I am grateful to Stephen C. Nelson for his kind remarks and a healthy debate, and I have nothing to add to his succinct presentation of the empirical contributions of the book. My current thinking on the global spread of forms of technocratic knowledge was stimulated by his elegant synthesis of the analytical apparatus that Ruling Ideas advocates. As an interdisciplinary political economist, I was particularly pleased to read a review that places one’s book in the august context of James C. Scott’s work on social translation. Most of all, however, I welcome Nelson’s call on scholars to use this book’s analytical framework to think of other, less linear configurations of neoliberalism than the embedded—disembedded spectrum captured by the book’s neo-Polanyian scope.

Nelson is an experienced comparativist with superb knowledge of Latin America, and I was delighted to read that in his view the book’s account of varieties of neoliberalism may travel to contexts wider than semiperipheral and postauthoritarian European contexts. The conservatism of my statement about scope was perhaps excessive. At least, by covering the post-2008 crisis in Spain and Romania the analysis certainly was no longer solely about postauthoritarian states but also about ordinary European democracies. I was only half convinced, however, by Nelson’s suggestion that not using the “most similar” or “most different” case section logics is a problem for the book. The introduction makes it clear that these cases were selected by using a different strategy (critical or least/most likely cases), and I found it beyond the book’s immediate concerns to restate the terms of the debate between the most similar/different camp and the least/less likely one. Nelson is right that the analysis could benefit from adding more cases, but given the granular and context-sensitive research entailed by the sociological analysis of the economics profession and the state, such an expansion would have been unwise in a book-length argument.

Regarding the empirics, I was stimulated by Nelson’s observation that disembedded neoliberalism may have been triggered by the imperative to retain the country’s remaining pool of skilled workers. This imperative was certainly key in the intriguing class politics of the Romanian state but was marginal in the political economy of adopting radical neoliberal reforms, such as flat taxes benefiting the very top of the income distribution, privatized pension systems offering diminished pension returns, or labor regulations that international organizations judged to be abusive. Indeed, students of skilled Romanian migration would be hard-pressed to find progressive taxation, public pensions, or progressive labor regulations as drivers of the migratory phenomenon, yet they would find more support for the more embedded forms of neoliberalism from the countries where they emigrated.

Nelson wonders if the radicalization of Romanian neoliberalism was not driven by Romania’s poverty and its government’s race to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). I agree with Nelson that radicalizing neoliberal ideas and policy regimes is a form of signaling to foreign investors. But I am wary about the logic behind it. Development studies scholarship is clear that disembedded neoliberalism is just one of the many signals that developing countries can use and that, indeed, some of the most successful developing countries attracted FDI with neodevelopmental states whose ideational foundations were at odds with neoliberalism. Moreover, the book’s comparative historical method brings to the fore the fact that after 1990, the need to signal to foreign investors was a constant. What changed was the dominant policy regime, which went from neodevelopmentalism in the early 1990s to disembedded neoliberalism from the late 1990s onwards. To top it off, given the structural and macroeconomic ills of the Romanian economy during the early 1990s, FDI was, in fact, most needed when neoliberalism was utterly rejected by the ruling elites of the time. Indeed, therein lies the value added of taking varieties of neoliberal ideas seriously across time, not just across space, and having a clear sense of how different forms of professional, economic, and institutional capital shape the politics that explain that variation in the first place.