I am very grateful to Joscha Wullweber for his thoughtful and generous engagement with Unexpected Revolutionaries. His review captures both the book’s central arguments and its limitations with remarkable accuracy. I particularly appreciate his invitation to further reflect on the political and social foundations of central banking—an invitation I fully embrace.

Wullweber raises two related and crucial questions. The first concerns the extent to which my focus on central banks’ reputation risks overlooking the broader economic and political context that shapes their behavior. I share this concern. The book does not deny the importance of the macroeconomic environment. Indeed, it argues that the shift from inflationary to deflationary conditions after 2008 fundamentally changed the politics surrounding central banking. The change in this economic context mattered because it altered political dynamics: as disinflation and stagnation replaced inflation as the main threat, the social and governmental coalitions that had sustained the old orthodoxy eroded, exerting new pressures on central banks to adapt. My claim is not that reputation is the only causal mechanism at work, but that it is a crucial one for understanding how central banks mediated and negotiated those contextual and political pressures in turn. Reputation links context to politics: it is the channel through which central banks interpret changing circumstances and decide how far to deviate from orthodoxy while preserving their legitimacy.

The second question concerns which societal and political forces matter most in shaping central bank behavior. Here, I fully agree that this question deserves systematic inquiry. The book’s argument implies that these forces are context-dependent and historically contingent. The recent attacks on the Federal Reserve by US President Donald Trump or the politicization of the ECB during the Euro area crisis illustrate how reputational pressures can originate from both elected officials and public opinion. Future research should examine more precisely the configuration of societal coalitions that sustain or challenge central banks, and the conditions under which politicization moves in democratic or authoritarian directions. Wullweber is right that politicization is not an end in itself: it can foster greater responsiveness, but it can also threaten the autonomy necessary for sound policymaking, or even lead central banks to “fake” legitimacy by performing responsiveness without genuinely broadening their societal accountability. Understanding how these dynamics unfold—and under what conditions politicization enhances rather than undermines democratic accountability—should be a central task for future research building on the agenda advanced here.

In short, I view Unexpected Revolutionaries as a contribution to a broader conversation about the politics of central banking, rather than as its conclusion. From the Volcker era of the early 1980s to the post-pandemic period of the early 2020s, the book traces how central banks have navigated changing economic conditions and political expectations, showing that reputational management has been a persistent mechanism linking technocratic authority to democratic legitimacy. By foregrounding reputation, the book seeks to recover the political foundations of technocratic authority and to encourage further work on how societal expectations shape the boundaries of monetary policy and condition the evolution of central banks as critical institutions at the core of contemporary capitalist systems. I am grateful to Joscha Wullweber for pushing this discussion forward in such a constructive and insightful way.