The financial and economic crisis as well as the interventionist efforts of respective governments to stabilize their economies, have generated a lot of controversy about the virtues of the free-market system and the wisdom of state intervention. As reality has shown, without an appropriate economic policy and regulatory framework, a nation’s financial system becomes vulnerable to crisis and jeopardizes the stability of the entire economy.  In this paper we analyze the main trends of economic thought which preceded the global crisis, focusing on those that have been directed towards increasing state intervention in democratic nations: Keynesianism, corporatism, ordoliberalism and neocorporatism. Extreme interventionism will not be a topic of the paper. In the present work, we reach the conclusion that global crises have drawn attention to the great economists of the time and many of them were the spearhead for new directions of state intervention in the economy. The solutions proposed by these economists are nowadays used to rescue economies from the economic crisis.