Deciding for bigness: Constitutional choice and the growth of firms

This essay draws upon the contractarian distinction between constitutional and operational levels of personal choice and an evolutionary analysis of the growth of firms to illuminate the complex of theoretical and historical issues surrounding the emergence of large-scale economic organization in the United States in the years since 1870. The evolutionary analysis suggests why the individual's economic autonomy must largely be sacrificed for the material wealth made possible by increasing scale in production, and a juxtaposition of the views of F. A. Hayek and Louis Brandeis on this question, seen in the light of the fundamental tenets of American antitrust and corporate law, offers a perspective on the operational and constitutional choices we have made with respect to “bigness” and on the values these choices have revealed. Copyright George Mason University 1991