Traditional historiography envisages a discontinuity between Fascism's initial laissezfaire period (1922- 1925) and the corporativist epoch that followed in Italy (usually understood as the "real" expression of Fascism). By viewing this same period through a lens of austerity, in terms of both economic policies and economic ideology, one can observe greater coherence across these two diff erent phases. Austerity, in fact, is the thing that ties the two together. It embodied the active intervention of the state to reinforce capital accumulation through privatizations, bailouts of fi nancialindustrial complexes, monetary defl ation, and especially coercive control of labor. Speaking broadly, the nationalist slant of Fascist austerity emerges through the sacrifi ce of the majority for the saving/investing minority, who purported to represent the interests of the whole nation. Our story supports the notion that the interwar economy's truly Fascist element was its coercive control of the labor force (see Toniolo 1980, xii- xiii; and Ciocca 2004, 198- 99).

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1620