The world around central banks has shifted. Europe is confronting an unprecedented combination of environmental, economic, and social challenges. Reducing carbon emissions to zero fast enough to avoid catastrophic global warming is difficult; doing so while also reducing economic inequality so as to avert social disintegration and democratic backsliding is very difficult. Addressing this twin challenge will require the state – and the European Union – to deploy all economic policy instruments already at its disposal, and to develop new ones and coordinate their use in new ways. The paper proceeds in three steps. The first section discusses three distinct challenges – legal, political, and ideational – for the debate on the future of central banking. The remainder of the paper will tackle the two main ideational challenges, namely, institutional amnesia (forgetting past realities of central banking) and strategic ignorance (ignoring present realities of central banking). To overcome institutional amnesia, the second section briefly reviews the history of central banking, showing that the price stability is only one of several goals that central banking has, historically, been associated with. To overcome strategic ignorance, the third section reviews three mandate-remote, or ‘extracurricular’ areas of recent ECB activity.