Stoller’s insightful analysis shows how the composition and values of members of Congress on both sides of the political divide have allowed monopoly power to dominate American business and politics ... This book will strike a chord with those who lived through the Great Recession and experienced frustration at the injustice of bankers and corporations being bailed out while so many lost their homes and livelihoods.

Stoller arranges this potentially dry story of anti-monopoly politics into a series of dramatic set pieces. From street brawls to legislative legerdemain, from fiery rhetoric to intellectual double-dealing, the book is full of virtuous populists defending the little guy against dastardly monopolists and their enablers, the 'paranoid red-baiting corporate right' and the 'corporate left.' Readers will learn fascinating details about the inner workings of New Deal policies, banking regulation, the conglomerate movement and the rise of the Chicago school and its intellectual assault on antitrust law. Full of righteous and riveting writing, Goliath provides an important overview of a vital history ... Yet as an argument about political economy, the book relies on melodrama and caricature, leaving much asserted but little proved ... Readers already disposed to the premise will cheer, but those seeking to understand why monopolies grew and retained such political power will be left confused ... Stoller is angry, and with good reason...His book is looking for villains, not just among the plutocrats who make a mockery of democracy but among the well-intentioned liberals, from the Clintons to Barack Obama, who pay weak-tea lip service to the dangers of corporate power even as they enrich themselves at its teat ... The result is that Goliath is punditry posing as history. Stoller writes with the cocksure confidence of someone who believes he has uncovered the secret origins of America’s woes ... Yet history is not a self-righteous morality play, and it cannot boil down to heroes and villains ... To achieve real reform, we must do more than recycle 100-year-old platitudes about shopkeepers and family farms and rescue long-dead Texas congressmen from obscurity. Rather than look for heroes in a bygone economy, we must see the past as the violent, racist and oppressive time that it was. Perhaps then we can marshal our collective power to regulate capitalism in the public interest.

... highly relevant to the primary race ... Stoller strafes targets across political and ideological spectrums ... Goliath also does a deep-dive on the rise of what has become known as the Chicago School and market conservatism ... Stoller’s shout-outs are eclectic ... Based on the 2016 election, Stoller may be on to something ... Unfortunately, Goliath comes up short in addressing the intersection between culture and economics ... McGovern’s redistributive economics coupled with unvarnished social liberalism and foreign policy dovishness managed to alienate organized labor, a Democratic mainstay.

... timely ... while Goliath is replete with well-researched stories, the book is argumentatively incomplete and oversimplified. As Professor Daniel Crane notes in a recent article for the Cato Institute, it is absurd to assume that the Sherman Antitrust Act was earnestly passed to break up trusts ... Stoller spends little time addressing libertarian antitrust supporters, neoliberal competition fiends, or socialist detractors. Stoller’s antitrust world is simple, divided into good antitrust crusaders, such as Senator Wright Patman, and bad 'corporatists' like New Deal architect Adolf Berle and economist John Kenneth Galbraith. And while he is right to spend a great deal of time criticizing Democrats, liberals, and technocrats for abandoning the working class, Stoller spends too much time straining to throw different lefty theorists like Galbraith under the bus for supporting the three-part marriage of big institutions: labor unions, corporations, and government ... Stoller’s roving enthusiasm for Jeffersonian 'system of regulated competition' makes the reader wonder how Stoller’s world is different from Friedman’s or Hayek’s. Surely it is, but it is crucial to know precisely how, so as not to repeat the last 50 years of regressive economic policy. Stoller assumes that antitrust enforcement is implicitly populist policy, but it’s not ... It’s impossible to know where Stoller stands because he never paints a picture of the antitrust world he aspires to ... Tellingly, Stoller saddles his prose with tone-deaf subordinate clauses when he uses odious events and characters as positive reinforcements of his thesis.

What’s so telling about this narrative is not only the fact that the golden age of competition that Stoller wishes to restore is the very same period in which great, vertically integrated oligopolies ruled the economy in coordination with one another, labor unions, and the state; it is also that his expansive view of economic power still can’t find a place for class conflict—which, although invisible to Stoller, was often the engine of downward redistribution in the midcentury boom. Because he does not grasp how the fundamental antagonism between labor and capital underlies other forms of economic rivalry, Stoller misunderstands the nature of the New Deal and the legacy it leaves us. As a result, his book offers us a useful guide to some of the ills of concentrated market power today but does not ultimately come to terms with their real origin or present any viable political response ... If the problem lies with capitalism as a system and not specific malicious capitalists, then we’ve got to embark on an adventure of a different kind, one that leads us not back to the comforts of midcentury America but somewhere wild and new. Goliath will not help us find the way.

... passionate, ill-focused ... Ultimately, he lapses into a baggy jeremiad that blames 'concentrated power' for everything from fascism to obesity. This account of once-potent populist politics probably won’t convince those who aren’t already in sympathy with Stoller’s worldview, but it’s lively history.