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ANNOUNCING: Barry Lynn’s New Book - LIBERTY FROM ALL MASTERS

Barry C. Lynn

Liberty from All Masters is the culminating work of Barry C. Lynn’s 20-year vanguard study of how monopoly power threatens individual liberty, democracy, prosperity, and national security. In the book, Lynn details how Google, Amazon, and Facebook have developed the ability to manipulate the flow of news, information, and business in America, and are fast transforming this power into autocratic systems of control. As importantly, Lynn shows us what we can do about it, by detailing how Americans over the course of two centuries built a “System of Liberty,” and by laying out how we can put this system to work again today.

Lynn is widely known to be one of the most prescient writers about the dangers of concentrated economic power. In his 2005 book, "End of the Line,” he warned of exactly the sorts of industrial disruptions that the COVID-19 crisis has revealed, leading The American Prospect to call him “the man who knew.” In his 2010 book Cornered Lynn was the first to sound the alarm about the political and economic threats posed by the overthrow of America’s anti-monopoly laws. That work has deeply influenced lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and, in the words of The Financial Times, made him the “founding father” of the fast-growing anti-monopoly movement.

 In Liberty from All Masters, Lynn is back with another warning, in some ways more grim than the first two. But this time he accompanies it with a detailed blueprint – based on an important new reading of American history – for how to build a better democracy here at home, and a better world.

ENDORSEMENTS

“From the beginning, the citizens of the United States have resisted unchecked power. In the nineteenth century, voters recognized the new threat posed by concentrated corporate power and demanded a ban on monopoly. The antitrust laws that their legislators passed were unambiguous: Big is bad. For decades, these laws protected freedom and competition, but as Barry Lynn recounts in Liberty from All Masters, in the 1970s, a group of economists and their fellow travelers launched an intellectual coup worthy of Orwell. Legislating from the library, they persuaded judges that what the law said, actually, is that big is not bad. We live with the consequences. Monopolies give a handful of private citizens powers that autocrats of the past could only dream of. If you want to save democracy, read Lynn's guide to the battle citizens must wage, once again, to defend their liberties.”
—Paul Romer, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2018

“Liberty from All Masters builds on Barry Lynn's lifetime of work analyzing the evils of concentrated private power in America today, and makes a deep critique of the way we have come to think about antitrust.  He questions not just whether consumer welfare and efficiency can be measured in a digital economy, but whether they ought to stand as normative standards in a democratic society.  A highly provocative and important book.”
—Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, Trust, and The Origins of Political Order

“In a moment of deep economic calamity and suffering, Barry Lynn points to one of the most critical root drivers of our failing economy and democracy: the problem of monopoly power. Barry has been leading the way on reviving the public and policy attention to the problem of monopoly, and in this latest work he makes the crucial case for why contesting economic power is critical not just for addressing the problem of inequality, but also for advancing a vision for society that centers democracy, racial equity, and a more inclusive and dynamic conception of freedom. A must-read for everyone working to build a more inclusive democracy and economy in the years to come.”
—K. Sabeel Rahman, President, Demos; Author of Democracy Against Domination

“Over the last several years, Barry Lynn has been the key figure behind the sea change in how we view competition policy -- or the lack thereof -- in this country. He foresaw how the rise of unchecked corporate monopoly power would corrupt our economy, our politics and our society years before others, and he has relentlessly spoken that truth to power. Liberty From All Masters is another visionary work, and confirms Lynn’s status as one of the most important thinkers on the political economy today. A must read for anyone who cares about sustainable capitalism and liberal democracy.”
—Rana Foroohar, columnist for The Financial Times; author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

“Very few thinkers In recent years have done more to shift debate in Washington than Barry Lynn. In Liberty From All Masters, he proves himself as a lyrical theorist and a bold interpreter of history. This  book is an elegant summoning of a forgotten tradition that can help the nation usher in a new freedom.”
—Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind, national correspondent for The Atlantic

“I’ve worked closely with Barry Lynn for many years, first in my role as founder of Authors United and later as President of the Authors Guild. I’ve long been an admirer of the clarity and elegance of his thinking and writing about globalization, monopoly, and economics. I believe Lynn is one of the most important intellectuals in America today, his work focusing on the fast-growing concentrations of economic power in our society, and the grave dangers that poses for innovation, competition, open markets, and the free flow of information so vital to our democracy.”
—Douglas Preston, author, and president of The Authors Guild

“Barry was one of the very first to warn of the dangers of the monopoly power of Google, Amazon and other online platforms. His analysis of the problem, and what to do about it, has been hugely helpful for all of us now fighting to protect our democracy from these corporations and their all-powerful manipulation machines. Barry knows what we are up against and frames it so anyone can understand. Fortunately, Barry also knows what needs to be done to fix the problem. That’s why, in these dark days, Barry is one of the few people who give me hope.”
—Roger McNamee, managing director of Elevation Partners, author of Zucked

“I read Barry’s first book, End of the Line, back in 2005. What I thought at the time was, who is this guy, who is able to draw the connections between all these complex economic and political systems. In his next book, Cornered, he delivered a fully developed explanation for what’s gone wrong with America’s economy, in a common-sense language that anyone could understand. What Barry has done, in short, is reduce the neoliberal economic model to rubble, and he’s done it in such a way as to make the demolishing of that grand fortress look easy. He even makes it seem like tearing it down is our patriotic duty, like it's part of the American tradition. Of course our modern ideas don't work, he has you agreeing—and any nineteenth-century farmer from Kentucky could have told us why.”
—Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas and Listen Liberal

“Barry C. Lynn, author and executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an antitrust advocacy group, has been sounding the alarm about monopolies for years. In his new book, Liberty from All Masters, he insists that monopolies are ultimately a political problem. As surely as Americans are citizens in a democracy, they are citizens in a political economy. But with their far-reaching and subtle powers, monopolies undermine our agency in the economic sphere of life. Indirectly, they threaten democratic self-governance, too.

”Lynn champions what he calls “the American system of liberty.” This system, rooted in the founding generation’s ideas, insists on a mutually supportive relationship between economic and political liberty. More than freedom from government interference, this liberty is a positive “conception of the citizen as a producer, maker, thinker. The citizens’ primary responsibility, according to this line of reasoning, is to fight for the liberty to sell or otherwise share what she has created, without restriction, at fair market prices.” An open marketplace, Lynn thinks, is a genuine public space. It is a place where we gather as equals to buy and sell, learning valuable information about what we and our neighbors value in the process. It’s also a place where we might recognize “dangerous concentrations of economic and political power.”
—Paul Gleason, associate editor at Psychiatric Times and a finalist for The Washington Monthly’s 2020 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing

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PURCHASING DETAILS:

Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Pages: 320
Publication Date: September 29, 2020
ISBN (Hardcover): 978-1-250-24062-0
Section: Non-Fiction