Séminaire GREDEG : Clara E. MATTEI (New School for Social Research- New York City)

Publié le 14 juin 2023 – Mis à jour le 22 mars 2024
Date(s)

le 19 juin 2023

Lieu(x)
14H00- 15h30 Salle Picasso
GREDEG - Bâtiment 2 - Campus Azur du CNRS - 250 rue Albert Einstein - SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS

Title:
The Capital Order: austerity and technocratic policymaking
 

This seminar is mainly based on Clara's recently published bestseller:
"The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism"

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.

Clara 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, Clara E. 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.

More about Clara Mattei
 
PART I: war and crisis
1 The Great War and the Economy
2 “A Wholly New School of Th ought”
3 The Struggle for Economic Democracy
4 The New Order

PART II: the meaning of austerity
5 International Technocrats and the Making of Austerity
6 Austerity, a British Story
7 Austerity, an Italian Story
8 Italian Austerity and Fascism through British Eyes
9 Austerity and Its “Successes”
10 Austerity Forever
(authorized by the author)

 
AJOUTER
Date(s)
Le 19 juin 2023 14:00 - 15:30