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  • The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law by Brett Christophers
  • Benjamin C. Waterhouse
Brett Christophers. The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 348 pp. ISBN 9780674504912, $45.00 (cloth).

At the turn of the last century, economic debates in the industrializing world revolved around what Americans termed “the Trust Question,” known generally as the problem of monopoly. Both experience and theory (prominently but not exclusively Marxian) suggested that capitalism held within it the seeds of its own instability and, depending on how you read the tea leaves, its own destruction. Under conditions of free competition, certain firms grew dominant, consolidating and concentrating their market power and extending a monopolistic grip over both the processes of production and the mechanisms of exchange, curtailing the very freedoms that brought them into being. “Free markets,” in other words, inevitably led to their own extinction. Antimonopolists proposed a wide range of remedies—from regulatory reform to trustbusting to revolution—but all understood this inexorable trend toward monopoly as capitalism’s defining feature.

More than a hundred years later, that intellectual tradition persists. From the pens of theorists to the Facebook posts of armchair activists, debates over political economy largely recapitulate the notion that capitalism is, and always has been, inherently monopolistic. [End Page 940]

Except when it is not. In his new book, The Great Leveler, geographer and political economist Brett Christophers challenges the vision of capitalism as a “linear historical narrative of from-competition-to-monopoly” (p. 10). Drawing on the economic history of the United Kingdom and the United States since the late nineteenth century, Christophers argues for a dialectical vision of capitalism at the intersection of both competition and monopoly. This dialectical framework proceeds from Marx’s 1846 observation that “monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly,” as well as David Harvey’s recent argument that capitalism has historically been defined by the contradictions between the two. According to this model, competition drives down prices and profits, leading to business failures and monopolies. In a non-competitive environment, monopolistic firms generate profit through rent-seeking rather than innovation and the creation of real value, prompting crisis. In response, capitalism’s pendulum swings the other way, promoting greater competition and innovation, and the process begins anew. The result, Christophers argues, is that “capital historically ‘oscillates’ between relative excesses of monopoly and competition, always finding balance hard to achieve, let alone sustain” (p. 11).

Aligning himself with “Marxian-inspired historians of capitalism,” Christophers is thus primarily concerned not with capitalism’s volatility, but rather “the mechanisms through which such volatility has been tamed” (pp. 57–58). Over the course of six chapters—three theoretical, three historical—he lays out a persuasive case for a previously overlooked mechanism: competition law. When capitalism swung too far toward monopoly, the British and American systems responded with vigorous antitrust policy. Yet when capitalism swung the other way and suffered an excess of competition, the legal system responded by marginalizing antitrust enforcement. Instead, it defended intellectual property (IP; that is, trademarks, copyright, and patents), which had the effect of stifling competition and (re)promoting monopoly. The law thus acts as “the Great Leveler” of the title, enabling capitalism “to maintain an unstable path predicated upon the achievement and repeated renewal of a precarious but precious degree of balance” (p. 81).

The first half of The Great Leveler argues that the competition–monopoly relationship represents the “core capitalist dynamics of profit-generation and accumulation” (p. 20). In particular, these early chapters argue that classical Marxism’s fixation on production (where value is created) fail to account fully for capitalism’s dynamics over time. Instead, Christophers seeks to “place exchange, markets, and competition in the political-economic spotlight” (p. 76).

The second half of the book takes up that charge empirically, surveying the shifting regimes of competition law in Britain and [End Page 941] the United States. Helpfully organized and clearly argued, the book divides the history of capitalism into regimes of competition law. Between the 1890s and the 1940s, Christophers argues, the dominant thrust of Anglo-American legal...

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