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By Root 2069 0

- a distinction that the ill-fated Soviet physicist Bukharin had once denied to him existed in a socialist society. Planning could only inhibit and corrupt knowledge, resulting in disasters like Lysenkoism. Polanyi passionately upheld this view ofwhat he called "pure science," in almost religious tones (and hewas a noted theologian). Bernal's camp, he concluded, had "surrendered" to a philosophy that would destroy science. He was as opposed to science with a social purpose as Hayek and Popper were to industry with a social purpose.27

Polanyi's assault on patenting was all the more remarkable in this context. "Patent Reform" appeared in the Review of Economic Studies in autumn 1944, shortly after The Road to Serfdom.28 It seemed to mark a sharp departure from everything he and they defended. Polanyi certainly contended that patents misrepresented creativity and corrupted researchthat was unsurprising. But he argued that the distortions were so great that they outweighed even the dangers of state intervention. The system could only be fixed by change so radical as to amount to its destruction, he maintained. It should be replaced by both a comprehensive state system of administration and a massive provision of state subsidy. That is, in order to free science from its bondage to intellectual property Polanyiwas prepared to do a deal with what he regarded as the devil. Why?

Polanyi acknowledged the strength of support for patenting. A broad consensus in its favor had existed ever since "the very earliest days of the Free Trade movement" (by which he meant the early modern agitation that had produced the 1624 Monopolies Act). Without patents, backers felt, industrial research would lose the stimulus and guidance of market profitability. Speculative capital would dry up. Inventors would be left at the mercy of rapacious corporations, and could not afford to seek backing for fear of seeing their creations expropriated. Research would stagnate amid a reversion to craft secrecy. Polanyi thus recognized the strength of the assumption that "pioneer" inventions needed patents.29 But that assumption, he insisted, was false. If research was truly a matter of tacit knowledge, then no algorithm could exist to predict even probabilistic ally which candidate discoveries or inventions would succeed. There was no such thing as "commercially justified" investment in pioneer ventures, therefore, with or without apatent system. This being so, there was nothing to offset the "grave difficulty" of patenting, namely, the truism that "the full benefit of knowledge is only reaped when its circulation is free." Monopolies militated against the progress theywere supposed to uphold. In recent years, Polanyi claimed, their harmful effects had even increased. The TNEC had proved this: "floods" of patents, often of dubious validity, constrained whole fields of inquiry, while fear of litigation quelled innovation. The system was one of millionaires' justice, as radio pioneer De Forest had found to his cost. Like Plant, in the end-to whom he sent a review copy of the article-Polanyi believed that patents were dubious extrapolations from a false understanding of creativity itself. They presumed to "parcel up a stream of creative thought into a series of distinct claims, each of which is to constitute the basis of a separately owned monopoly." In reality, discoveries were not atomistic in this way, but drew on "the whole network of human knowledge."The system failed because it sought "a purpose which cannot be rationally achieved." Intellectual proprietorship was irrational and corrupt. "The nature of knowledge" demanded "the abolition of patents."

"In order that inventions may be used freely by all," Polanyi urged, society must "relieve inventors of the necessity of earning their rewards commercially." But here was where things got tricky. Pure science could not be self-supporting. As a first step, Polanyi helped himself to Plant's idea for compulsory licensing. But this was merely a way station on the path to the total abolition of intellectual property.