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By Root 1993 0

Carey was no scientist. He never performed experiments or did any but the most perfunctory mathematics. His workwas devoid of statistical analysis, instead parading endless "facts," each of them treated as self-sufficient and self-explanatory. Instead, he made reading into his scientific practice. He collected and regurgitated massive amounts of historical and economic information from printed books. Having honed his skills in longyears spent as a reader for his father's publishing house, he co-opted a way of reading that in private he called his "`copy-book' plan."42 This "Plan" was in essence aversion of the commonplacing used by earlier generations of scholars to cope with the daunting flow of books produced by printing. Commonplaces constituted Carey's version of scientific "observations." For Marx this was his fatal flaw: he lambasted Carey for an "uncritical and superficial" shuffling of numbers, for "spurious erudition," and for an "atrocious lack of the critical faculty." But what to Marx was a maddening weakness was for others an impressive empiricism, much needed in the and field of political economy.43

In particular, Carey relied for his observations on the reprint system. None other than Edward Youmans's edited collection The Correlation and Conservation of Forces was a key resource for his societary science.44 This volume was the first account of "the new philosophy of forces" to enjoy large exposure in the United States. It comprised reprinted essays by Grove, Helmholtz, Mayer, Faraday, and Liebig, all of them arguing for the correlation of "forces" between various branches of physical phenomena. An additional reprint by the physiologist and proponent of animal magnetism William Carpenter went further, to indicate rich interchanges between physical and vital forces. Carpenter's extension of this "new philosophy" to the internal dynamics of the human body was deeply controversial in Britain. But as Youmans remarked in his introduction, if he was right then the principle of correlation "must also apply to society." And it was there, he continued, that "we constantly witness the conversion of forces on a comprehensive scale." "The powers of nature are transformed into the activities of society; water-power, wind-power, steam-power, and electrical-power are pressed into the social service, reducing human labor, multiplying resources, and carrying on numberless industrial processes: indeed, the conversion of these forces into social activities is one of the chief triumphs of civilization."45 Carey's reading of the book followed these leads, which bore fruit in his own force-based societary science. He well knew Youmans's views-he once showed up at Appleton's premises and launched into a tirade against him for promoting Spencerism and "British free-trade"-but his use of the editionwas radically antagonistic to them.46 In short, Carey's defense of reprinting would rest not only on reprints, but on those designed to destroy reprinting itself.

TWO IDEAS OF PIRACY

Carey became the universally acknowledged "high priest" of protectionist ideology. His polemics enjoyed huge support in the Northern states, especially Pennsylvania. The press, Horace Greeley's Tribune in the van, lauded them; Greeley himself wrote a treatise endorsing much of Carey's program (its protectionism, that is; he supported international copy- right).47 As a result, two ideas of piracy confronted each other in contemporary literary politics. One was that of national rapacity. The outraged British accusedAmerica of this, charging wholesale theft not only ofbooks but also of designs, theories, technologies, and industrial techniques. Careywillingly conceded that to the British Americans were "little better than thieves or pirates." The other was what his camp saw as the real idea of piracy: that exemplified by Britain's endorsement of colonialist exploitation across the globe. In support of free trade, Carey's side pointed out, the British were quite prepared to hail maritime pirates as free trade pioneers. They regarded the smuggler who violated