Starting from Mark Bevir’s volume Democratic Governance (Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010), this article aims to assess Bevir’s theory of governance, highlighting his remarkable effort in providing a genealogy of the governance processes. The author critically discusses Bevir’s interpretative approach, his profound examination of theories, doctrines and narratives that had been essential for the establishment of governance (the neoliberal, the institutionalist, the «Third Way», etc.), and his idea that we can radically distinguish neoliberal governance from new governance practices, constructed around «joining-up» and «networks».