Introduction to the special section on Financialization, state action and the contested policy practices of neoliberalization

The view that neoliberalism has become, and remains, the dominant ideology of economic statecraft in most parts of the world is widespread within critical social science scholarship. But there is no settled view on the nature of ‘the neoliberal state’ (see Plant, 2009; Weiss, 2012). Is there such a thing? Despite many scholars’ confidence in the influence of neoliberalism on economic and social policy across many countries, the sheer diversity of policy practices and institutional structures to which the label ‘neoliberal’ has been applied means the archetypal state form of neoliberalism is difficult to discern. This is partly because the defining characteristics of neoliberalism are contested (allowing some to claim the category is redundant as anything other than a broad heuristic). And it is partly because of the concurrence of a widespread adherence to neoliberal ideas and the process of financialization (allowing some to claim that the category has been overtaken in importance in explanatory terms). The response to the pandemic has muddied the waters still further. There are now lots of suggestions that there can be ‘no going back’ to the economic world as it was before. But when it is so difficult to specify what the characteristics of that world were, problems obviously arise in describing what lies beyond it