Goliath, Matt Stoller’s New Book on American Democracy and Monopoly, Out Now

Simon & Schuster published Open Markets Fellow Matt Stoller’s new book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Populism on Tuesday. The book details how Americans once understood the connection between corporate monopolies and authoritarianism and successfully opposed both through antitrust and other competition policies.

Farhad Manjoo of the The New York Times reviewed Stoller’s book and called it “deeply researched.” Stoller’s book has also been reviewed in The American Prospect and The National Review (twice). In The American Prospect review, University of Oregon political science professor Gerald Berk wrote, "Democrats who seek to revitalize their party would do well to study Matt Stoller’s Goliath and incorporate—in a complex and thoughtful manner—its central teachings." The National Review’s Kyle Sammin wrote that although antimonopolism “has been dormant for decades, the corporate consolidation of this century has given Americans on both sides of the political spectrum reason to wonder if it should be awakened. And Stoller’s treatise is a good place to start in thinking through that question.”

Stoller also has essays out this week in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Wired. In The New York Times, Stoller explained how the business models of Google and Facebook, coupled with American lawmakers’ permissive approach to communications policy, have led to “a radical centralization of power over the flow of information.” “To save democracy and the free press,” Stoller writes, “we must eliminate Google and Facebook’s control over the information commons.” Meanwhile in The Wall Street Journal, he discussed why trustbusting is a “business-friendly trend” and outlined how antitrust prosecutions and breakups of dominant corporations fostered, even “oxygenated” markets. And in Wired, Stoller argued that the actions of Uber, Facebook, and Google recall the “law-flouting financial empires of the 1920s. We know how that turned out.”

You can order the book online here.