Centralization of economic power facilitates centralization of political power. That was once a hard-won lesson, and it’s a lesson we must re-learn. Plus, the end of big box tyranny.

Neumann’s book, therefore, was received warmly. For Neumann, a key driver of the rise of the Nazi movement was monopolization, because he saw it as a system of economic control that was totally compatible with, and indeed encouraged, the rise of an authoritarian government. He noted that the Weimar Republic oversaw a massive merger wave; chemical giant IG Farben was a result of the combination of six firms in 1925. The Social Democrats, he argued, failed because they “did not see that the central problem was the imperialism of German monopoly capital, becoming ever more urgent with the continued growth of the process of monopolization. The more monopoly grew, the more incompatible it became with the political democracy.”

In the U.S., however, our antitrust laws saved our democracy. “In Germany,” Neuman wrote, “there was never anything like the popular antimonopoly movement of the United States under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.” The Sherman Act, in other words, wasn’t perfect, but it did stop the rise of fascism. This kind of influence is obvious in decisions at the the time, which had deep moral rhetoric. In 1945, Judge Learned Hand ruled that Alcoa was a monopoly, noting that “among the purposes of Congress in 1890 was a desire to put an end to great aggregations of capital because of the helplessness of the individual before them.”