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extending from the most basic to the most exalted. These laws must be common to both natural and social realms, and Carey would be their discoverer. He thus projected himself as nothing less than a nineteenth-century Copernicus, fated to overthrow the monstrous concoction of epicycles that was contemporary political economy. Hence it was that a Manual of Social Science designed to feed his doctrines to students opened with a rhapsody from Kepler about the harmony of the world, and hailed Carey as "the Newton of Social Science."33

Carey's prime example of the blindness of political economy was an axiom that he attributed to Ricardo, although in fact it dated back at least to Adam Smith. According to this axiom, societies always began by farming the most fertile soils. Later, as population pressures grew, they spread into less fertile lands, so their agricultural output tailed off. Carey took this axiom to be central to the reputation ofpolitical economy as the "dismal science," because it not only assumed that wealth ultimately derived from agriculture, but also asserted that humanity faced an ever-worsening future. That is, it was the basis for Malthusian despair. Carey maintained that history showed it to be false in every single factual instance (fig. 11.2). Marshalling examples from ancient Assyria to modern Chile, he tackled "this atrocious theory," as one eulogist put it, with "a demonstration of its falsity that has scarcely a parallel in the history of science, physical or moral." Carey asserted that in fact societies did the precise opposite. They always began by cultivating uplands with thin soil (A), and only moved on to richer, lower country (B) as wealth and technology permitted. And this made sense, he thought, because their sheer fertility would make rich lands hard to farm with primitive machinery. Carey thus asserted that history showed a common thread ofprogress: from poorer to more sophisticated roads, from simpler to more complex commerce, from primitive to more powerful tools, and from subsistence to productive farms. It was almost certainly this conviction that inspired him to seek out Liebig, who was the leading proponent of an agricultural chemistry that promised to shatter Malthus's pessimism.34

Carey's social science developed from this fundamental observation into a huge mass of empirical specificity and principled generalization. At the same time it came to resemble more and more explicitly a certain image of natural science. It began from the point that man was, as Carey declared, "the molecule of society." Our basic need (because definitive of humanity itself) was for "association" with other humans. One only became properly human through association, because humanness consisted largely in knowledge, knowledge depended on experience, experience was collected and communicated through language, and language came into being collectively. A completely isolated human being would therefore not be fully human at all. Thus this latter-day Newton proclaimed what he called his "great law of molecular gravitation": that human beings naturally gravitated toward one another, forming social groups. Moreover, larger groups exerted a correspondingly stronger "attractive force," cities having more pull than small towns. As Carey concluded (with a distinctly shaky grasp of Newtonian principle), social gravitation was "as everywhere else in the material world, in the direct ratio of the mass, and in the inverse one of the distance."35

FIGURE 11.2. Carey's pictorial retort to Ricardo. H. C. Carey, Principles of.Social.Science, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincottand Co., i8g8), vol. 1,138. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

What resulted from this lawwas a society resembling a collage ofplan- etary systems. People gravitated toward centers, large and small, and small centers congregated around large. To explain why these systems did not collapse in on themselves, Carey hit upon on what he dubbed "societary circulation." This now became his central concept. Such circulation, he argued, was essential