Tax Guidebooks and Their Narratives in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

Tax guides give tips on how to reduce tax payments, that is, call on economic entities to pursue optimization. However, their legitimization narratives differ among countries and have changed over time. This is shown by a comparison of Spanish, US and West German tax guides between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s. This article argues that the trend towards governmental self-optimization and self-discipline found in advice literature from the mid-1970s was also reflected in the tax advice books of some, but not all, countries. This took the form of extreme criticism of the tax system as a whole, which, it was suggested, could only be improved through individual resistance in the form of tax avoidance. This undermined the narrative of taxpaying as a community task and civic duty. In contrast, in societies where the ‘retro-liberal’ narrative of the unjust tax state was untenable, the genre of tax guides was unable to establish itself.