A focus on austerity also off ers a new lens to historically evaluate Italian Fascism and its economic agenda. Indeed, while traditional historiography stresses the discontinuity between the fi rst laissezfaire period (1922– 1925) and the corporativist period that followed (with the latter usually understood as the real expression of Fascism), I suggest that a continuity can be drawn between the two: austerity. Whatever its historiographic period, austerity was always much more than laissezfaire; it embodied the active intervention of the state against capitalist crisis.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1045