2025/11/18 by Gerald Berk · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Economic Theory and Institutions #Foucault, Power, and Ethics #Legal and Constitutional Studies
paper · doi:10.1017/s1537592725102788
openalex created_date 2025/11/18 · openalex publication_date 2025/11/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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.