Clara E Mattei's The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism lays out how capitalism achieves its foundational goal - 'the necessity to rehabilitate capital accumulation in settings where capitalism has lost its innocence'.

This is a book for our times.

All around us, whether in South Africa, our continent or our world, we can feel more than ever the crushing and oppressive weight of the multiple political, economic and social consequences wrought by decades of neoliberal capitalism.

Most of humanity is not only simply trying to survive - both materially and mentally/emotionally - but is also searching for explanations as to how and why we got here. Clara E Mattei's 450-page tome offers some serious and timely assistance.

Not only is The Capital Order the product of more than six years of painstaking archival research, it is one of those increasingly rare books which combines impressive scholarship (there are almost 100 pages of meticulous endnotes and a 30-page bibliography) with a seriously radical, anti-capitalist analysis that seamlessly weaves the past into the present. Besides that, it is written in a generally accessible style, which engages the reader by telling a long and complicated "story"...