Both the problem and solution is scale

Resurgence magazine, August 2012

 We are living in a frightening and exciting historical moment. All around us there are signs of paradigms shifting: Occupy camps springing up; riots on the streets; growing anger about the greed of those at the top of the financial pyramid. Our certainties seem to be collapsing along with our economies and our ecosystems.

 Living through a collapse is a strange experience. Perhaps the strangest part is that ‘nobody wanes ro admit that it’s a collapse. The results of half a century or debt-fuelled ‘growth’ are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties continue to crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. Politicians – surveying the wreckage of the system they have long talc us there is no alternative to – have nothing to say. Neither do most economists, Faced with this, people are looking elsewhere for answers. One place worth looking is the almost forgotten work of a political thinker who predicted four decades ago chat we might get to this point.

 The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. A crisis caused not, as we are regularly told, by too little growth, but by too much. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge branches of public money, and this in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of Western nations.

 The European Union has grown so big and so unaccountable that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass-extinction event.

 One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr, who has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that most people have never heard of. Possibly readers of this magazine will be better informed: Kohr was one of the intellectual founders of Resurgence and the wider green movement, and one of the principal inspirations for E.F. Schumacher, But he did not have a wide following himself. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire any revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did nor rewrite the economic rules of the modern world.

 Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason why his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half-century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, whether revolutionaries or plutocrats. Quite the opposite, in fact: Kohr’s message is a direct challenge to them. “Wherever something is wrong,” he insisted, “something is too big.”

 Kohr was born in 1909 in the Austrian town of Oberndorf, This small-town childhood, together with his critical study of economics and political theory at the London School of Economics, his experience of anarchist city-states during the Spanish Civil War (which he covered as a war reporter), and the fact that he fled Austria after the Nazi invasion, contributed to his growing suspicion of power and its abuses. Settling in the USA, Kohr began to write the book that would define his thinking. Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the rime was a radical case: mat small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers of superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, giganrist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of clearing a world government as the next step cowards uniting humanity. Kohr was at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, dryly, that his critics “dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet”.

 Kohr’s claim was that society’s problems were caused not by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called the human scale: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modem states, all systems became oppressors.  Changing the system, or the ideology it claimed inspiration from, would nor prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions has shown – because «the problem is nor the thing that is big, but bigness itself.”

 Drawing expansively from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it, The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get their hands on. The solution to the world’s problems was, counter-intuitively, not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of anyone unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative.

 On a whistle-stop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does an entertaining and persuasive job of convincing the reader that many of the glories of Western culture, from cathedrals to great’ art to scientific innovations, were indeed the product of small states.

 To read The Breakdown of Nations 50 years on is to wonder at the predictive powers of its author. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for “whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions.”   Beyond those limits, it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible end point: collapse.

 We are now rapidly reaching the point Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where “instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence.” Kohr’s ‘crisis of bigness’ is upon us, and true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

 This shouldn’t surprise us. lt didn’t surprise Kohr, who, unlike some of his utopian critics, never confused a desire for radical change with the likelihood of it actually happening. Instead, Kohr’s downbeat bur refreshingly honest conclusion was that, like a dying star; the gigantist global system would in the end fall in on itself and the whole cycle of growth would begin all over again. But before it did so, “between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination”, the world would become “little and free once more”.

 We are living in a frightening and exciting historical moment. All around us there are signs of paradigms shifting: Occupy camps springing up; riots on the streets; growing anger about the greed of those at the top of the financial pyramid. Our certainties seem to be collapsing along with our economies and our ecosystems.

 Living through a collapse is a strange experience. Perhaps the strangest part is that ‘nobody wanes ro admit that it’s a collapse. The results of half a century or debt-fuelled ‘growth’ are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties continue to crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. Politicians – surveying the wreckage of the system they have long talc us there is no alternative to – have nothing to say. Neither do most economists, Faced with this, people are looking elsewhere for answers. One place worth looking is the almost forgotten work of a political thinker who predicted four decades ago chat we might get to this point.

 The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. A crisis caused not, as we are regularly told, by too little growth, but by too much. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge branches of public money, and this in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of Western nations.

 The European Union has grown so big and so unaccountable that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass-extinction event.

 One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr, who has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that most people have never heard of. Possibly readers of this magazine will be better informed: Kohr was one of the intellectual founders of Resurgence and the wider green movement, and one of the principal inspirations for E.F. Schumacher, But he did not have a wide following himself. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire any revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did nor rewrite the economic rules of the modern world.

 Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason why his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half-century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, whether revolutionaries or plutocrats. Quite the opposite, in fact: Kohr’s message is a direct challenge to them. “Wherever something is wrong,” he insisted, “something is too big.”

 Kohr was born in 1909 in the Austrian town of Oberndorf, This small-town childhood, together with his critical study of economics and political theory at the London School of Economics, his experience of anarchist city-states during the Spanish Civil War (which he covered as a war reporter), and the fact that he fled Austria after the Nazi invasion, contributed to his growing suspicion of power and its abuses. Settling in the USA, Kohr began to write the book that would define his thinking. Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the rime was a radical case: mat small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers of superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, giganrist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of clearing a world government as the next step cowards uniting humanity. Kohr was at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, dryly, that his critics “dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet”.

 Kohr’s claim was that society’s problems were caused not by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called the human scale: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modem states, all systems became oppressors.  Changing the system, or the ideology it claimed inspiration from, would nor prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions has shown – because «the problem is nor the thing that is big, but bigness itself.”

 Drawing expansively from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it, The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get their hands on. The solution to the world’s problems was, counter-intuitively, not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of anyone unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative.

 On a whistle-stop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does an entertaining and persuasive job of convincing the reader that many of the glories of Western culture, from cathedrals to great’ art to scientific innovations, were indeed the product of small states.

 To read The Breakdown of Nations 50 years on is to wonder at the predictive powers of its author. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for “whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions.”   Beyond those limits, it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible end point: collapse.

 We are now rapidly reaching the point Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where “instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence.” Kohr’s ‘crisis of bigness’ is upon us, and true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

 This shouldn’t surprise us. lt didn’t surprise Kohr, who, unlike some of his utopian critics, never confused a desire for radical change with the likelihood of it actually happening. Instead, Kohr’s downbeat bur refreshingly honest conclusion was that, like a dying star; the gigantist global system would in the end fall in on itself and the whole cycle of growth would begin all over again. But before it did so, “between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination”, the world would become “little and free once more”.