Einaudi’s intellectual legacy, and why he really matters to us today, lies not just in his ideas on Europe, even if they gave the drive toward European union an ordoliberal push from the Italian side of the border. Rather, Einaudi and his ideas matter because of the school of economics that he founded at the Bocconi University of Milan, which produced two generations of economists reared in these ordoliberal views. The modern argument for austerity was developed primarily by these second-generation Bocconi graduates, who went on to become some of the most influential members of the global economics profession, especially Alberto Alesina, Franceso Silvia Ardagna, Guido Tabellini, and Roberto Perotti. The importance of Alesina and his collaborators’ work in defining and defending the modern policy case for austerity cannot be overestimated. It is through their efforts that Einaudi’s legacy lives on in the form of an Italian ordoliberalism that, like Hume and Smith, has a deep distrust of the state and its management of debt as its core. It is this intergenerational legacy that has decisively shaped the final form of contemporary austerity arguments.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 450