State and Welfare State: present situation and prospects

The purpose of this paper is to speculate about possible factors that could lead to a possible return of the State in general and the Welfare State in particular, after the neoliberal phase that could have been closed in the contemporary crisis. The point is to see if the trend towards "minimum State" has reverted, something that could already be started at the end of the 20th century, and also if the global crisis occurred at the beginning of the 21st century will accelerate this trend. Anyway, a return of the State is more than possible but with a practice of the Welfare State quite different from the vision of those that, in the late 19th century and early 20th, began to implant it in some central countries.