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The conclusion ends the book with an explication of the Federalists’ idea of an American national state.

It starts by pointing out that the ratification of the US Constitution did not mean the end of politics, nor the end of the debate about the future course of the American republic, for now the Federalists faced the next step of state building: creating the institutions of government that would realize their ideas about a national state in America. The mainstream interpretation of the Federalist argument presents it as a call for limited government and protection of minority rights, but this study has offered a different interpretation. It sees the Federalist argument as an attempt to convince the American public about the need to build a powerful state and to explain how this state would work – the idea of an American national state that the Federalists developed during the ratification debate was the result of creative thinking in the face of serious challenges. This conclusion is devoted to an explication of both the challenge that the Federalists faced and the concept of the state they developed, but the basic issue may be summed up as follows: what the Federalists had to do, and what they did, in the debate over ratification, was to develop a conceptual framework that made it possible to accommodate the creation of a powerful national government to the strong anti‐statist current in the American political tradition.

This chapter reports on Leon Petrażyckian's contribution to the topic with a focus on what justifies listing him among the classic contributions to a sociological approach to law and considering him, to use Adam Podgorecki's phrase, the father of sociology of law. The chapter supports Professor Cotterrell's call for more sensitivity of the sociolegal academy to its intellectual tradition, which is ‘still too little valued in the sociolegal enterprise and considered too arbitrarily and marginally’. In addition, the chapter briefly describes the idea of adequacy and of class concepts, his comments on the role of language in science, and his classification of art and sciences. Petrażyckian's own concept of law can be best distinguished by three headings, namely psychologism, a correlativity of rights and duties and ‘anti-statism’, and legal pluralism. Although all of these aspects that have affecting Petrażyckian's concept of law are closely related, they can be discussed to some extent separately, outside their original theoretical context, usually with a sociological colouring. It is also noted in this chapter that Petrażycki's interdisciplinary contribution is full of potential for a sociological inquiry into the capitals and the much more interesting countryside of law's empire.

Political scientist Allen B. McBride tells us that the Tea Party erupted on the political scene virtually overnight in the immediate aftermath of the election of America's first black president. Despite its northern origins, McBride cites the anti-statist ideology of the Tea Party as the main reason for its strong support in Dixie. The chapter argues that the Tea Party may be better described as a movement than an actual party and is actually the latest incarnation of populism in America. More important, perhaps, through the use of polling data and the monitoring of social media, this chapter concludes that, like the Populist Party of the 1890s, preliminary data suggests that today's Tea Party is not distinctively southern nor may it be expressly racist. McBride provides important caveats to both points: stressing that these conclusions are based on preliminary data; that the South may be in the process of losing its regional distinctiveness; and that public opinion survey data has long been known to underestimate attitudes and behaviors that fall outside of the political mainstream.

This concluding chapter summarises the book's key themes and offers a number of suggestions about how social work can reassert its core mission and commitment to social justice. It begins with the argument that neoliberalism has to be understood as a political and economic project, noting how neoliberals' anti-statism is most apparent in attitudes to the welfare state — or, more precisely, payments made to those who are out of work. It then considers the cumulative effect of the government's austerity policies, the ideological attack on the whole basis of the social contract and the post-war welfare settlement, and the increase in the so-called ‘marketisation’ of the state. It also explains how neoliberal policies followed by a period of austerity has exacerbated inequality and ends by analysing the poverty paradox of social work.

This chapter explains why starting with the concept of the green state is politically and intellectually important. It begins by noting that many theorists from different perspectives have been very critical of state-centrism or reliance on states to solve environmental problems. Ecologists, Marxists, Feminists, Critical Theorists and Neoliberals have all articulated powerful critiques of the state. In response, theorists of ecological modernisation have defended the role or potential of the state, and authors like Robyn Eckersley and John Dryzek have formulated the notion of the green state to describe states which protect or advance environmental or ecological issues. A crucial lacuna in their work is the developing world, however, particularly in Africa. This chapter explains why this occurs, and challenges this omission through examples of variants of green states in Egypt and South Africa. It calls for green state theories which challenge the neo-Weberian assumptions of ecological modernisation.

This chapter analyzes how Italian clientelist liberalism has shaped policy outcomes in fiscal policy, labor-market policy, and financial regulation since the early 1990s. Unlike France and Germany, where national liberal traditions were successfully synthesized with the postwar political-economic order, in Italy a weakly embedded liberalism became increasingly dominated and undermined by clientelistic imperatives. Like its German counterpart, Italian liberalism has traditionally viewed groups as the fundamental components of the social and economic order. Unlike those in Germany, however, these groups have acted and been seen as acting as impediments to adjustments rather than partners with the state. The result has been a zero-sum conception of political reform, a conflation of notions of the limits of state power with the vested interests of powerful groups, and a deep distrust of the state. In fiscal policy, labor-market policy, and financial regulation, these political dysfunctions have frustrated reforms and undermined effective adjustment.