“Antitrust” is a word that has long outlived its usefulness. We need a new word – or set of words – that captures society’s imperative to regulate economic and social relations with its corporate creations.

Who recalls why we’re against trusts? At least beyond a vague, queasy feeling about collusion, hidden power, price fixing and political corruption…

In the US, business trusts arose in the 1880’s and 90’s to hold controlling interests in corporations. At that time, state laws existed that restricted ownership of corporations to in-state residents, limited the corporation’s ability to do business across state lines, and imposed capitalization restrictions. Since the trusts were not incorporated, however, these restrictions did not apply to them.

By 1900 trusts controlled large segments of industries ranging from oil to steel to sugar. “Antitrust” came to be the term used to describe the efforts to control the trusts.

From its origin, ‘antitrust’ incorporated two often contradictory concepts.

First, it referred to government remedies for negative effects on the marketplace caused by large business organizations that had suddenly appeared after the American Civil War (1861-65).

These ills included hostile takeovers that resembled banana republic coups complete with thugs and arrested corporate officers. But of more general effect were legal and illegal business combinations that used anti-competitive practices to extract top prices from consumers and other businesses.

The second concept was that very large economic organizations posed a threat to the democratic process and to society itself. Companies that got too big – from Standard Oil in 1912 to AT&T in 1981 – had to be broken up.

Both concepts underlay the idea of ‘antitrust’: government could by regulation and litigation maintain markets dominated by huge entities, and at the same time, government should break up entities whose very size and power threatened the continuation of a democratic society.

Ironically, the second decade of the 20th century saw both the beginnings of real antitrust enforcement and the end of the trusts themselves. After 1914, there were no trusts to be anti.

The trusts died because the state of New Jersey rewrote its corporation laws to accommodate Standard Oil and did away with the disabilities that had brought trusts into existence. By 1914, all of the then 48 states (save one) had redone their constitutions and corporation laws to abolish the restrictions on corporations that John D. Rockefeller had “bought” New Jersey in order to gain.

So, we now have a term – antitrust – unrelated to any contemporary experience or practice. Its meaninglessness inhibits public debate on the two concepts underlying it that continue to roil American economic life.

We lack the words to debate whether we should continue the policy of the last 30 years of attempting to regulate (or deregulate) large economic entities, or should return to the rule that they should be limited in scale and scope.

The need for new words is urgent. In the term just past, the new conservative majority on the US Supreme Court has undone protections on price fixing dating to 1911 and imposed burdens on victims of anti-competitive practices not seen since the 1930s.

New terms must capture the new realities.