ABSTRACT
Throughout the history of mankind, the state has always been an important actor in social life. The arenas and tools of state intervention have changed substantially over time in connection to social perceptions and political institutions. The role of the state, including its involvement in the economy, has always been a political issue. The state is an embedded social institution. Therefore, state performance can be analyzed not only from the technical but also from the political perspective. It is an important dimension of a state’s effectiveness, but also whose interests are mostly served and how state actions affect other social institutions. In the age of modern capitalism, three periods of intensive state activity may be observed. As Nölke (2014) rightly indicates, after late-nineteenth-century economic nationalism and the Keynesian (and corporatist) decades of the twentieth century, the new period of statism in the first decades of the twenty-first century has already become the third state-led paradigm of the capitalist world. Obviously, the three periods had very different features even from the technical standpoint (the usage of economic policy tools). Therefore, it is not self-evident that these periods have so much in common that direct comparisons between them are possible, especially without proper analysis of both state policies and the global economic environment and political conditions in which they developed. Obviously, the state’s policy toolkit depended on both internal and external political conditions as well as on prevailing political concepts and social perceptions.
