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By Root 1954 0

to the development of "all those faculties, mental and moral, by which the human animal is distinguished from the brute." It was an old idea dressed up in nineteenth-century clothes -Harringtonian republicanism had rested on a similar principle in the seventeenth century and Harrington could almost have dictated Carey's contention that "with societies as with individual men, physical and mental development, health, and life, had always grown with growth in the rapidity of circulation and declined as the circulation had been arrested or destroyed."What was new in Carey's version was what did the circulating. This was an entity that he called "societary force." Societary force was by all accounts to be taken as real, not metaphorical. Carey wanted it accepted alongside the other forces -magnetism, gravity, electricity, and so on- the interactions between which so excited naturalists in the 1840s-i85os. Figures like Faraday and William Robert Grove had become famous for suggesting that forces were somehow interlinked, and proposed various visions of the "correlation," "conversion," or "conservation" of"force," "power," or "energy." Carey vaunted this as nothing less than a "new philosophy." It promised to resolve all"subtle agencies" into manifestations of "one and the same force." That force could never be created or destroyed, only converted into some other form. By exercising such conversions, one could produce effects in the realworld. In retrospect this sounds like early energy science. But in the i85os substantial differences existed between these rival schemes, Carey's among them. His was, in essence, a contribution not to the physical science of force, but to the social. If "unity of law" unified the sciences, that was because it was itself based in a more fundamental "unity of force." Societary science was the discipline devoted to analyzing this unity of force in all its provinces.36

In other words, power came about through the artful guidance of a circulation of force through its various forms. To ask about the nature of this force was in a sense to raise a question malposee, since no one form was more fundamental than the others. But for Carey the best candidates were electricity, first and foremost, and money a distant second. Electrical force appeared in the nervous system and in plants no less than in inorganic matter; it flowed freely through conductors with, he thought, no loss of efficacy Electrical circuits furnished the easiest form of force circulation to imagine, the most powerful, and the most modern. Electrical force in motion therefore became his archetype for societary circulation. It was not an absurd idea; on the contrary, it was distinctly up to date. In Carey's generation, researchers likeAlfred Smee were trying to develop an American science called electro-biology to display forces implicit in social communities. But there is no sign that Carey directly encountered electro-biologists. Instead he built his vision on what little he himself knew of electrical circuits. He asserted that every individual in a social system exhibited a certain polarity, analogous (and perhaps more than analogous) to the terminals of a battery like Grove's. Which polarity one displayed depended on one's role at a given moment. As "giver and receiver, teacher and learner, producer and consumer," he wrote, each citizen could be considered "positive and negative by turns."As aresult, when citizens combined in different configurations they could collectively constitute "a great electric battery to which each individual contributes his pair of plates." Societary force would then flow from and through this battery Such a model suited a notion of money as this force, too, making capital into a circulating, fluid-like entity in some ways similar to Marx's concept. `As it is with electricity in the physical world," Carey told the treasury secretary on one occasion, "so it is with moneyin the social one." Both electricity and money were powerful and invisible-traits that led him to predict that society would eventually adopt