The Politics of Civilizational Healing: Power, Incumbency, and Transformational Capacity

Why do societies continue to reproduce arrangements whose serious life-disabling consequences are already substantially recognized? This article defines that recognition–transformation gap as a problem of transformational incapacity and develops a middle-range framework for investigating it. A regime is treated non-conspiratorially as a stabilized configuration of institutions, infrastructures, technologies, routines, laws, resource flows, expectations, knowledge systems, and power relations. Its regime reproduction capacity (RRC) is the combined capacity of those elements to reproduce characteristic outcomes or absorb challenge without fundamental alteration. Transformational capacity (TC) is the distributed capacity to alter the causal structures producing a recognized condition; countervailing capacity (CC) is the subset able to constrain, balance, bypass, or restructure concentrated power. The article makes five integrative contributions. It develops a three-axis Power Audit that distinguishes the modality, direction, and legitimacy of power. It specifies a Civilizational Healing Enactment Circuit linking injury perception, political formation, authorization, institutional transition, operationalization, reproduction, and evaluation. It separates two transition thresholds — legitimate authorization and operationalization — from the further problem of durability. It distinguishes powers requiring legitimate constraint from useful incumbent capabilities that can be converted toward a successor regime. Finally, it proposes a four-dimensional healing test: causal effectiveness, life-grounded outcomes, transformational legitimacy, and non-domination, assessed independently rather than collapsed into a single score. Structured, focused comparison and within-case process tracing are used to probe the framework across tobacco control, the Montreal Protocol, fossil-energy transition, nineteenth-century urban sanitation, and the emerging governance of artificial intelligence. The comparison shows that knowledge is necessary but rarely sufficient; that successor viability and transition protection are politically produced; that incumbents are heterogeneous; and that implementation and feedback explain why formal commitments diverge from durable outcomes. The framework is offered as a fallible research programme, not a universal law of change. Its governing principle for artificial intelligence is epistemic augmentation without political substitution.