In this prescient final paragraph, Director and Levi laid a foundational neoliberal premise, which would develop into a more extreme form in the coming years: Antitrust law should utilize economic theory, and Director and Levi had in mind the special brand of economic theory they espoused—not the versions of imperfect competition theory espoused by the Cowles Commission or MIT (Mirowski 2002). That is, when courts decide cases, reformulated Chicago economic theory should be employed as background theory. This implies that notions of rules of fair conduct should not be the sole basis of antitrust law decisions, which included principles such as small businesses should have the right to compete. This neoliberal premise underlay many of the articles of the Antitrust Project.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1147