The republican tradition had attributed to economics a broader moral and political purpose, and the early advocates of antitrust, true to this tradition, had assessed economic arrangements for their tendency to form citizens capable of self-government. Arnold dismissed this “old religion” as a sentimental notion out of place in an age of mass production. He was the first major antitrust advocate to reject altogether the civic argument for antitrust and to insist exclusively on the consumerist one:
