Neo-liberalism is an oft-invoked but ill-defined concept in the social sciences. This article conceptualizes neo-liberalism as a sui generis ideological system born of struggle and collaboration in three worlds: intellectual, bureaucratic and political. Emphasizing neo-liberalism's third 'face', it argues that a failure to grasp neo-liberalism as a political form imposes two limitations on understanding its effects: (i) fostering an implicit assumption that European political elites are 'naturally' opposed to the implementation of neo-liberal policies; and (ii) tending to preempt inquiry into an unsettling fact-namely, that the most effective advocates of policies understood as neo-liberal in Western Europe (and beyond) have often been elites who are sympathetic to, or are representatives of, the left and centre-left. Given that social democratic politics were uniquely powerful in Western Europe for much of the postwar period, neo-liberalism within the mainstream parties of the European left deserves particular attention.

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The European Central Bank (ECB), like all European institutions, poses basic problems of definition and comparability. Mobilizing Bourdieusian field theory (BFT) to resolve them, we map out the ECB's deep investments in scientific prestige and scholarly productivity -that is, its hyper-scientization -and the ambiguities therein, and then set out to explain them. Mobilizing diverse sources that include official documents, on-site interviews, and comparative data, we argue that hyper-scientization is a field effect expressing the ECB's origins and cross-location in three worlds: financial institutions, professional economics, and European politics. We then trace out the signs and symptoms of cross-location. First, we trace the origins of the ECB's directorate for research, DGR, which differentiated the ECB from most other European central banks at the time of its founding. Thus invested, the ECB accelerated its scholarly activities in step with the internationalization and scientization of economics. But this also expressed the ECB's stake in European authority struggles: research exchanges are a means of building relationships with national central banks, which was especially crucial in the lead-up to the European Union's (EU) 2004 enlargement. We thus argue that there is more to the ECB than its independence and policy operations, and that some of its most striking features are best explained as effects of its multiple field locations.

The classical sociology of parties was born alongside parties themselves. It explored their dynamic interrelationships with states and society, as well as the tensions inherent in the fact that parties are simultaneously representatives and power seekers. Despite these rich foundations, from the 1960s the sociological approach came to be narrowly identified with a one-dimensional conception of parties, and political sociologists focused their attention elsewhere. This review contributes to efforts that began in the 1990s to reclaim the political party as a full-fledged sociological object. To this end, we track the hourglass-shaped trajectory of the sociology of parties: from broad Marxian and Weberian roots, to narrowing and near-eclipse after the 1960s, to a reemergence that reclaims the breadth of the classical traditions. We conclude by suggesting six lines of inquiry that we believe would be fruitful, emphasizing both classical concerns that deserve more attention and innovative approaches that point in novel directions.

A novel brand of laissez-faire that lay outside the political mainstream in the early postwar years was broadly hailed at the dawn of the twenty-first century as the common sense of a global age. Yet how to understand neoliberalism as a specifically political thing, especially in the unlikely terrains of Western European and leftist politics, is unclear. This article mobilizes field theory to conceptualize and investigate neoliberal politics in Western democracies, treating the left-right axis as a variable but fundamental organizing dichotomy over which mainstream political parties exert a unique definitional influence. To trace how this dichotomy has shifted over time, I develop a novel index of political neoliberalism using data on the electoral programs of mainstream parties across 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1945 and 2004. I find that between the 1970s and 2004 a revised political center emerged, featuring a new concept of state responsibility and the means by which it should govern: a historical shift that took root across the left-right spectrum among mainstream parties and that was as much in evidence in Continental, Nordic, and southern countries as in Anglo-liberal countries. The overall trend can be fairly characterized as the rise of a specifically neoliberal politics. I suggest that a full explanation requires both a political sociology and a sociology of knowledge, attending to the organizational and cultural bases of Western party systems.