Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [243]
This was on the face of it an astoundingly interventionist proposal. It had no counterpart anywhere else in Polanyi's voluminous writings. But he argued that eliminating intellectual property in researchwas so important that it justified extreme measures. The need outweighed even "the danger of corruption and arbitrary oppression" that he felt was intrinsic to government subsidies. He tried to distance his idea from notions of state planning, saying that it merely involved streamlining an existing distribution rather than reallocating resources between rival institutions. Its task was already being performed badly, he pointed out; the target of doing better would not be hard to hit. But he conceded that to avoid corruption the appraisal system of his tribunals would have to be "rigid" and that government agents, not peers, would have to staff it. They must exercise a perfect oversight of the field of industrial creativity That might seem distinctly Bernalian, and, moreover, to conflict once more with Polanyi's stipulation against predicting research outcomes. But the important distinction, perhaps, was that between retrospection and prediction. The tribunals' valuations would be of an invention's previous value, not (as with a patents system) its future worth.
This tension draws our attention not to Polanyi's final view of science and society, but to what was in fact a difficult internal struggle that he waged during the war years to articulate that view. He struggled with a series of projects, the remains of which are to be found among his papers today. Each one incorporated sections from its predecessors. In the intellectual progress that they trace, the issue of patenting turns out to have been central. Briefly, he first projected a book to be called Science, directed squarely against the "planning of science" movement. This he pursued for three years, in 1940-43, only to abandon it and move on to another work provisionally called The Scientific Method in Society. This in turn gave way to The Autonomy of Science, which advanced a sweeping three-stage view of the history of science extending back centuries. Elements of this then reappeared in what might seem a radically different text, on Economic Planning. Finally, Polanyi turned the book on planning into a volume named Full Employment in Theory and Practice. And this last did appear in print, as Full Employment and Free Trade, in 1945-constituting the third part of a triptych with Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Popper's Open Society. Only much later would fragments of the other projects resurface, most notably in Personal Knowledge. Throughout these pivotal years arguments about patents formed one of the few common threads, linking each new project to the last. Even the full-employment work culminatedwith them: their abolition was central to creating a moral form of free trade that it claimed was essential to sustaining low unemployment.30
One reason for this ubiquity was that Polanyi believed that the ideology of free trade had originated in opposition to patents. Economic liberty dated from the Monopolies Act of 1624. But more important was the fact that in the 1930s-1940s many hailed patent pooling as the basis of internationalism and