The neoliberal reorientation toward monopoly first made its debut in Director’s book review of Charles Lindblom’s Unions and Capitalism (Director 1950). Director maintained that because of competitive forces emanating from the supply side of the market, competitors would supplant any monopoly that attempted to permanently restrict its own supply. According to Director, the market system through the “corroding influence of competition” (p. 165), has the “effective tendency” to “destroy all types of monopoly” (p. 166; emphasis added). Thus, competition became Director’s philosopher’s stone, and the only way the stone would lose its prodigious powers was whenever government intervened. Director maintained that history had demonstrated that without the intervention of government, “competitive tendencies have triumphed over the exclusive or restrictive tendencies” (p. 166). Among most economists and jurists of the 1950s, however, it would have been an outrageous oxymoron to maintain that competition existed even in the face of monopoly. Therefore, by 1950, Director had become an acolyte of an unprecedented faith in the forces of competition.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1109