More than a century earlier, Jefferson had complained to James Madison that the Bill of Rights contained no “restriction against monopolies” and supported an unsuccessful constitutional amendment that would have limited Congress’s ability to establish monopolies of trade. In his 1913 book, Other People’s Money, Brandeis, too, argued that protection of liberty and opposition to monopoly went hand in hand. “We learned long ago that liberty could be preserved only by limiting in some way the freedom of action of individuals,” Brandeis said in a 1912 speech. “In the same way, we have learned that unless there be regulation of competition, its excesses will lead to the destruction of competition, and monopoly will take its place.” Brandeis was concerned, in other words, not only about the effect of monopoly on the economy but also about its effect on democracy. In his writings and judicial opinions, he focused on the way monopolists appropriated the businesses and property of independent citizens and how this harmed democratic institutions at the local, state, and federal levels.

Alexander Hamilton may be the rock star of the moment on Broadway, but he should not be the rock star of the 2016 election. In the U.S. presidential race, most of the major candidates are taking on the banks, but, unlike Brandeis, none of them consistently opposes bigness in both business and government. In January, Bernie Sanders declared, “If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust-buster, were alive today, he would say ‘break ‘em up.’ And he would be right.” In fact, Sanders had the wrong historical analogy: Roosevelt did not want to break up the banks; he wanted to regulate them instead. It was Brandeis and Wilson, not Roosevelt, who wanted to break up the banks, but Brandeis abhorred the big government regulatory bodies that Roosevelt and Sanders embrace. Sanders has also attributed his vision of Democratic Socialism to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First New Deal, expressed in his 1937 inaugural address. Here, Sanders’s analogy is historically accurate. But as Arthur Schlesinger noted, “The First New Deal breathed the spirit of the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Croly; the Second New Deal, the spirit of the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson and Louis D. Brandeis. First New Dealers saw economic concentration as inevitable and national planning as desirable; Second New Dealers wished to restore a competitive marketplace.”

The First New Deal created the alphabet soup New Deal federal agencies that Brandeis voted, as a Supreme Court justice, to invalidate. He much preferred the Glass-Steagall Act, which was inspired by his writing. Glass-Steagall separated commercial from investment banks by prohibiting banks from selling stocks. The law helped maintain financial stability until it was dismantled in 1999. Some economists argue that the dismantling of this law led to the creation of banks that were too big to fail and the crash of 2007, which Brandeis might have predicted.