The Roots of Austerity and 20th Century Fascism (feat. Clara Mattei): How Austerity Paves the Way for Fascism & is used to destroy left movements
- Wolfgang Lieberknecht
- 18. Mai
- 3 Min. Lesezeit
My guest Clara Mattei has written about austerity’s dark intellectual origins in her important new book The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way for Fascism. We discuss the main ideas of this book and how the historical roots of austerity emerge as a response by the ruling class to the social democratic gains of the working class following the First World War in Europe. At the core of Dr. Mattei's book is a powerful lesson for the left, namely that conditions of economic austerity have the tendency to sap the political resolve of the working class. Austerity depoliticizes the working class and this is why liberal economists implement it. We discuss the history of how economists and technocratic policymakers invented austerity and how we can challenge it. Clara E. Mattei is a Professor of Economics and Director of the CHE, Center for Heterodox Economics, of The University of Tulsa Oklahoma, recently inaugurated in February 2025 (https://sites.utulsa.edu/chetu).
Clara E. Mattei is a Professor of Economics and Director of the CHE, Center for Heterodox Economics, of The University of Tulsa Oklahoma, recently inaugurated in February 2025. She was previously Associate Professor at The New School for Social Research Economics Department and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.
Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. She recently published her first book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press 2022). The book was praised in the Financial Times as one of the ten best economics books of 2022, is now being translated in over 10 languages, and has won the 2023 Herbert Adams Baxter Prize of the American Historical Association.
In November 2023, Mattei published her first book written directly in Italian, L’economia è politica: Tutto quello che non vediamo dell’economia e che nessuno racconta (Fuori Scena publisher 2023). The book will be released soon in English under the title Escape from Capitalism, with Simon & Schuster and Allen Lane (Penguin).
Her current book project critically reassesses the Golden Age of Capitalism (1945-1975) and its Keynesianism through the lens of austerity capitalism. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and Il Fatto Quotidiano - an Italian national newspaper that she contributes to regularly. She also writes a monthly column for the Swedish national paper, Dagens Etc.
The Capital Order by Clara Mattei
“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.
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