Whose Coordination? Which Democracy? On Antitrust as a Democratic Demand

The growing movement seeking to revive an aggressive, “neo-Brandeisian” approach to antitrust policy sees it partly as a way of protecting democracy against concentrated economic power. Yet on closer inspection, prevailing theories of democracy as collective decision making offer weak support, at best, for a neo-Brandeisian approach. Rather than abandoning the insight that an aggressive approach to antitrust can help protect democracy, however, this essay argues that we should adjust our theories of democracy to accommodate it. I first show why prevailing accounts are ill suited to explaining the democratic virtues of a neo-Brandeisian approach. I then outline an alternative ideal of democracy—defended in greater detail elsewhere—and draw out its implications for antitrust. While vindicating the intuition that aggressive antitrust policy serves democratic goals, my account also incorporates genuine worries about such an approach, and thus enables neo-Brandeisians to reformulate their democratic ambitions in more precise and promising terms.