Antitrust is a body of law and policy designed to promote, or at least to protect, economic competition. There are many legal books and many economic books on the subject, but so far as I know there is no other book devoted to the philosophical scrutiny of the concepts that underpin it. The idea of a philosophy of antitrust may seem abstruse, but there is nothing puzzling about it. Philosophy may be conceived as a set of meta-studies associated with first-order disciplines: for psychology there is philosophy of mind, for mathematics there is philosophy of mathematics, for moral thinking there is philosophical ethics, and so on. (This is not to say that the boundary between a discipline and its philosophy is, or should be, sharp; for example, some of the most interesting work in ethics in recent decades has been by philosophers who have engaged with practical moral issues.) For law there is philosophy of law, and different parts of the law are associated with different branches of its philosophy: one such branch is the philosophy of antitrust.

The concepts studied in this book lie at the foundation of antitrust, but they are not peculiar to antitrust. Those of competition, agreement and joint action, for example, arise in various areas of theory and practice. I hope therefore that the book will interest people – economists, philosophers, political scientists and others – who have no special concern with antitrust.