L’innovazione sociale: an old neoliberist wine in new bottles?

The contemporary systems of welfare state were attacked between the 1970s and 1980s by neoliberal thinkers who complained about the increase in public debt and social expenditure, the unsustainability of retirement systems and the passivizing effect of the classic forms of social protection. Another type of criticism was added to these criticisms during the 1990s. This was based on the perspective of the Third Way, which searched for an alternative to Keynesian statism and the neoliberal marketization of welfare services. The crisis initiated in the middle of 2000s re-launched this criticism and bolstered new policy discourse and practices − such as a social investment perspective, social impact investment and “second welfare” − all of which find in the concept of Social Innovation an important common denominator. The article, moving from a reconstruction of the main attacks on welfare state systems, argues that social innovation does not represent a real alternative to the neoliberal paradigm but, instead, a flanking discourse aimed at stabilising and reproducing it.