1. Introduction: the political economy of public finance since the 1970s: questioning the Leviathan Marc Buggeln, Martin Daunton and Alexander Nützenadel; 2. Creating a dynamic society: the tax reforms of the Thatcher government Martin Daunton; 3. Fiscal policy in Japan and the United States since 1973: economic crises, taxation and weak tax consent Elliot Brownlee and Eisaku Ide; 4. Swiss worlds of taxation: the political economy of fiscal federalism and tax competition Gisela Hürlimann; 5. Taxation in the 1980s: a five-country comparison of neo-liberalism and path dependency Marc Buggeln; 6. The Swiss tax haven, the Bretton Woods system crisis and the globalisation of offshore finance Christophe Farquet; 7. Postwar fiscal traps Peter H. Lindert; 8. Fiscal redistribution in comparative perspective: recent evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data centre David Jesuit and Vincent Mahler; 9. The state, public finance and the changing response to investing in the future: the case of the United Kingdom since the 1970s Martin Chick; 10. From 'brink of the abyss' to 'miracle': public spending in Denmark and the Netherlands since 1980 Reimut Zohlnhöfer; 11. The politics of public debt techniques: (re)inventing the market for French sovereign bonds and shaping the public debt problem, 1966‒2012 Benjamin Lemoine; 12. Structural fiscal imbalances, financial repression and sovereign debt sustainability in Southern Europe, 1970s‒90s Stefano Battilossi; Index.