Sakari Hänninen, Kirsi-Marja Lehtelä and Paula Saikkonen (eds.), The Relational Nordic Welfare State: Between Utopia and Ideology (Cheltenham/Northampton: E. Elgar, 2019)

Abstract

Neoliberalism is a peculiar phenomenon: Nobody, to my knowledge, identifies as being a neoliberal, yet several publications have recently demonstrated how four decades of neoliberal reforms have transformed Western democracies in surprisingly uniform ways. In this sense, neoliberalism is an ideology without proponents, or, to use vocabulary from The Relational Welfare State: Between Utopia and Ideology, a utopia that has successfully manifested itself by replacing or transforming other socio-historical regimes.

Keywords

• nordic countries
• economics
• welfare state