Unexpected Revolutionaries contributes to a burgeoning literature investigating central banks’ intellectual and institutional dynamics. The book fulfils its ambition of building a new framework to explain why and how, in the past two decades, central banks have “scrapped their policy playbook” (p. 8), which had been developed from the 1980s to 2000s. Manuela Moschella argues convincingly that investigating these “how-why” questions requires moving away from an ideational view of central banks as “epistemic communities” or technocratic bodies, and to put again at the center of the analysis the political nature of central banking. This perspective allows us to understand changes in monetary policies as attempts at (re)gaining political support across multiple audiences. This main thesis of the book deserves consideration by all historians of economics interested in the role and place of economics (and economists) in policymaking institutions, even beyond central banking. And yet, historians of economics would probably be slightly disappointed (as I was) by the fact that the book does not engage with any of the relevant work on the subject in the history of economics. This results in the main shortcoming of the book: its inaccuracy when presenting some key economic ideas and their history, and thus its inability to explain what has changed. Otherwise, this is an insightful and enjoyable read.

Unexpected Revolutionaries questions the transformation of central banking from the 2008 Great Financial Crisis to the most recent COVID-19 episode and the ensuing inflation—a transformation encompassing notably the rise of “unconventional” monetary policy and the inclusion of government-issued bonds into central banks’ asset-purchasing programs. Right from the Introduction to the book, the reader is puzzled by the characterization of such changes as departures from some not clearly identified “neoliberal macroeconomic regime” (p. ix) or “monetary” and “economic” “orthodoxy.” In the initial pages, these terms conflate the notion of central bank “independence” and the idea of inflation targeting (p. 1). Although the reader is eager for more clarity about this “orthodoxy,” they will have to wait until chapter 2. Moschella first presents her novel theoretical framework (chapter 1), which she will then apply to explain how and why central banks moved away from “orthodoxy” since 2008 (chapter 3). The framework is also applied to two case studies, the Federal Reserve (chapter 4) and the European Central Bank (ECB; chapter 5).

Chapter 1 convincingly argues in favor of the main takeaway of the book, i.e., reconceptualizing central banks as “political actors” seeking political support from multiple audiences. This view is contrasted with the “technocratic” view, prevalent in political economy (also labeled by Moschella the “standard view"). The “technocratic” view explains the changes that have occurred in central banking by either one of two narratives: the “only game in town” and the “learning” narrative. The first narrative argues that, since 2008, “central banks could make difficult decisions that fiscal policymakers were either unable or unwilling to make” (p. 18). By contrast, the “learning" narrative highlights how “central banks evolved overcoming ideational constraints,” that is, “develop[ing] new ideas and economic models to replace the old ones” (p. 18).

Opposing this view, the book puts forward that “economic policy-making is a quintessentially political process” (p. 19). This applies also to central banking, although of course with some peculiarities and differences, both with respect to other domains in policymaking (p. 3) and with respect to each particular central bank (pp. 56–57). The “political” nature of central banks explains monetary policy changes, based on the idea that “the audiences whose political support is necessary for particular policies and regimes may change over time” (p. 20).

“Audiences” are here plural. For central banks, they encompass elected officials, interest groups, market actors, the media, and citizens (p. 22)—while academic economists are surprisingly omitted from this list. Audiences have heterogeneous demands, which leads central banks “to prioritize some audiences over others” (p. 22), depending on “the consequences that the specific audience group can bring to bear on the organization should their demands and expectations be disappointed” (p. 30).

When engaging with their audiences, central banks seek to build “reputation” (that is, “distinctive traits of the institution, as shaped by its history, mission, capacity, and actual performance,” p. 21). On the one hand, central banks “build” or “signal” their reputation. This is done with the deliberate purpose of “shaping audiences’ expectations about the institution’s goal and performance” (p. 21), in order to “assuage criticism and retain necessary political support” (p. 29). On the other hand, audiences “accept,” “recognize” (or not) such reputation. When such acceptance is “threatened,” central banks react either by “pre-emption” (e.g., the “use of policy ‘caveats,’” such as “signaling their new policies as being aligned with their past reputation,” p. 32) or by looking for “political cover” (“subordinating their interventions to the policy interventions from other economic policymakers," p. 33). Chapter 4 offers excellent illustrations for this latter strategy. It documents, for instance, how the Fed actions during the Great Financial Crisis (or inaction, in the case of Lehman Brothers) were conditional to the political support provided by elected officials. A third strategy to cope with reputational threats consists of “active management,” i.e., “adopt[ing] actions that attempt to win back support by signaling the institution’s willingness to meet the demands and expectations articulated by the audiences” (pp. 33–34). Again, chapter 4 (for the case of the Fed) and chapter 5 (for the ECB) illustrate this point very well, by discussing these central banks’ engagement with climate change–related issues (pp. 111–116) or with the “inclusivity of employment” (pp. 91–96). Overall, the book rightly emphasizes the political pressure coming from various audiences’ dissatisfaction with the operation of central banks after 2008. This is also the result of a “(re)politicization” of monetary policy through the prism of its distributional consequences. As Moschella argues, although conventional monetary policies do have distributional effects, these were less apparent than the distributional effects of unconventional monetary policies (pp. 4, 28, 45).

Chapter 2 attempts a “historical reconstruction” (p. 14) about how central banks have built, since the 1980s, a reputation of “monetary orthodoxy centered on the achievement of price stability” (p. 16), whose “social acceptance … has long supported central banks’ power and independence” (p. 29). The chapter investigates “three major historical junctures” (p. 14) in this respect: the Great Inflation, the Great Moderation, and the “Lost Decade” in Japan. The (overall brief) considerations about Japan are interesting, and a novel addition with respect to other similar work.

Chapter 2 starts with overemphasizing “the lesson learned” from the “Volcker experiment”; this is presented as the “major catalyst for an explosion of fresh thinking by economists and policymakers” (p. 43), leading to “a solid consensus in monetary economics that guided central banks and justified their policy choices for the subsequent three decades” (p. 6). This argument is taken straight out of one of Ben Bernanke’s retrospective accounts about the history of macroeconomics (p. 43). There is thus an unavoidable dissonance between this simplified claim and the abundant literature in the history of macroeconomics documenting the intellectual transformations occurring in the 1970s and the fierce controversies of the 1990s. Although it is acknowledged that “the causes of the Great Inflation and stagflation have been the object of lively academic debates in the economics profession” (p. 36), nothing is said about the scope of such debates.

As for what would constitute this three-decades-long “solid consensus,” chapter 2 portrays a very confusing image of a “monetary orthodoxy” (or “economic orthodoxy”) conflating different theoretical approaches and concepts. The chapter continuously refers to “monetary orthodoxy” as “monetarism” or “monetarist theory” (and, sometimes, “neoclassical theory”). Such (undefined) “monetarism” is argued to be the “dominant paradigm in economic theory” (p. 37), whose dominance extends from the 1980s to the 2000s—a questionable historical stretch. For sure, “monetarism” is understandably associated here with Paul Volcker’s policies because of their “emphasis on the money supply” (p. 41), although the chapter acknowledges that “different views exist on the extent to which the Fed’s decisions made under Volcker were driven by monetarist ideas” (p. 41). The rise of “monetarism” is also associated with “the dismissal of Keynesianism” (p. 43). On this subject, the chapter endorses thus the “Phillips curve myth” (Forder Reference Forder2014), arguing that “the lessons of the Great Inflation indeed invalidated the supposed long-term trade-off between inflation and unemployment, as theorized by the Phillips curve” (p. 24; see also p. 44).

Rational expectations are supposedly the “key insight” of “monetarism” (p. 43). This explains why, surprisingly, Milton Friedman is footnote material here, whilst Robert E. Lucas is acknowledged (p. 43). However, what these pages of chapter 2 describe is actually the “Lucas Critique” from 1976, and not rational expectations per se. This is (again) confusing, since the main point of the Lucas Critique is about the (econometric) methodology for policy evaluation, and it is not about central bank independence, rule-based monetary policy, or even, after all, about rational expectations. This illustrates the chapter’s tendency to refer indistinctively to ideas that, although related, have their own intellectual trajectories.

Another example concerns “rule-based” monetary policy and the “conservativeness” of central bankers. Moschella argues that “a corollary of the importance of being conservative is the rise of more precise, rule-based monetary frameworks” (p. 45). However, the “rules vs. discretion” literature (Kydland and Prescott Reference Kydland and Prescott1977), besides preceding the “conservativeness” one (Rogoff Reference Rogoff1985), is not even focused on monetary policy but on policies of any kind. Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott’s point (1977) is that, within an intertemporal dynamic framework, rule-based policies would lead to superior welfare outcomes more than discretion-based policies. Similarly, the idea of a “conservative” central banker (i.e., with a higher aversion to inflation than the average population) is actually presented, in Kenneth Rogoff (Reference Rogoff1985), as an alternative to rule-based monetary policies (not as a “corollary”). As for the rise of “precise” rules, it is surprising that, for instance, John Taylor’s influential contributions about monetary rules are omitted.

Chapters 1, 3, and 4–5 do a great job in suggesting an explanation of changes in central banking, but chapter 2 is not as good in characterizing such changes, especially at the intellectual level—that is, how monetary policy is understood by economists (within and outside central banks). Chapter 2’s inaccuracies tend to weaken the overall thesis of the book, making it difficult for a reader to grasp what has changed in central banking in the past decades. Whilst changes in policies are more apparent (and clearly and precisely summarized in chapters 3–5), the reader is left wondering to what extent central bankers (and economists) have moved away from the intellectual framework inherited from the “Great Moderation” era. Historians of economics would be rather skeptical of any claim about “revolution” in the domain of “economic orthodoxy.”

However, the point of this review is not to complain about the lack of dialogue between the political economy literature and the history of economics—an issue that is not distinctive of this particular book, by the way. Rather, my purpose here is to point out the necessary complementarity of the two approaches. For historians of economics, this means taking very seriously Moschella’s criticism about viewing central banks “as a typical example of epistemic communities whose members share policy views that closely reflect the state of knowledge in the field of macroeconomics and common professional and educational backgrounds” (p. 25). Moving beyond this view is not an entirely uncharted territory for historians of economics (see Goutsmedt and Sergi Reference Goutsmedt and Sergi2025 for a survey); yet, this book offers fresh insights, and a novel framework that could be fruitful for our field, too.