It has been a strange few years for European capitalism. The 2008 crisis threw the entire system into disarray, but it was met with draconian austerity packages that seemed to permanently cement a fully liberalized and financialized regional economy.

And yet there have been new challenges from the Left and debates about alternatives to neoliberalism. The ideas of Wolfgang Streeck, a German economic sociologist, occupy the center of these debates; his public interventions on the politics of austerity, the nature of the 2008 global crisis, and the future of the European Union have proven critical.

In this interview — conducted by Jonah Birch of New York University and George Souvlis of the European University Institute in Florence — Streeck explains his evolving perspective on social democracy, the much-contested “European project,” and why the Left needs to “sober up.”