Editorial: Rescaling the state: new modes of institutional-territorial organization

Abstract

Over the past 100 years, modern Western states have undergone two historic transformations. The first occurred between the 1920s and the 1940s, when the liberal, non-interventionist form that had dominated the 19th and earlier centuries gave way to the Keynesian welfare interventionist (or Fordist) form. From its origins in the 1930s (in the UK, the USA and Sweden), the Keynesian welfare state project emerged as the dominant post-war model of social and economic regulation among many of the advanced industrialized nations. Its twin goals were the stabilization of the inherent cyclical instabilities of capitalist growth and the construction of mass societal support and cohesion through the maintenance of full employment and provision of a public welfare system. Of course, nation states pursued different variants of...