Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [187]
This idea of social batteries had prescriptive implications. The question it posed to policy makers was how to create and maintain such batteries in the number and arrangement that would maximize the flow of societary force. The key to this lay in the polar character of electricity. Carey thought that just as real batteries depended on a difference between plates, so societies depended on distinctions between social plates, or citizens' roles. It was therefore crucial in order for circulation to take full effect that a society exhibit diversity. Specifically, there must be real "difference of employments." Without that there would be no "positives and negatives" to provide the opportunity for force to be converted and power to be obtained. Moreover, such distinct individuals must not only exist, but also be in at least close proximity (this being half a century before long-distance power transmission). In other words, diversity and interaction had to obtain at the local level. So Carey despised institutions that acted at a distance and the "middlemen" who served them. Middlemen were "traders" of all kinds, who charged for the transfer of goods and people across distances and therefore imposed a tax on association. They were like insulators interrupting a circuit. By contrast, he spoke admiringly of the class of the "converters" in a community- the makers of cloth, iron, books, instruments, ships, houses, mills, and furnaces. They acted, he said, as "the solvents of the electric battery." This class constituted "a body of conductors of an electric force whose action becomes more and more intense as societary positives and negatives, producers and consumers, are brought into closer relations each with every other." Without them, the battery would cease to work. Like Tocqueville before him, Carey thus hailed the American tradition of "civil corporations," but for the different reason that he thought civil society was the institutional form of social circuitry. And he also argued that maintaining social variety might depend on government action to sustain diversity within communities. Such action would uphold the operation of a free market locally, by intervening to prevent its homogenization under distant factories (a demand redolent of one that eighteenth-century artisans had made on different grounds).38 This being present, he enthused, "the power and the habit of association {would} become more and more confirmed." Every "societary atom" would find its place, and "an enlightened feeling of self respect gradually supersedes that blind selfishness which so generally characterizes ignorant and isolated men." Morals, tastes, feelings, and affections would improve, and the people would qualify for the liberty of "freedom of speech." Progress would prevail.
Carey's conclusion was thus that civilization-intellectual, moral and economic progress-depended on the maintenance of a diverse and decentralized set of circulations. This involved local free markets protected by strong barriers against distant monopolies. His prime example was the German Zollverein, the customs union produced in post-Napoleonic Europe that regularized trade across the German states. "Under it," Carey declared, "the positives and negatives of awhole nation were brought into communication with each other, and thus has been created a great battery of 40,000,000 pairs of plates throughout which there is a rapidity of circulation scarcely elsewhere on so large a scale exceeded." France and the state of Massachusetts, likewise, managed to preserve social variety; as a result, the powers of their people developed daily, and theywere free. The same thingwas happening to America at large.