Leopold Kohr

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Leopold Kohr (born 5 October 1909 in Oberndorf bei Salzburg, Austria, died February 26, 1994 in Gloucester, England) was an economist, jurist, political scientist and a practicing philosopher.

Contents 1 Life and Work 2 Philosophy 3 References 4 Bibliography 5 See Also 6 External links

[edit] Life and Work

Kohr grew up in the small town of Oberndorf near Salzburg, and it remained his ideal of community. He obtained doctorate degrees in law at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and political science at the University of Vienna. He also studied economics and political theory at the London School of Economics.

In 1937 Kohr became a freelance correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, where he was impressed by the limited, self-contained governments of the separatist states of Catalonia and Aragon, as well as the small Spanish anarchist city states of Alcoy and Caspe. He became close friends with journalist George Orwell and shared offices with correspondents Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux.^[1]

Kohr fled Austria in 1938 after it was annexed by Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States and became a citizen.^[2][3][4]

Kohr taught economics and political philosophy at New Jersey's Rutgers University from 1943 to 1955.^[4] From 1955 to 1973 he served as professor of Economics and Public Administration at the University of Puerto Rico. There he developed his concepts of village renewal and traffic calming. He also advised the independence movement of the nearby island of Anguilla.^[4]

After many rejections by American and British publishers, Kohr's first book The Breakdown of Nations was published in 1957 in Britain after a chance meeting with British anarchist Sir Herbert Read.^[2]

In 1973 Kohr moved to Wales, whose Welsh Independence movement he had long advised and supported.^[4] He taught political philosophy at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.^[5]

In 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden, Kohr received the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the Alternative Nobel Prize, "for his early inspiration of the movement for a human scale.”^[5] In 1984 Salzburg created the Leopold Kohr Academy and the Cultural Association "Tauriska" to put his theories of regional autonomy into practice.^[4]

Kohr was planning to return to his hometown of Obendorf to live when he died in 1994. He was buried at the local cemetery in the family plot.^[4] Salzburg journalist Gerald Lehner completed a biography of Kohr in 1994.^[1]

Author Ivan Illich describes Kohr as "a funny bird—meek, fay, droll, and incisive," as well as "unassuming" and even "radically humble."^[6]

[edit] Philosophy

Kohr described himself as a "philosophical anarchist." Kohr protested the "cult of bigness" and economic growth and promoted the concept of human scale and small community life. He argued that massive external aid to poorer nations stifled local initiatives and participation. His vision called for a dissolution of centralized political and economic structures in favor of local control.^[5]

In his first published essay "Disunion Now: A Plea for a Society based upon Small Autonomous Units," published in Commonweal in 1941, Kohr wrote about a Europe at war: "We have ridiculed the many little states, now we are terrorized by their few successors." He called for the breakup of Europe into hundreds of city states.^[2] Kohr developed his ideas in a series of books, including The Breakdown of Nations (1957), Development without Aid (1973) and The Overdeveloped Nations (1977).^[5]

From Leopold Kohr's most popular work The Breakdown of Nations:

There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations have been welded onto overconcentrated social units.

Kohr was an important inspiration to the Green, bioregional, Fourth World, decentralist, and anarchist movements. One of Kohr's students was economist E. F. Schumacher, another prominent influence on these movements, whose best selling book Small Is Beautiful took its title from one of Kohr's core principles.^[3] Similarly, his ideas inspired Kirkpatrick Sale's books Human Scale (1980) and Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (1985). Sale arranged the first American publication of The Breakdown of Nations in 1978 and wrote the foreword.^[2]

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Small is Beautiful: Selected Writings from the complete works. Posthumous collection, Vienna, 1995.
• The Academic Inn, Lolfa, 1993.
• The Inner City: From Mud To Marble, Lolfa, Dyfed, 1989.
• Development Without Aid: The Translucent Society, Schocken Books, 1979.
• The Overdeveloped Nations: The Diseconomies Of Scale, Schocken, 1978.
• The City Of Man: The Duke Of Buen Consejo, Univ Puerto Rico, 1976.
• Is Wales Viable?, C. Davies, 1971.
• The Breakdown of Nations, Routledge & K. Paul, 1957; Chelsea Green Publishing Company edition, 2001.

[edit] See Also

• Anarchism
• Bioregionalism
• City state
• Decentralization
• Human scale
• Secession
• Simple living

[edit] External links

• Leopold Kohr Akademie
• The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr, Ivan Illich, Fourteenth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures, October 1994, Yale University.
• Leopold Kohr Online links to Kohr articles
• Leopold Kohr's essay "Disunion Now: A Plea for a Society based upon Small Autonomous Units" (1941)
• Kirkpatrick Sale comments on Kohr and Breakdown of Nations