For decades, the Schumpeterian tax state was considered the central paradigm of Fiscal Sociology. However, it increasingly fails to meet many of the conceptual challenges of contemporary public finance. To demonstrate this, the paper undertakes a double re-contextualization of the discourse on public finance. Its development is traced back to evolutionary thinking, which Joseph Schumpeter updated around 1918. However, and following the rise of democratic capitalism after 1945, thinking about the tax state became intertwined with economic control. Its socio-political specifics were marginalized. Since the Great Recession of 2008/2009 and widening fiscal crises in advanced capitalist economies, this discursive narrowing has again become the subject of political and economic controversies.