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What it argues
Goliath is Matt Stoller's history of monopoly power in America, arguing that the concentration of corporate power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is not a novel development but a return to a pattern that Americans once recognized as a fundamental threat to democratic governance — and successfully resisted through antitrust law. The book traces two opposing political traditions: the Brandeisian tradition that treated bigness as inherently dangerous to democratic participation, and the Chicago School tradition that dismissed structural concerns and focused only on whether concentration produced consumer harm measurable as higher prices.
Stoller's central claim is that the Chicago School revolution in antitrust thinking — associated with Robert Bork's 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox — didn't just change legal doctrine. It changed what Americans thought was acceptable, possible, and worth fighting about. By reducing antitrust to a question of consumer prices in the short term, it removed from the table the questions about power, political participation, and the dignity of work that had animated anti-monopoly politics since the Gilded Age. What followed was three decades of mergers, acquisitions, and market concentration in banking, retail, agriculture, media, and technology that the old regulatory framework would never have permitted.
What it gets right
- 1.
Anti-monopoly politics was once a mainstream American tradition. The Progressive Era and New Deal both defined concentrated corporate power as a threat to democratic self-governance, not just economic efficiency.
- 2.
The consumer welfare standard, associated with Robert Bork, redefined antitrust law to ask only whether a merger produces short-term consumer price harm. This change removed structural concerns about power from the analysis.
- 3.
The shift in antitrust doctrine in the 1970s and 1980s was not primarily academic. It was funded and organized by business interests that understood the policy implications and invested in changing the legal culture.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Matt Stoller is a policy analyst and writer who has worked as a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and as a budget analyst on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. He writes the BIG newsletter on monopoly power and corporate concentration. Stoller has been a prominent voice in the neo-Brandeisian antitrust movement, which argues for a return to structural concerns in competition policy. Goliath, published in 2019, drew on years of policy research and archival work to reconstruct the political and intellectual history of the anti-monopoly tradition in American politics. He has been cited in Congressional hearings on Big Tech and platform regulation.
