Technocracy as the rule of experts had as its basis an assumption of epistemic superiority. In this sense, the experts were the guardians of untarnished objective knowledge on how to properly stabilize credit and run the market economy. As we have explored in depth in the preceding pages, such knowledge prescribed the austerity motto— produce more and consume less. Hence, it emerges that austerity was not only an antidemocratic project, but, at its core, a repressive one: it forced people to sacrifi ce without criticism.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1024