The debate on capitalism over the last forty years: Different attempts to exorcise neoliberalism?

There is a fil rouge that runs through the 40-year long debate on capitalism in Stato e Mercato and in the Comparative Political Economy (CPE) field. It is the deeply held and widely shared idea that neoliberalism cannot provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of ensuring the economic and democratic development of advanced societies. However, this core idea translated into different strategies of research. This article discusses six major themes or lines of research that followed one another and partly overlapped: the crisis of Keynesian arrangements; neocorporatism as a potential substitute for State regulation of the economy; micro- and meso-levels of institutional regulation; different models and varieties of capitalism; a supposedly universal neoliberal trajectory; finally, the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Each of these themes was linked to the core idea of neoliberalism as a partial, and ultimately unsatisfactory, regulatory arrangement for advanced economies in democratic societies. However, this normatively-grounded aversion to neoliberalism among CPE scholars has paradoxically delayed the development of an analytical focus on it, giving rise to two shortcomings. First, the theoretical and ideological claim by neoliberalism to «free» the market from State intervention has been taken at face value by CPE scholars, that have failed to understand the massive role actually played by the State even in pure-market economies. Second, CPE scholars’ intellectual aversion to neoliberalism has rarely turned into an open rejection of its analytical assumptions on how to assess economic performance: advanced economies have continued to be appraised in terms of GDP, rates of growth and the like, not (also) in terms of equality and inclusiveness. The current pandemic, however, is powerfully questioning these neoliberal assumptions and may prove to be a turning point