This article examines the relation between criminology and the state in the postwar period. The article begins by looking at the role of the criminologist in the emerging welfare state. Here the state was regarded as benevolent, while the task of the criminologist was to help guide penal policy along benevolent lines. We then chart the development of a more critical approach to the state, now conceived as an authoritarian formation by critical theorists who no longer considered themselves insiders. We then trace a range of forces that worked to marginalise the state now increasingly viewed as irrelevant. These include the triumph of neoliberalism, the reception of Foucault’s work and globalisation theory on mainstream criminological thinking. We conclude by drawing attention to the reality of a post-welfare, neoliberal order, in which the state never went away, and profile recent attempts to theorise its nature. In the context of societies where state power is omnipresent in our lives, we suggest the time has now arrived when we need to reconnect the body of the King with his decapitated head.