In sum, Hawtreyan economics spread far and wide, becoming embedded in the worldview of the most commanding minds of the leading technocratic institutions that implemented austerity aft er World War I. In a moment when budget cuts and dear money policies had lost their veneer as “natural” policies and faced harsh public backlash, they required economic theory to justify them. Th eir grounding in economic theory came through the personalities at the levers of power. Th is was the true novelty of austerity— a project that was at once theoryand policymaking, at once an ideological, material, and personal process.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 874