Last year, the writer and political analyst Ian Bremmer was invited to a meeting at the Chinese consulate in New York to discuss the global financial crisis. He Yafei, China’s then vice-foreign-minister, asked the assembled group partly in jest: “Now that the free market has failed, what do you think is the proper role for the state in the economy?”

State capitalism is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is very much in the ascendant at the moment. Not only has the financial crisis sapped confidence in the sorts of free-market policies that Washington has promoted since the end of the cold war, but the continued rise of China with its particular blend of “market-Leninism” has given new respectability to the idea of the state taking a large, even dominant, role in the economy.

If Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History seemed to define to intellectual zeitgeist of the early 1990s, then it is books such as Mr Bremmer’s recent The Rise of State Capitalism that are dominating discussion at the moment.