---
title: "Reform"
sousTitre: "“To re-form” means to restore shape, to reinstate a better form. In the mouth of power, the word has come to name the opposite: to close, to cut back, to dismantle. We trace the shift piece by piece, from the Latin *reformare* to “structural reforms,” across six languages."
description: "An inquiry into the word “reform” across six languages (French, English, Spanish, German, Chinese 改革, Arabic إصلاح). Original meaning: to restore form, to improve (*reformare*). Contemporary drift: euphemizing the dismantling of public institutions. The shift from “improvement” to “dismantling,” documented in French by Éric Hazan (*LQR*), is observed in the Western neoliberal sphere; Chinese *gǎigé* and Arabic *iṣlāḥ* retain a more intact charge."
date: 2026-07-13
lang: en
tradition: transversal
auteurs: ["Eric Hazan"]
---
# Reform

Reform is a word that has switched sides. It announces that something broken will be made better, yet increasingly serves to name the opposite: closure, reduction, dismantling. Between these two meanings, what is at stake is not a stylistic nuance—it is the erasure of power relations. The task now is to show, piece by piece, how the word was turned inside out.

## The meaning beneath the word

*Reform* comes from the Latin *reformare*: *re-* (again) and *formare* (to shape). To re-form is to restore a form—either the one a thing has lost, or a better one. The word first denoted moral amendment (*to reform oneself*, to correct one’s conduct) and religious restoration (the Reformation). Always a movement toward improvement, a return to a just form. Nothing in its etymology licenses its use as a synonym for destruction.

## The genealogy of the shift

How does *reform* go from “to improve” to “to dismantle”? Not by accident, but by design. Eric Hazan, in *LQR*—the “lingua quintae respublicae,” the language of the Fifth Republic, modeled on Klemperer’s *LTI*—lists the word among governmental euphemisms and dissects its use:

> The ubiquitous *réforme*: in LQR, the word has two main uses. The first is to make the dismantling of public institutions and the acceleration of liberal modernization acceptable.
>
> — **Éric Hazan**, *LQR. La propagande du quotidien*, ch. L'euphémisme. éd. after the French translation by the author, *Raisons d'agir*, 2006.

The method is consistent: take a word laden with positive meaning, hollow it out, then use it as a mask. *Reform* does not persuade through argument—it disarms opposition in advance. To oppose a reform is already, in the word’s very fold, to oppose improvement. The power relation vanishes beneath a grammatical self-evidence, and the measure—whatever it may be—passes for the natural course of things, the one to which we need only “adapt.”

## The same veil, six languages

The shift is not a French oddity. The word travels, and its drift travels with it—though not to the same depth everywhere.

In the four languages of the neoliberal sphere, *reform* functions as a free pass: the word precedes the measure and absolves it. In Chinese, *gǎigé* (改革)—literally “to change and transform”—remains indexed to an avowed state project, not to the euphemization of retreat; its charge is voluntarist, not defensive. In Arabic, *iṣlāḥ* (إصلاح) derives from the root *ṣ-l-ḥ*, “to make good, sound, just”: it still carries the moral and religious meaning of restoration—the word of Islamic reformism—and has not been as thoroughly turned into a managerial mask.

This is not to say that Chinese or Arabic are immune: wherever the vocabulary of international financial institutions imposes itself, “structural reforms” import the shift with them. But the inventory is clear—the veil is thickest where the word has most often served to pass off dismantling as progress.

## To re-form, or to undo

The question that lifts the veil can be put in five words: *Are we restoring form, or unmaking it?* The word never answers—it is the measure that does. “Pension reform,” “labor market reform”: each time, restoring the verb’s original meaning—to restore form—is enough to reveal what it conceals, and to return to the reader the grip on what is being done to them.

## Sources

- Éric Hazan, *LQR. La propagande du quotidien* — Raisons d'agir, 2006, chap. « L'euphémisme »


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/devoiler/2026-07-13-reforme/