The Late Emerging Consensus Among American Economists on Antitrust Laws in The Second New Deal /

While this influence had already been noticeable within the Department of Justice (DoJ) Antitrust Division since the 1960’s (Williamson, 2003), the ‘paradigmatic’ turn was definitively taken in the early eighties with the appointment by the President Reagan Administration of William Baxter as head of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (Dan Wood and Anderson, 1993). [...] In the second part, we show that the rallying of the institutional school economists to the judicial implementation of the Sherman Act provision was all but evident. [...] At the same time, the consequences of the 1929 crisis led some of the supporters of economic liberalism to accept the legitimacy of government intervention to address the concentration of economic power issue, in other words, to protect the market process against itself. [...] In the context of the rise of the 5The acquisition, maintenance or extension of a monopoly is sanctioned by the Section 2 of the Sherman Act only if it is not the consequence of the undertaking’s merits. [...] The 1929 crisis and the US experience of the NIRA, led some classical liberals to examine the risks for the future of the free market economy induced by the increasing concentration levels.