“A must-read, with key lessons for the future.”—Thomas
Piketty
A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual
origins.
For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have
resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages,
fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While
these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve
had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries
all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy
among troubled states, an important question remains: What if
solvency was never really the goal?
In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei
explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its
originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed
capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.
Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and
Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years
after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that
elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic
hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,”
relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties,
including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated
power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is
where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of
entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to
capitalism.
Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy,
much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order
offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of
austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary
political power.