ABSTRACT. This Feature deepens and seeks to provide a foundation for the current broadening in the anti-trust debate and, ultimately, in adjacent areas relating to market organization. As normative reconstruction, it may help guide current reform efforts as well as the interpretation and implementation of the existing antitrust laws. The Feature traces a thread beginning with the “moral economy” origins of antitrust and the common law of restraint of trade; continues through the American antimonopoly coalition’s distinctive and egalitarian moral economy vision; and culminates in a reinterpretation of the legislative history of the Sherman Act, both as to affirmative purpose and as to judicial role. I propose a core prescription: the command to disperse economic coordination rights. This core prescription in turn implies three key tasks: taking affirmative steps to contain domination, to accommodate and promote democratic coordination, and to set rules of fair competition.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/feature/recovering-the-moral-economy-foundations-of-the-sherman-act
