An Advocate of Small
Who Thinks Big
By Judith Anderson
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
1977
Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter are both fond of quoting
economist-philosopher E. F. Schumacher, that "small is beautiful"
and that the citizenry should lower its expectations of government.
If it weren't for "a total incapability of collaborating
with anyone, even the best of friends," they might instead be quoting
Leopold Kohr.
Schumacher invited Kohr, his old friend and fellow
philosopher, to pool their "independently developed but similar"
ideas in a book, Kohr said last week on his way to spend a weekend with
friends at Bohemian Grove.
Kohr declined, and the rest is history. Schumacher's little
book, "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," because
the bible and its author guru of the small growth movement. Kohr has remained
in relative obscurity, though he says his own thoughts on smallness date back
40 years and Schumacher's only 15.
Kohr, now 67 and hard of hearing, despite the hearing aid he
holds out like a microphone, does not seem to mind the turn of events. In
fact, now that he is retiring from the academic world (in Aberystwyth, Wales,
where he has taught at the University of Wales for three years), he hopes some
of Schumacher's glory will reflect upon him.
"I hope the requests for lectures will increase with the
increasing miseries of bigness," Kohr said, smiling at the prospects.
(Kohr has two speaking engagements this week in the Bay Area,
but both are private. The reason, a friend said, is that Kohr is unpublished
in the U.S., and if the public were to hear him and become interested in
pursuing his ideas, they would only be frustrated in their attempts to buy his
books.)
It is no accident that Kohr's work which he started as a
newspaper correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and later continued in
Puerto Rico for 30 years as a teacher, is winding up in Wales. The separatist
movement in that country to establish a Welsh parliament epitomizes what Kohr
has been preaching for years:
"That salvation lies not in international
handholding" but in small, self-contained states that can look after
themselves. "To live in separation is infinitely simpler than in trying
to maintain a union."
'To live in separation is
easier than union'
Kohr said. Bigness has "an impoverishing effect," and the big
nations such as the U.S., France, Italy and Great Britain "are
floundering . . . shaking on their foundations."
"The scandal of our age," said Kohr, "is not
war but big war, not poverty but massive poverty, not unemployment but the
scale of unemployment."
"And since the scale of a problem is determined by the
size of the body which it affects," he once wrote, "it follows that
problems of social existence are not diminished but aggravated with every
increase in the size of a community."
Problems would not be eliminated in city-state sized entities,
he said, but they would be more manageable.
Kohr used the energy crisis as an example: "At least 60
per cent of energy consumption is commuting," he said. If we lived and
worked in smaller communities and resumed use of "our amplitude of muscle
power" (i.e. walking), "we would solve 60 per cent of the energy
problem. In Puerto Rico, I had to travel 50 or 60 miles a day to conduct my
business. In Aberystwyth, I travel one-half a mile -- 30 seconds for a
haircut, a minute to buy fish, two minutes to my office by the sea."
Leopold Kohr: "I believe I
have graduated from crank to romantic"
Kohr laughingly acknowledges that his ideas have often been classed as
eccentric. "Yes, yes, I have been considered a crank," he said in
his heavy Austrian accent. But thanks to friend Schumacher's popularity, Kohr
believes he has "graduated from crank to romantic."
He is pleased that the small-is-beautiful concept is catching
on but also disturbed that the politicians who advocate it don't fully
understand how it works.
"You can't say less government is better" in a huge
country the size of the United States, he said. "You need the biggest
government possible in the biggest countries. It is a futile exercise in folly
to suggest otherwise."
"If one wants less government," he went on,
"you must first diminish the size of the place to be governed. The answer
is not, let's have smallness. It's, let's create the frame where the problems
are diminished by diminishing the size of society."
On a visit to San Francisco in 1967, at the invitation of the
late advertising genius Howard Gossage, Kohr suggested the creation of a
city-state here, with a duty-free port, as an antidote to poverty -- and to a
power shift to Southern California.
"The people here feel themselves primarily citizens of
San Francisco secondarily, if at all, as Californians or even Americans,"
he said at the time. "You're practically a city-state now, in
feeling."
He is not quite so outspoken today, at least on the subject of
San Francisco. Secession from the state of California "would be the
prerogative of the citizens of San Francisco," he said. "But I am an
enthusiast of any community that decides to make the most of its limited
dimensions, whether it be San Francisco, Wales, Scotland, Sicily or Swiss
canton."
Kohr, at last, is going to have a chance to practice what he
preaches. Aside from the hoped-for invitations to lecture, he will retire to
"a little farm in Wales" and see just how self-sufficient he can
become.
__________
Anderson, Judith. "An Advocate Of Small
Who Thinks Big." San Francisco Chronicle.
Tues, June 7, 1977, p. 21.
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[Return to L. Kohr page]
