As political sociologists probe the role political parties and labor movements play in mediating and co-constituting the state and polities, Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented will stand out as a guiding methodological text. The basic argument is that political party experts, particularly in center-left parties, “refract” and interpret political developments. The refraction approach “involves the study of historical change from the inside out, centered on the formation, infrastructural conditions, and orientations of party experts” (27). Experts develop political language that shapes how constituents relate to the state. Shifts in party rhetoric during Polanyian moments, achieved through intraparty struggle, is a driving force behind the formation of new institutional arrangements of political economy.