Now that we have examined austerity in theory, our purpose of this final chapter is to examine austerity in practice. But if austerity's intellectual history has been relatively short—you can't really argue all that much about state spending until states actually start spending in large amounts—its natural history has been even shorter. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, economies went through boom and bust cycles and states, particularly those on the gold standard, did not try to compensate. Because those processes unfolded when classical liberal states were in charge, there was nothing to cut, and no democratic imperative to which policy makers had to respond. Laissez faire was the policy of the Belle Époque because La Belle, by and large, was not all that democratic. It's not until the early twentieth century, as detailed in chapters 4 and 5, that we encounter states that are both big enough to cut, and democratic enough to cause problems for austerity policy.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 481