So, here it is. The volume which will be written up as the liberal riposte to The Orange Book.

It’s going to tell us how we can regain the fervour and the achievement of our New Liberal forefathers – how, in the new millennium, we can protect the inheritance of the welfare state which our party and our thinkers created, and how we can best continue to strive for the fairer society all liberals want. Trouble is, Reinventing the State can’t live up to that billing.

It’s a heavy-weight contender, nearing 400 pages, and with 22 chapters from 21 contributors. It has some excellent chapters: pick it up, turn to the back and read the impressive, clear-headed conclusions by Steve Webb and Jo Holland. If you like your prose persuasively measured, be warmed by Chris Huhne’s liberal narrative, ‘The Case for Localism’. Or, if you prefer a text which is angry and splendidly strident, be converted by Paul Holmes on ‘The Limits of the Market.’ But, as a whole, Reinventing the State is both too sprawling and, paradoxically, too limited to hit the mark.

This is a problem of all books which are somewhere between political thought and political policy: they have to be a snapshot, a work of the moment with in-built obsolescence. They necessarily lack a longer perspective. This does not mean that they do not mention history – the liberal tradition, as defined in its fully-developed form of New Liberalism, effuses this book and, in particular, David Howarth’s knowledgeable chapter.

But what they find harder to do it is to appreciate their own place in that historical context. This matters because, in the case of Reinventing the State, it means what is being said is being undersold.

Taken together, the chapters here are saying something much more than that the market is imperfect. As Liberals, we are wise to the fact that the invisible hand is often doing something furtive under the table. Yet, we also recognise that in some circumstances the market mechanism is the least bad option – as the authors in this volume acknowledge.

But the key contribution of Reinventing the State is the claim that the circumstances demand that we roll back the frontiers of the market, where cowboys and the lawless thrive. Our society is in crisis. That crisis is talked about in some chapters as a moral or psychological malaise.

Whether you buy that or not, Duncan Brack makes a strong case for a crisis of inequality, the legacy of the Thatcher / Blair years. In that situation, this is the moment to intervene, the reason we need the state to act. But that begs the question, what ‘state’, what level of government?

As you would expect in a volume by Liberals, there is a theme running through several chapters of devolving real power to local authorities and the communities they serve. Some of the writers seem to want less to reinvent the state than to reconfigure it or even dismantle parts of it.

What, surprisingly, there is much less of here is talk of the competencies of the European Union, or of the devolved Parliaments in Britain. As Liberals, we know that the problems our society faces can not all be addressed by Westminster. What it would be good to hear more about is how our MPs can divest themselves of the powers they have, both upwards to a reformed Brussels, and downwards to Edinburgh, Cardiff and town halls across the country.

Perhaps that is asking for a big book to have been even bigger. But it is surely where the opportunities for Liberals lie in the early twenty-first century.

* David Rundle is a Lib Dem councillor in Oxford. He blogs at de moribus liberalibus.

UPDATE: One of the chapters from Reinventing the State was written by The Voice’s Mark Pack and is available to read online here.