Goliath

Stoller, an anti-monopoly researcher, writes a political history of American concentration and the anti-monopoly tradition, arguing that opposition to concentrated economic power was a central strand of American politics for most of the country's history and was deliberately abandoned in the 1970s.

His narrative centres on Wright Patman, the Texas congressman who spent decades attacking chain stores, bank concentration and the Federal Reserve, and whom Stoller treats as the representative figure of the tradition. He covers the Populist movement, the Brandeis position that concentration is a political rather than economic problem, the New Deal's anti-monopoly programme, the postwar antitrust enforcement that constrained large firms, and then the shift. He argues the change came from within the Democratic party in the 1970s, from a new generation that regarded anti-monopoly as outdated and regulation as inefficient, combined with the Chicago school's intellectual work and Robert Bork's consumer welfare standard.

His current application argues that concentration in technology, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, banking and defence has produced political power, reduced dynamism, suppressed wages and hollowed out regional economies.

The book is polemical and history in service of an argument. Historians have criticised the treatment of Patman as heroic, the compression of the 1970s shift into a single ideological decision, and the selection of evidence. The core historical claim, that American politics contained a sustained anti-monopoly tradition that was abandoned rather than refuted, is well supported and is the book's contribution.