Crisis, reputation, and the politics of expertise: fictional performativity at the Bank of Italy

Simone Polillo

Review of Social Economy, 2023, vol. 81, issue 3, 342-362

Abstract: Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in the intersection between knowledge and political rationality in advanced liberal democracies has drawn attention to two general and contradictory processes: first, the rise of technocracy, and of the institutions, and experts, who use technical knowledge as a lever of power; second, the democratization of expertise – the emergence of lay audiences as stake-holders and competent participants in technical and scientific decisions and debates. In this paper, I analyze the annual reports on the Italian economy written by the Bank of Italy between 1960 and 1984, and trace the debate they spurred in three national newspaper outlets. I detail the emergence of public expertise on the economy, as well as the emergence of crisis and reputation management as techniques for the Bank to bolster its authority. I argue that the Bank of Italy, by framing the present as an exception, achieved a form of performativity that I call fictional.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2020.1857822

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