What Did Happen to the Antitrust Movement?

Abstract

In January 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter asked a simple question: What happened to the antitrust movement?' Hofstadter posed this query in a conference paper he delivered to an interdisciplinary meeting held at the University of California, Berkeley, on the links between business, politics, and society. Reviewing the history of antitrust from the late nineteenth century to the postwar era, Hofstadter sought to understand its decline in popularity. Exactly how, he wondered, did the antimonopoly impulse that had burned so brightly seem to fade away? For Hofstadter, the answer lay in the transition experienced by the American social order during the early twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, antitrust was an ethical question that had spurred a popular movement for greater social justice, provoking much public debate about the moral and political viability of large combinations of firms. With the restructuring of social and economic life around more complex organizations, however, antitrust became a technical issue to be managed by experts empowered by a federal bureaucracy. Over time, then, concerns about the legitimacy of big business were gradually uncoupled from a broader public consciousness. Or, as Hofstadter famously put it, once the United States had an antitrust movement without antitrust prosecutions; in our time there have been antitrust prosecutions without an antitrust movement.2