The centaur state as a functional corollary of neo-liberalism.

This review essay highlights three tensions in Wacquant's trilogy on welfare reform, the rise of the penal state and the reconfiguration of ethno-racial boundaries: between functionalist and historical types of arguments, between universal and country-specific modes of analysis, and between necessity and contingency. I advocate for a historical, comparative mode of analysis that focuses on divergences as much as convergence in the ways that inequality has been restructured over the past decades around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]