Faculty

Profile

Clara E. Mattei is Associate Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research.

Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. She recently published her first book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (2022). The book was praised in the Financial Times as one of the ten best economics books of 2022, is now being translated in over 10 languages, and has won the 2023 Herbert Adams Baxter Prize of the American Historical Association. 

Her current book project critically reassesses the Golden Age of Capitalism (1945-1975) and its Keynesianism through the lens of austerity capitalism. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation and Il Fatto Quotidiano, an Italian national newspaper she contributes to regularly.

Degrees Held

PhD (jointly), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSUP) and Université de Strasbourg, Ecole Doctorale Augustine Cournot in Strasbourg
MA in Philosophy, Pavia
BA in Philosophy, Cambridge

Recent Publications

"L'Economia è politica" (Foriscena Editore, 2023)  

The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, November 2022)

• Portuguese translation: A ordem do capital: como economistas inventaram a austeridade e abriram caminho para o fascismo (Boitempo, 2023)
• Italian translation: Operazione Austerità: come gli economisti hanno aperto la strada al fascismo (Einaudi Editore, 2022)
• Swedish translation: Kapitalets Ordning: Hur ekonomer skapade åtstramningsdoktrinen och banade väg för fascismen (Verbal Förlag, 2023)  

“Early Women Economists at Columbia University Contributions in the Struggle for Labor Protection in the Lochner Era”, chapter in Routledge Handbook of the Women's History of  Economic Thought, Kirsten K Madden and Robert K Diamond Editors, Routledge, 2018.

"Hawtrey, Austerity and The 'Treasury View, 1918-25," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 40(4), 2018.

“Treasury view and post-WWI British austerity: Basil Blackett, Otto Niemeyer and Ralph Hawtrey,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 42, Issue 4, 14 July 2018, Pages 1123–1144

"Austerity and Repressive Politics: Italian Economists in the Early Years of the Fascist Government 1922-1925", European Journal of the History of Economic Thought  (EJHET), Vol. 24:5, 2017.

"The Guardians of Capitalism. International Consensus and Fascist Technocratic Implementation of Austerity", Journal of Law and Society (JLS), Vol. 4:1, 2017

Research Interests

Post-WWI monetary and fiscal policies, history of economic thought and methodology

Awards And Honors

Young Scholar Award of the History of Economics Society (June 2015) for the working paper presented at the annual conference: "The Guardians of Capitalism. International Consensus and Fascist Technocratic Implementation of Austerity"

Young Scholar Award off the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (May 2015) for the working paper presented at the annual conference: "Austerity and Repressive Politics: Italian Economists in the EarlyYears of the Fascist Government 1922-1925’