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Antitrust after Neoliberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2025

Abstract

Antitrust is back, and neoliberalism is in flux. Led by a new movement that takes its name from Louis Brandeis, it evolved quickly from obscurity to prominence. How should we understand the New Brandeisians? This article takes an interpretive approach. I draw on Foucault, because he illuminates the vital role of monopoly in the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism and provides a conceptual framework that allows us to understand the debate between neoliberals and neoBrandeisians accurately as a dispute over the standards for making truth claims about markets. Whereas neoliberals developed a formal theory that promised to the excise the problem of monopoly from antitrust, neoBrandeisians draw on Progressive-era Legal Pragmatism to show how that project cannot stand up to jurisprudential or empirical scrutiny. NeoBrandeisians offer a meliorist alternative: although they concede the impossibility of fully ridding markets of monopoly, they show how a vigilant and adaptative antitrust regime can subdue market power sufficiently to serve prosperity, liberty, and democracy.

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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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