Competition Law and Democracy

This book explores how competition and its protection through competition law are linked with democracy.

This book asks how competition and its protection through competition law are linked with democracy. It finds that the supposed symbiosis between competition (law) and democracy rests on a republican understanding of liberty as the absence of domination, which originates in ancient Roman thought.Examining the normative foundations of US antitrust and EU competition law, Elias Deutscher argues that the idea of a competition-democracy nexus rests on a commitment to a republican understanding of economic liberty. The book uses this republican concept of economic liberty to analyse how US antitrust and EU competition law embodied a competition-democracy nexus and explains how the turn of competition law toward a more economic approach has led to its decline. The book offers proposals for how the nexus can be revived to allow competition law to address contemporary concerns about the concentration of corporate power.