Neoliberal Transformations of the Italian State: Understanding the Roots of the Crises By Adriano Cozzolino. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021, 216p. $110 hardback, $38 eBook

Abstract

and of from the ‘ populist government of ’ Italian and European elites, rapid decline to the Conte II, featuring the collaboration of the Five Star Movement with its previous antipodal Democratic Party, and the installment of a technocratic government (Draghi), one after the beginning of the pandemic. seeking to understand these changes and related phenomena, among which populism and technocracy, read the brilliant book ‘ Neoliberal Transformations of The Italian State ’ by Cozzolino. In fact, the book provides an in depth theoretical and empirical analysis of the transformations of the Italian State in the last 75 years, with a focus on the period 1976 2015, featuring a transition from a parliamentary regime to a de facto presidential one, centered on the executive powers. The book has illuminating results on the unique Italian case, but also more broadly on state theory and its intertwined political and economic dynamics. Departing from the critique of func-tionalist, reductionist, and reifying approaches to state (typical of behaviorist, neo-positivist, and neo-Weberian approaches), the author underlines instead the importance of studying the state not as a thing , but as a social relation , or more specifically as a terrain for contestation. critical International political Cozzolino theoretical framework, dialectical Cozzolino the constructed. The theoretical empir-ically the