Crisis, reputation, and the politics of expertise: fictional performativity at the Bank of Italy

Abstract

Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in the intersection between knowledge and political rationality in advanced liberal democracies has drawn attention to two general and contradictory processes: first, the rise of technocracy, and of the institutions, and experts, who use technical knowledge as a lever of power; second, the democratization of expertise – the emergence of lay audiences as stake-holders and competent participants in technical and scientific decisions and debates. In this paper, I analyze the annual reports on the Italian economy written by the Bank of Italy between 1960 and 1984, and trace the debate they spurred in three national newspaper outlets. I detail the emergence of public expertise on the economy, as well as the emergence of crisis and reputation management as techniques for the Bank to bolster its authority. I argue that the Bank of Italy, by framing the present as an exception, achieved a form of performativity that I call fictional.