Comparing rhetorics of crisis. Italy and the United Kingdom at the turn of the 1970s

Alberti, Manfredi and Telesca, Giuseppe (2025): Comparing rhetorics of crisis. Italy and the United Kingdom at the turn of the 1970s.

Abstract

This paper aims at challenging a consolidated reading of the 1970s as an age of crisis par excellence, from the perspective of Britain and Italy. It focuses on both real economic facts and their interpretation by economists, “second hand dealers in economic ideas” and policy makers. We reflect on the actors who “proclaimed” the crisis in the 1970s and the recipes they suggested to overcome it. We argue that the rise of neoliberalism and the paradigm change in economic policies were also the product of a narrative construction, influenced by political and ideological reasons, which contrasted an extremely negative picture of the 1970s to a very positive, nearly caricatural, representation of the 1980s.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: 1970s crisis; narrative economics; Keynesianism; neoliberalism; monetarism.
• Subjects: B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B0 - General; N - Economic History > N1 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics ; Industrial Structure ; Growth ; Fluctuations

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