This chapter summarises the main findings of the book and the trajectory of republican liberty as the central element of the competition–democracy nexus. The chapter also explores proposals for how the competition–democracy can be revived to allow competition law to address the contemporary challenges of industry concentration and the rise of corporate power. The chapter discusses different avenues towards a competition–democracy nexus 4.0 that would realign competition law with the parameters of republican antitrust. The chapter also casts light on the hard policy choices one such reform would involve.

This chapter argues that in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (c. 1770s–1790s) republican conceptions of liberty were put into service of both antislavery and proslavery discourses. Focusing on the American, Dutch, French, and Haitian revolutions, it distinguish three lines of republican reasoning that informed arguments against slavery: the 'extension' of political freedom to enslaved people; the idea that the institution of slavery leads to corruption; and third, the notion of republican liberty as a reward for military courage and sacrifice. It then identifies three ways in which republican conceptions of liberty were widely reconciled with the existence of chattel slavery: only a certain delineated group in society could responsibly enjoy republican liberty; enslaved people were a form of property and therefore not part of a society of free citizens; and finally, the idea that enslaved people who did not resist their slavery, basically acquiesced in their unfree status and were unworthy of republican liberty. Eighteenth-century republican arguments about liberty did not necessarily contradict chattel slavery, but could also form part of the legitimization of slavery. The chapter, then, demonstrates not so much the limits but the versatile employability of the republican discourse of liberty.

This chapter explores the usefulness of neo-Roman liberty – to live free from subjection, deference, and vulnerability to the arbitrary will of others – for our contemporary philosophical debates about human rights. For eighteenth-century republicans such as Wollstonecraft and Price, liberty understood in this way was conceptually linked to rights of humanity, but that link has been severed. Starting from a sense of perplexity about the disengagement between 'republican' liberty and human rights and the curious inability of mainstream human rights philosophy to deal with major political challenges, neo-Roman liberty is used here to push human rights philosophy onto more radically egalitarian terrain. The critique focuses on the naturalistic bias in human rights thinking, a misunderstanding of international human rights law, a tendency to focus on event-based 'local' principles of justice, and a reluctance to challenge structural causes of injustice. The contention is that Skinner’s neo-Roman liberty serves to establish two important normative premises for a human rights philosophy with more bite: human rights should offer the strongest protection for those who are most vulnerable to socio-economic and political marginalisation, and that objects of human rights should be conceptualised in terms of open-ended goals of justice, predicated on a commitment to structural equality.

In the introduction, I first set forth some statistics on the current state of unionization. I then go on to explain some important differences between the argument from equality and the argument from liberty, and the need to reclaim the argument from liberty from the Right if we are to adequately defend a number of progressive policies including unionization. I also discuss the difference between consequentialist moral arguments and arguments from right, and explain the role that empirical claims play in each. I explain the difference between ideal and “non-ideal” theory, between preinstitutional and postinstitutional rights, and how these differences relate to the debate over unionization. I introduce the idea that liberty is a very complex notion and identify three different concepts of what liberty might mean. I explain the difference between a concept and a conception and how this makes what we talk about when we talk about liberty even more complex. Finally, I introduce the main arguments included in each of the three main essays in the book and explain that, while the overall argument of the book concentrates on the situation in the United States, it also has application to other liberal capitalist democracies and applies to other issues besides unionization.