The role of the state has occupied center stage in the development of economics as an independent discipline and is one of the most contentious issues addressed by contemporary economists and political economists. In this volume, ten distinguished contributors examine patterns of interventionism and anti-interventionism in a wide variety of historical, political and institutional contexts and within different theoretical traditions. At the center of their analysis is the challenge of forming a new synthesis in which the valid insights of the dominant Neo-Liberalism anti-interventionism are stripped of their ideological baggage and integrated into a wider and more objective intellectual framework.