Abstract
Faced to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the socialist bloc in the late 1980s on the one hand, and the advanced spread of the neoliberal discourse, on the other, European social democrat parties started a process of discussion which aimed to analyse realistically the global changes that the society, the economy and the very subjects had experienced in the last decades, and thus, aimed to recover the lost support of the electorate (Giddens, 1998). They tried to find a renovated discourse that, standing on the social democratic value's platform, would be able to offer a new framework of thinking and policymaking which would be ‘beyond the Old Left and the New Right', that is, different from traditional social democracy and neoliberalism (Giddens, 1999).
The focus of this book review is to discuss to what extent those accusations were right: According to Anthony Giddens, was the Third Way just neoliberalism in disguise? In order to answer this question, we will first try to define what he understand as neoliberalism, and then, to describe what the Third Way proposal was about.
