Agreeing to Disagree in Antitrust

The contemporary divide between antitrust interventionists and non-interventionists is not fundamentally a technical dispute about economics or administrability. Rather it is a moralized and identity-laden conflict in which economic arguments are instrumentalized to support deep normative views about the role of markets, the state, and coercive legal power. Drawing on insights from social psychology—motivated reasoning and skepticism—the essay explains why new evidence rarely persuades acros