Confronted with the problem of regenerating society in decline, Iberian liberalism professed two conflicting ideals: reform by an enlightened minority within the traditional constitution, and radical revolution, deriving its political theory from the sovereignty of the people. The origins of these programmes must be sought in the later eighteenth century, when foreign influences were grafted on to the traditions of earlier diagnosticians of decline. The Iberian Enlightenment, although it revivified intellectual life, was, by European standards, a derivative and second-rate affair: its significance lies in its influence on the reforming civil servants who controlled the Spanish monarchy in the later years of Charles III; whether they drew on outmoded mercantilism, on more modern physiocratic influences or, later, on the ideas of Adam Smith, they were committed to the proposition that civil society was not an unalterable, sacrosanct structure, but susceptible of rational improvement by legislation based on political economy. Since their aim was the increased prosperity of the state, their emphasis was on useful arts, practical reform, and the elimination of useless classes, useless scholastic education and economically harmful charity. Compared with the Spanish reformers, Pombal's tightening of effective state control in the interests of increased revenue, effected by the exertions of an over-worked sole minister, was an old-fashioned programme, inspired by Colbert. Nevertheless, to the Portuguese liberals this suspicious autocrat became the picture of the enlightened reformer.

The reform programme was to be spread all over Spain by government-sponsored Patriotic Societies. Their activities were often puerile, a naive parade of scraps of scientific knowledge picked up in foreign journals. Nevertheless, these government servants and their local supporters staked out a programme: the recasting of university education on lines inspired by the regalian claims of the state; the promotion of public works, by which some provincial capitals were transformed; a network of roads from Madrid; the rationalisation of administrative divisions and the removal of obstructions to efficient government caused by municipal sloth and corruption and by provincial privilege. Apart from a few deists they were not heterodox, least of all were they revolutionaries.