When we speak of concepts like “totalitarianism” and “corporatism,” it is often assumed that fascism stands very far from the liberal market society that went before it, and which we are still experiencing today. But if we pay closer attention to Italian fascism’s economic policies, especially during the 1920s, we can see how some combinations typical of both the last century and our own were experienced already in the first years of Benito Mussolini’s rule. A case in point is the association between austerity and technocracy. By “technocracy,” I refer to the phenomenon whereby certain policies that are common today (such as cuts in social spending, regressive taxation, monetary deflation, privatizations, and wage repressions) are decided by economic experts who advise governments or even directly take over the reins themselves, as in several recent cases in Italy.

As I explain in The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, Mussolini was one of the greatest champions of austerity in its modern form. This was in large part because he surrounded himself with the authoritative economists of the time, as well as champions of the emerging paradigm of “pure economics” — still today the basis of mainstream neoclassical economics.

Just over a month after the Italian fascists’ March on Rome in October 1922, the parliamentary votes of the National Fascist Party, the Liberal Party, and the People’s Party (or the popolari, a Catholic party and predecessor of Christian Democracy) introduced the so-called “period of full powers.” In so doing, they granted unprecedented authority to Mussolini’s minister of finance, economist Alberto de Stefani, and his colleagues and technical advisers, in particular Maffeo Pantaleoni and Umberto Ricci (unlike the former two, a man of liberal ideology).