Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [183]
CIVILIZATION AND SOCIETARY FORCE
The United States has now lived for longer with international copyright than it did without. As a result, the case for it is familiar. The case against is far more counterintuitive. But there was indeed an argument against transatlantic copyright. It upheld not just piecemeal unauthorized reprinting, but a system, and thereby a society. The figure most responsible for it, Henry C. Carey (1793-1879; fig. ILI), created the most influential arguments ever mounted for an alternative to universal literary property.
Carey's role was grounded in experience. As Mathew Carey's son, he enjoyed deeper familiarity with the world of publishing, in all probability, than anyAmerican contemporary (except perhaps the Harper brothers). He had been a publisher most of his life, having first managed a branch of the firm in Baltimore at the age of twelve. Between 1821 and 1835-the glory years of the reprinting system-he ran what was one of the largest publishing houses of all; in 1824-26 its sales aggregated to over $500,000. During that time he masterminded the consolidation of the reprinting industry itself. He knew the culture of reprinting so intimately because he was largely responsible for its existence.
Carey began an authorial career at the moment when he was badgering the Harpers into framing the courtesy system. At first he was a free trader-a commitment that his father reviled. But in the late 1830s something happened to overturn his views. At that point his own firm was leaving the frenzy of reprinting behind. As it did so, Carey, retiring from active involvement, wrote a volume entitled The Harmony ofNature. The book apparently argued from natural science to a version of classical political economy. We cannot know for sure, however, because he abruptly withdrew it and destroyed the entire impression, saying that he had experienced an economic epiphany. A sudden conviction that orthodox political economy radically misconstrued the natural world had transformed his views. He now embarked on a remarkable new career as a political economist and developer of what he called "societary science," in which antagonism to free trade was almost axiomatic. Carey spoke, wrote, campaigned, and published in this cause without cease for the rest of his life-a period of some forty years. During that time he became probably the most famous and influential American economist of whom we today have never heard. His views were adumbrated in a three-volume Principles of Political Economy (1837-40), proclaimed in Past, Present, and Future (1848), and then consummated in the Principles of Social Science (1858-6o). In the interstices of these projects he issued an unending torrent of letters, tracts, pamphlets, and editorials on every topic of his day, from slavery to currency reform. Crowds of thousands came to hear him speak. He played a leading role in the formation of the Republican Party, and in i86o was instrumental in defeating Simon Cameron's bid for the presidential ticket, thus paving the way for the nomination of Lincoln, whose favorite economic thinker he was thought to be. Meanwhile he also traveled widely in Europe, meetingJohn Stuart Mill, the scientists Liebig and Humboldt, and Cavour, the Italian politician. And at home "Carey's Vespers"-regular occasions for wine and conversation about social topics -would later be remembered as foundational for the enterprise of social science. While John Stuart Mill may have pronounced Carey the worst political economist he had ever read, for every Mill there was a Marx, who lined him up alongside Bastiat as the only one worth refuting. And the lawyer and economist Erasmus Peshine Smith found Carey's writings so revelatory that he was led to repudiate the very notion of intellectual property and elaborate a history of civilization itself in terms of piracy.31
FIGURE ii.i. Henry C. Carey. H. C. Carey, Miscellaneous Works, 2 vols.