Chapter 2 provides the reader with a state of the art on the political science literature on paradigm shifts and its failure to materialize post-crisis. It seeks to nuance this binary view by using the social constructivist approach to the political power of economic ideas, emphasizing the preconditions the new idea set needed to fulfill to become operational. It combines these arguments with the sociology of economics and science and technology studies, which focus on the modalities of regulatory science and its interaction with academia. It insists that for economic ideas to become politically powerful, they need to be able to construct “risk objects” about which sufficient secured knowledge exists to justify public intervention.