerned, and hence in the functioning of the economy? Second, if the change has a cost in terms of violence and bloodshed, as was apparent in the case of the French Revolution, do the advantages that may be reaped justify these costs?

In the eighteenth century the tradition of the Enlightenment gave a more or less positive answer to the first question: intervention by benevolent sovereigns, guided by reason, may favour social progress, which in any case remains the direction human history tends to move in. The second question, on the other hand, hardly represented a real issue for exponents of the Enlightenment, who by and large accepted as a matter of fact the absolute power of national monarchies and limited their proposals for intervention to the fields of economic issues and social policies.