A Financial Times Best Book of the Year "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.
