Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
New Caesars: Antitrust Law as Political Theory from Rockefeller to Zuckerberg
Speaker
- T.J. Foley, Fellow, Program on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard Kennedy School.
Chair
- Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Contact
Tenzin Dadak
tdadak@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
Louis Brandeis wrote in 1914 that industrial monopolies encroached on individual freedom gradually without resorting to violence, a process he likened to how “Caesar Augustus became master of Rome.” A century later, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—a longtime Augustus admirer—and his fellow tech executives jealously guard their corporate empires against attempts to limit their power, even as public concern over their size grows. Often, concerns about corporate power are refracted through a set of antitrust laws that prohibit monopoly and anticompetitive conduct. Yet, the antitrust project against “Big Tech” largely fizzled. Why? In this talk, I make four claims. First, competition laws impose an upper limit on accumulations of private power, thereby constituting the essential relationship between the citizen, the state, and the market. Second, the power to construct this boundary was delegated to a specialized set of experts tasked with producing “legitimate” forms of economic knowledge throughout the 20th century. This transfer of epistemic authority effectively tied a knot between economic expertise, on one hand, and the delimitation of the public/private boundary, on the other. Third, these resultant economic measures, techniques, and technologies created the conditions necessary for large private firms to assume control of essential democratic functions, ranging from surveillance to information dissemination. Finally, renewing a collective democratic project requires re-imagining both the public/private divide that antitrust laws help construct and the entwined epistemic and normative commitments that hold it in place.
Bio
T.J. Foley is a Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School, researching how economic expertise has reshaped the relationship between citizens, markets, and the state. His forthcoming book with Sascha Meinrath, Watchdogs: The Rise and Decay of America's Trust-Busters (University Press of Kansas, 2026), argues that America's competition law regime has been reconstituted by narrow, price-focused econometric models, fueling corporate concentration rivaling the Gilded Age. His research appears in Energy Research & Social Science and the American Journal of Legal History. He holds an AB from Harvard College.