We are presently facing a multiple crisis. It features an economic and financial dimension, as well as ones dealing with climate change and the erosion of biodiversity, energy shortages and the volatility of basic-food prices, and political representation and integration. To deal with such a crisis successfully we need sophisticated analyses of the world we inhabit and the root causes of our present predicament.

We also need to consider dominant crisis diagnoses which might lead to false policies. However, they are quite powerful. There has been much talk about the ‘return of the state’ over the last three years. Politicians from the centre-right to the centre-left – accompanied by a handful of neoliberals – agree with the diagnosis that, while markets do essentially have certain positive effects, the markets have run out of control and must be now re-regulated in some form or other. Either the state or the intergovernmental system, like the EU, should be made responsible for the crisis. Most opinions regard the state as a more or less neutral actor that is responsible for the common good of society, and which deals with collective problems. According to this perspective, markets are rather unconnected to political power and authority; they are considered mainly as mechanisms of allocation which have become partially ineffective. This interpretation fails to take account of the way that the state has transformed itself over the last years and expedited the neoliberal metamorphosis of society.