2,812 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Defending free enterprise once meant, for many European economists, opposing patents. Fritz Machlup and Edith Penrose recover this nineteenth-century dispute to ask what can justify granting exclusive rights over knowledge others might independently discover. Their 1950 article combines the history of abolitionist campaigns—including the Netherlands’ abolition of patents in 1869—with a careful separation of claims too often treated as interchangeable: property, fair reward, incentives, and disclosure. Rewarding inventors, they show, does not by itself establish patents as the right instrument; stimulating invention does not prove that protection is necessary or worth its social costs. By distinguishing the political victory of patent advocates from the unresolved economic debate, the article gives readers concrete grounds for questioning what exclusive rights accomplish—and at whose expense.