Antitrust and Global Capitalism' 1930-2004

Tony Freyer has written a moderately useful survey of the role of antitrust regulation in shaping corporate structure and behaviour in the second half of the twentieth century. His main theme is that antitrust as the central plank of state regulatory policy was pioneered in the United States with the Sherman Act, and then developed extensively under President Franklin D. Roosevelt after an earlier attempt at a more wide-ranging control of business through the National Recovery Act was struck down by the Supreme Court. This then provided a global model that was not directly imposed on the defeated powers of the Second World War, but rather gradually assimilated to domestic regulatory traditions. In this sense, Freyer argues (p. 394), antitrust ‘enforces not only instrumental outcomes but also possesses symbolic meaning, which fosters, at least among elites, a competition consciousness which can support holding big business accountable to power beyond itself ’. There is a detailed discussion of the Japanese contribution to the 1947 Anti-Monopoly Law, and of the way in which the German Cartel Law of 1957 arose out of the Ordo-Liberal tradition espoused by Ludwig Erhard. The German tradition played an important part in the approach to competition policy taken by the European Economic Community. The book concludes with an overview of some of the major regulatory clashes between the European Union and the United States

Capitalism · Cartel · Competition (biology · Economics · German · Law and economics · Market economy · Meaning (existential · Monopoly · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Price fixing · Sociology · State (computer science · Supreme court · History · Law · Merger and Competition Analysis