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In Carey's hands, piracy and copyright became elements in a massive and ambitious would-be science that encompassed the natural and social worlds. He sallied forth several times on the topic, but his Letters on International Copyright represented his most important effort. The Letters appeared first in 1853, at the peak of his agitation in the shaping of Republicanism. Written to oppose a treaty that the secretary of state had negotiated with Britain, it became the single most influential tract against the establishment of copyright between Britain and the United States. In part, it rested on the specific constitutional question of whether a treaty could legitimately determine domestic policy, since it need not be ratified by the House of Representatives-high-handedness that he associated with "centralized" governments.32 But Carey credited it with almost singlehandedly preventing such copyright being adopted in any form. In 1872 he published a sequel, The International Copyright tuestion Considered. These together formed the foes et origo of the anti-internationalization camp. Read alongside Carey's "societary science," they provided an authoritative and apparently scientific argument not only against the internationalization of literary property, but for its strict limitation even at home.

In challenging free trade, there is a sense in which Carey wrote so much because he had to: he was confronting the central orthodoxy of classical political economy. Free trade, as he remarked, had the status in London, Manchester, and Glasgow of "unquestionable scientific truth." To confront it successfully therefore required more science - and different science. This was what Carey set out to produce. He tried to supplant Ricardo's political economy with a societary science that would overturn most of its axioms, methods, facts, and prescriptions at once. He aspired to produce a unified system of knowledge that extended, in principle, from the most basic natural facts to the highest laws of society. His opposition to what he always insisted on calling "British free trade" would then be based on "societary laws" as certain in the social world as that of universal gravitation was in the natural. Andwhat was at stake in discovering those laws, Carey insisted, was the "great question" of his age: "that of civilization." There is no denying that the answers he produced were peculiar-not to mention extremely convoluted. But his presumptuousness in advancing them was typical of his age, when many proposed sciences just as presumptuous: Bagehot in Britain, Tarde in France, even Marx himself. And that age took Careyvery seriously indeed.

Where did Carey get the idea for a unified system of sciences? He got it, quite simply, from reading. That is, he gleaned it, in part at least, from products of the American reprinting system. In particular, Carey devoured Auguste Comte's Course ofPositive Philosophy in Harriet Martineau's translation as soon as it appeared in America, which it did in a reprint by none other than Appleton. Carey inhaled Comte, and circulated copies to his acolytes along with his own anticopyright tracts. Positivism convinced him that a social science must be created, and integrated as the highest level of a coherent and universal system of knowledge. In his own work he was not a positivist in the strict Comtean sense, however, and he reacted strongly against Comte's later moves to create a new religion. But he remained certain of the need for aunified science based on "positive knowledge." For him that meant two things. First, the investigation must begin with observations -with facts - and not with theoretical pronouncements. This, he believed, placed him in stark contrast to Manchester-school political economy, which paid no attention to "the great laboratory of the world" and dealt in terms so abstracted as to be actually false. And, second, there was a hierarchy of natural laws, and hence of sciences to address them,