Ernst Friedrich Schumacher Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher (1911–1977) was an environmental, or Buddhist, economist best known for his influential book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (1973). Influenced by the Austrian philosopher Leopold Kohr, he argued for small-scale economies, social and ecological justice, and nonviolence.

Schumacher was born in Bonn, Germany, to an academic family and studied first at Oxford University in Britain as a Rhodes Scholar and then at Columbia University in New York. In 1934 he returned to Germany but fled in 1936 with his new wife to escape Nazism, settling in Britain.

After becoming a British citizen in 1946, Schumacher was sent to Germany as part of the British Control Commission to work on the economic reconstruction of Germany following World War II (1939–1945), and he began around this time to think about the idea of appropriateness in terms of economic scale and patterns of ownership. The idea of appropriateness has since become a key theme in environmental economics.

In 1949 Schumacher became chief economic advisor to the British Coal Board, a post he held for twenty years. He argued that coal rather than oil should supply the greater part of the world’s energy needs and voiced concerns about the depletion of fossil fuels. He was active in the British Soil Association from this time as well, an interest that developed as a consequence of a family move to a house with a large garden in Surrey; Schumacher became an enthusiastic advocate of organic gardening.

In 1955 Schumacher travelled to Burma as an economic consultant but later said that he felt Burma could teach the West a great deal about economics. Impressed by the lack of materialism he observed in the Burmese people, he was committed to the idea that economics conceptualized purely in terms of providing for material needs was insufficient; economic activity also must be fulfilling for people in sustainable ways. His celebrated 1966 essay “Buddhist Economics” expanded on this theme and outlined his thesis that the most rational economic policy was production from local resources for local needs.

Schumacher’s ideas found practical expression in the Intermediate Technology Development Group (later known as Practical Action), which he founded in 1966 to work on economic development within people’s cultural context development, thereby respecting cultural differences and promoting the principle of appropriateness in technological and economic development.

Schumacher died in Switzerland in 1977. In addition to Small Is Beautiful, he wrote only one other book, A Guide for the Perplexed, published posthumously in 1977. Both titles have been widely read around the world. He also made regular contributions to the magazine Resurgence; a selection of these essays was collected in the 1997 publication This I Believe. In 1980 the E F Schumacher Society was founded in Britain to continue Schumacher’s work, and it grew to include branches in several countries.

Bibliography:

Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered. London: Vintage, 1973. The Schumacher Society, n.d., schumacher.org.uk.
Wood, Barbara. Alias Papa: A Life of Fritz Schumacher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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