Leopold Kohr Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) was an Austrian philosopher who formulated the theory that small is beautiful. Although he is little known outside his home country, he had a profound impact on economic and political thought in the latter years of the twentieth century. Born in Oberndorf, Austria, he insisted that everything he learned worth knowing he learned from that small town of fewer than two thousand people. He obtained his doctorate in law from the University of Innsbruck, his doctorate in political science from the University of Vienna, and he also studied at the London School of Economics. In 1937, Kohr became a freelance correspondent during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Although not Jewish, he fled Austria in 1938 after the Nazi takeover and immigrated to the United States where he became a citizen. He taught economics at New Jersey’s Rutgers University from 1943 to 1955, at the University of Puerto Rico from 1955 to 1973, and the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth from 1973 to 1978.

Kohr described himself as a philosophical anarchist. He protested the cult of bigness and unrestricted economic growth, and he promoted the concepts of human scale and small community life. He argued that massive external aid to poorer nations stifled local initiatives and participation, and he called for the dissolution of centralized political and economic structures in favor of local control. In his first published essay, “Disunion Now: A Plea for a Society Based upon Small Autonomous Units” (1941), Kohr called for the breakup of Europe into smaller parts. He developed his ideas further in his best-known work, The Breakup of Nations (1957), in which he states, “There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. . . . Whenever something is wrong something is too big.” He cited examples such as the dinosaurs and the Soviet Union to prove his point. He argued that small organizations and small cities are more benevolent, creative, efficient, and stable than their larger counterparts. His ideal was Switzerland, which maintained itself as a prosperous state amidst warring Europe.

Kohr continued to express his ideas in a series of books over the next thirty years. In Development Without Aid (1979) he calls on developing nations to reject Western aid and to seek self-sufficiency. In Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies of Scale (1978), he proposes that the larger the state, the worse off the citizen. In City of Man (1976), he praises the medieval city as more culturally and socially effective than its modern counterpart. In The Inner City: From Mud to Marble (1989), he maintains that urban giantism will lead to a breakdown of the social order and that human settlements need to return to “the human scale.” Two of Kohr’s profound contributions to social science were his use of the terms verhaltnismassigkeit, or proportionality, and appropriateness. Proportionality is a measure not only of efficiency but also of goodness. Appropriateness is the correlation between size and harmony.

Kohr helped cement the foundations of alternative economics and political science; he was an important inspiration to the green, bio-eco, fourth world, decentralist, and anarchist movements. One of his students was economic theorist E. F. Schumacher, who took Kohr’s seminal idea as the title of his 1973 book, Small Is Beautiful. A number of thinkers continued to develop Kohr’s seminal ideas, including Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich and English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read. Kohr was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, often called the alternative Nobel Prize, in 1983.

Bibliography:

Illich, Ivan. The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr. Great Barrington, Mass.: E. F. Schumacher Society, 1994.
Lehner, Gerald. 2009. “The Biography of Leopold Kohr.” Leopold Kohr Akademie. www leopold-kohr-akademie.at/lka/modules/info/index. php?id=1:1.

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