Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [188]
But it had been a close run thing. In i86o, Carey had thought the country subject to "a paralysis of the body politic, an arrest of the circulation, and a waste of physical and mental force." This stagnation had been the consequence of a neglect of societary force, usually to the benefit, again, of so-called middlemen. Much of Carey's occasional writing was more or less directly devoted to attacks on this class. He blamed the chronic problems of the period on their existence, charging that they created "forced" trade and called it free. The slave states of the American South were one case in point. (Careywas convinced that the Civil War was attributable to free trade and British perfidy.) But it was in Britain and the British Empire that Carey perceived the effects of middlemen to obtain in their purest form. Britain displayed decreasing association and advancing slavery, in effect if not literally. Being devoted to trade, he argued, the British system elevated the interests of distance above those of juxtaposition, and of class above diversity. Britain's vaunted "machines" of the Industrial Revolution were all industries for acting at a distance: ships, railways, telegraphs, and roads. Theywere never machines of locality And they culminated in mere display and pomp, meant to pull in the gullible. "Her whole energies are now devoted to getting up a show," Carey declared of the Great Exhibition. "Thus is the nation converted to a gigantic Barnum, with a gigantic museum, a new description ofmachine, invented for the purpose of attracting visitors." Meanwhile, beneath this gaudy show positives and negatives could never come into true contact because the laissez-faire system had destroyed local distinctions of person. With no opportunities for fruitful juxtaposition, force remained "latent," circulation "sluggish," and the people "enslaved."
Carey identified this phenomenon with centralization. This was for him the ultimate end of free trade and laissez-faire. Wherever it obtained, free trade led to a small class of the very rich, and a mass of the very poor who were effectively enslaved. Like Carlyle and Engels (and the British antipatent camp), Carey made much of the demoralizing effects of this "involuntary association," in which workers' lives were rife with fraud, drunkenness, and gambling. The colonies were in an even worse state. India had been laid waste; invoking Liebig, he predicted the utter exhaustion of its soil. In terms of societary science, free trade imperialism ensured that positive and negative plates were kept far apart, which prevented "any development whatsoever of mental force." Relentless exploitation for distant factories would lead inexorably to a kind of heat death of the empire.40
The way to fight back was by the hackneyed policy of protection. But Carey gave this policy a new, more fundamental purpose. "Without it, men cannot combine together," he declared. The Union would go the same way as Ireland, India, and Carolina. With protection in place, however, "there must be daily increasing economy of muscular force." With that would come the increasing development of "brain power" (another variant of societary force), leading to the enhanced use of machines. Civilization would triumph. "Centralization and civilization have in all countries, and at all periods of the world, been opposed to each other," he reckoned, and the way to civilization was by decentralization.41 The implications of protection were therefore millennial.
Carey therefore saw classical political economy as a false science concocted in the service of centralization, and hence of tyranny. It seemed to work only because British policies really did reduce humans to machines, producing the very objects that the science described. His societary science was to be its nemesis. In truth, however,