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adopts a regulation- and state-theoretical variegated capitalism approach to the genealogy and subsequent development of neoliberalism. It distinguishes four kinds of neoliberal project: post-socialist system transformation, principled neoliberal regime shifts, pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustment, and neoliberal structural adjustment regimes. The heartlands of neoliberalism are characterized by principled neoliberal regime shifts, typified by the USA and UK but with variations in Canada, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland. I consider the periodization of neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK and comment on similarities and differences with other cases. I then consider the extent to which pragmatic neoliberal policy adjustments can cumulate, over time, through ratchet-like effects, to produce de facto rather than principled neoliberal regime shifts. Here I also consider two cases – the Federal Republic of Germany, in which neoliberal policy adjustments serve a neo-mercantilist economic strategy but have consolidated into a more neoliberal regime shift, and Sweden, where a glass half-full, glass half-empty ambivalence exists as a result of the steady cumulation of neoliberal policy adjustments but much of the Swedish social democratic model has been retained. Finally, I consider the implications of neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands in terms of (1) core-periphery relations within the heartlands themselves, associated with intensified uneven development and (2) the repercussions of neoliberal regime shifts in the heartlands for the overall dynamic of a world market organized in the shadow of neoliberalism.

This article interrogates the concepts in this journal's title and, drawing on the strategic-relational approach in social theory, explores their interconnections. This conceptual re-articulation is then contextualized in regard to the European Union (EU) as a political regime that serves as a real-time laboratory for experiments in government and governance with implications for redesigning polities, politics, and policies, especially in response to symptoms of political and policy failures and other crises. Mobilizing the territory-place-scale-network schema, and drawing on critical governance studies, this article offers an alternative account of these developments based on (1) their sociospatial and temporal complexities, (2) recognition that socio-spatial relations are objects and means of government and governance and not just sites where such practices occur, and (3) extension of this approach to multispatial meta-governance, that is, attempts to govern the government and governance of socio-spatial relations. The article ends with suggestions for future research on the state and state power, governance of the EU, and the role of Territory, Politics, Governance as a major forum for future discussion on multispatial metagovernance.

We examine Marx's critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and 'cultural political economy'. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a 'poetry' of the future. We then consider the misleading 'base-superstructure' metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx's work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy.

This article responds to Staricco's critique of cultural political economy (CPE) for being inherently constructivist because of its emphasis on the ontologically foundational role of semiosis (sense- and meaning-making) in social life. Staricco recommends the Amsterdam School of transnational historical materialism as a more immediately productive and insightful approach to developing a regulationist critique of political economy. Both lines of criticism of CPE are addressed. First, Staricco misinterprets the implications of treating semiosis and structuration as ontologically equal bases of social life. Second, Staricco mistakes our criticisms of the 'Italian School' in international political economy for criticisms of the Amsterdam School – an approach we have always warmly endorsed. He therefore misses our more nuanced claim that, while the Amsterdam School emphasizes the importance of semiosis, it has fewer concepts to explain how semiosis matters and why only some imagined class identities and concepts of control are selected, retained, and institutionalized. CPE addresses this lacuna by integrating critical semiotic analysis into political economy. Third, we provide the first detailed comparison of the Amsterdam School and CPE to provide a better understanding of the merits of each approach and to indicate where they might complement each other without claiming one to be superior to the other.