In her essay “What Is Authority?” the twentiethcentury political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote: “Th e search for the best form of government reveals itself to be the search for the best government for philosophers”— the people doing the search— “which turns out to be the governments in which philosophers have become the rulers of the city” (Arendt 1961, 114). For austere economic experts imposing their wills on transitional economies since the 1920s, the process is very much the same: at the very moment their supposedly pure knowledge of transcendent economic ideas is applied to governing the real world, it quickly becomes clear that economic ideas are not really transcendent aft er all. While these economists may refute the suggestion of an agenda in these moments, their keenly political interventions reveal them, no matter how they may want the story to be told, as inescapably party to a struggle to preserve capital order— seemingly the only form of social order they can conceive of.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1597