‘The Limits of Austerity’

One of the challenges of historical work is the way in which concepts that have a powerful but limited traction in understanding episodes in the past are then used promiscuously and therefore unhelpfully. A recent example is ‘neoliberalism’, a term productively used to understand and analyse an important post-1940 intellectual movement, but commonly deployed to characterize all kinds of political and economic developments across the West since the 1970s. This is not, of course, an argument for not using the concept, but rather for its careful deployment. A similar problem can occur with ‘austerity’, which Clara Mattei applies to the years after the First World War when, following the initial post-war boom, restrictive economic policies were developed from 1920–21. Mattei offers a comparative account of Britain and Italy organized around ‘austerity,’ framed as a recurrent ruling-class strategy to suppress workingclass revolt. Her account is flawed by an exaggeration of the scale of the post-war labour insurgency in both Britain and Italy, and by the failure to assess the constraints imposed on their governments by the interconnectedness of the world capitalist order. She also greatly overestimates the role of economists in shaping the policy of austerity.