This article traces the metamorphoses of Norwegian reformism during the last two centuries. In the Norwegian system, the shifting political regimes have to a remarkable extent been accompanied by shifting knowledge discourses. Regardless of whether its ideological dress was liberalism or socialism, a central feature of Norwegian reformism has been its basis in different versions of social science: it has been a scientific reformism. The legal knowledge regime of the civil servants’ state was towards the end of the 19th century (...) replaced by a democratic-pedagogical knowledge regime. When the Labour Party gained control of the political centre in 1945, it did so in coalition with the new economists. Following the demise of the Labour Party state in the 1980s, some features of a new knowledge regime have become visible. (shrink)

Elster's work unstably combines Leibnizian and utilitarian conceptions of action and offers various deconstructions of rationality and individuality. His method ological individualism gives an inadequate account of its privileged object, individual teleologies, and a distorted account of the relational framework of social reproduction and transformation. Elster has not properly conceptualized the relation of the teleological act to patterns of material and social causality, and his rational choice theory proves unable to accommodate the interactions of his postulated monadic individuals. His most (...) recent work dearly illustrates the limits of an individualist approach, while remaining committed to its principles. (shrink)