authoro f SmaU Ii Beautid With a new Afterwordb y the Author and Forewordb y Kidqxkick Sale The long-neglected work that4 x1~s how big is anything but beautiful-for nations.e conomies. military forcess,g overnment programs, labor unions, businesses, neighborhoods, and ail other human end-or. “Whenever something is wr: ng, something is too big,” say? the far-sighted ,?;th,-,- “-.4 ‘.h..+il Vi T.. ~G.n 1 1w ork. Kohr’s thesis- that bigness is the source of all social misery-was for- mulated in 1957,b ut is just beginning to sound sensible to a lot of people. Thousands have zad E. F. Schumacher’s popular classic, Small Is Beautiful, and have begun to comprehend the dangers of bigness. Schumacher himsel:, however, gave enormous credit to Leopold Kohr, calling h:im the person who taught him more than anyone el:;e. nI ehT Breakdown of Nations Kohr argues convin;zing!y that gargantuan growth has brought on wars, depressed living standards, and blocked social progress. His lively examples are just as timely now as when Kohr first wrote &is book; perhaps now we can give his provocative ideas the atttintion they deserve. “Right from the opening page, with its outra- geous and yet clearly most sensiblep roposition, I was ccrptivutedw. hoever this mcm was, he could write skillfully.w ith wit cmd gruce and point... .hnd the theories that informed the : book-they were, to my mind, nothing short of briUicmLc ertainly utnong the most important contzibutfonst o political philosophy in recent decaw -from the Foreword by Kirkpahick Sale D529 / A Dutton Paperback / $4.95 f In Canada: $6.25 ISBN: O-52547529-X 1078 reakdown of Nations LEOPOLD KOHR Foreword by Kirkpatrick Sale Afterword by Leopold Kohr A Dutton Pafxrback E.P. DUTTON I NEW YORK TO COLIN LODGE sihT kcabrepap noitide first dehsilbup 1978 yb .P.E ,nottuD a Division of Sequoia-Elsevier gnihsilbuP ,ynapmoC ,.cnI weN .kroY Copyright @ 1957,197& yb Leopold Kohr droweroF Copyright @I 1978 yb kcirtapkriK elaS llA rights reserved. detnirP ni the .A.S.U No trap of siht noitacilbup yam be reproduced 01 dettimsnart ni yna form or yb yna ,snaem electronic or ,lacinahcem gnidulcni photocopy. recording or yna noitamrofni storage dna retrieval metsys won nwonk or to be ,de:nevni tuohtiw permission ni gnitirw from the ,rehsilbup except yb a reviewer ohw sehsiw to quote brief passages ni connection htiw a r&es nettirw for noisulcni ni a gam .eha repapwen or .tsacdaorb For nhtamrofni contact: .P.E ,nmtuD 2 kraP ,eunevA weN ,kroY .Y.N 10016 yrarbiL of Congress Catalog draC rebmuN 78-63312 ISBN: 0-525-47529-x Maps nward yb cnarF idracciB dehsilbuP ylsuoenatlumis ni adanaC yb .ekralC niwrI ynapmoC& ,detimiL Toronto dna Vancouver 10 9 8 7 0 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS - -. .~-~~- STNEMGDELWONKCA vi FOREWORDb y Kirkpatrick Sale vii . INTROD”CTION XV’?1 I THE PHILOSOPHIES OF MISERY 1 II THE REWOP THEORY OF NOISSERGGA 25 III DISUNION WON 55 I” TYRANNY IN A ETATS-LLAMS DLROW 70 ” THE SCISYHP OF POLITICS: THE PHILOSOPHIC TNEMUGRA 80 IV LAUDlVIDNI DNA EGAREVA MAN: THE LACITILOP TNEMUGRA 97 “II THE GLORY OF THE :LLAMS THE LARUTLUC TNEMUGRA “5 1iiV THE EFFICIENCY OF_THE :LLAMS THE ECONOMIC TNEMUGRA 132 1X UNION THROUGH DIVISION: THE EVITARTSINIMDA TNEMUGRA 170 X THE ELIMINATION OF riIERG :SREWOP NAC IT EB DONE,: 188 XI BUT LLIW IT EB DONE? ‘97 XII THE NACIREMA EMPIRE? 198 DROWRETFA by the Author 2’7 :SECIDNEPPA THE PRINCIPLE OF FEDERATION DETNESERP IN SPAM 225 YHPARGOILBIB 242 INDEX 245 A.CKNOWLEDGMENTS -- ost of my inspiration I owe to friends whose love of chal- icnge and debate was invaluable in the formulation of my ideas. This book would therefore never have been written without a long string of anir&ted discussions with Diana Lodge, Anatoi and Or!cx Murad, Max and Isabel Gideonse, Sir Robert and Lady Fraser, my venerable late friend Professor George M. Wrong and Mrs. Wrong, Noel ;nd Donovan Bartley Finn, my brother Jobn R. Kohr, David and Manning Farrell, Franc and Rosemary Ricciardi, and, above all, Joan and Bob Alexander who for fwe long years had tc bear with my’constructions of pleasurable gloom at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nx would the book ever have been pubiished without the advice and encouragement of Sir Herbert Read, or without rq friends and colleagues from the University of Puerto Rico-Severe Colberg, kdoifo Fortier, Hector Estades, Dean Hiram Cancio, and Chan- cellor Jaime Benitez-whose interest led to a grateful!y acknowl- edged grant from the Carnegie Foundation. The University of Puerto Rico L.K. January‘ 957 vi FOREWORD by Kirkpawick Sale he first time 1 ever came XI-ass the name of Leopold Kohr was in a footnote of an obscure little academic volume called Size and Democracy, where he was credited with these arresting words: There seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily accept- abie 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. Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.1 Naturally my interest was piqued, particularly since I was corn-- ing to similar conclusions in the course of my own explorations of scale and power, and I filed the name away for future reference. The second t&e I encountered it was in-E. F. Schumacher’s Smnll Is Beoutiju!. where Kohr is mentioned in passing as having written “brilliantly and convincingly” on “the problem of ‘scale,‘” though in fact none of his work is quoted or even cited. And the third time was when a friend of mine, Norman Rush, who had been a rare-book dealer and was possessed of what one can only call a photobibliographic memory, urged Kohr upon me as a man I had to read before I went any further into my own work. Though he was able to give me the name of Kohr’s seminal book-The Breakdoiun of h’ations, as it happened-he also allowed that it had been published home twenty years ago and was long since out of print. Unfortunately, although Norman assured me he had a copy of Breakdown somewhere around the attic of his house, there was no apparent way of ever laying hands on it: the attic was stacked from top to bottom with probably to,ooo books, on the floors, on the staircase, on the tables, behind the tables, holding up the 1Sire and Democmy, by Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Stan- ford University Press, 197S. p. 11 a. vii FOKEWOXD tables, and you could never find the Kohr without somehow get- ting rid of a couple of thousand books first. So if I was going to have a chance to read this man, I’d best look elsctia’wre. I tried the secondhand bookstores that still populate parts of Courth Avenue and lower Broadway in New York; not only were there no copies of Bzakdown, but none of the wizened old men, peering over rimless bifocals with the air of knowing every book since Guten- berg, had ever even heard of it. I tCed the book services that promise they can find any book anywhere-“~oo,ooo books in stock”/-mmmG? ~IJST ASK t&‘-but all my requests seemed to fall into a great void. I even asked a friend to advertise in The Antiquarian. Bookseller, bible of the rare-book trade, to see if some raiser somewhere would part with what I had now become convinced must be the last extant copy of Breakdown, and I was willing to pay his price; not a nibble. Reluctantly I resigned myself to never getting an actual copy of this precious volume to call my own, so I determined at least to find a copy to read. I tried my local bran& libraries: no listings. I went to the NYU Library a few blocks from my home: their only zpy was in some distant Wall Street branch, and when I called there they said they could find no trace of it. So finally 1 went to the 4snd Street Library, granddaddy 0.’ them~all, and within mio- “tes I was at ha sitting dew-r. with a copy-a pristine, barely touched copi’, it was no surprise to find-of Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations. It was worth the wait. Right from the opening page, with its outrageous and yet clearly most sensible proposition, I was cap tivated. Whoever this man was, he could write: skillfully, with wit and grace and point. He constructed his arguments with deadly logic, for the most pa persuasive and yet somehow judicious all at once. He seemed at home with a wide range of subjects and authors and periods, erudite and full of learning, sometimes of the most unlikely kind, but in na way stuffy or academic. He was enthusiastic and obviously believed very deeply in his vision, but he was not unrealistic or utopian in any sense. And if he was im- modest enough to compare himself with Karl Marx, suggesting that his theories explained some workings of the world actually better than that undoubted master, yet he was modest enough to acknowledge in an aside that he was an expert in, if anything, international customs unions and that “in every other field I have to trust to what other ape&lists have dug out.” . . . “I” FOREWORD Aed the theories that informed the book-they were, to my minii, nothing short of brilliant, certainly among the most im- portant contributions to political philosophy in recent decades. When first published in ,957 they seemed strange, no doubt, and clearly at odds with the growth-at-all-costs ethos of that period, but read in the light of the law ~CJ~OSw, hen that ethos had proved fruitless and even dangerous, they took on a new significance. This, I realized, was without doubt a book-to use the bromide so often misapplied-whose time had truly come. The importance of Bzakdown lies in its perception-unique in the modern world, to my knowledge, perhaps in all political literature since Aristotle-that size governs.~ What matters in the affairs of a nation, just as in the affairs of a building, say, is the size of the unit. A building is too big when it can no longer provide its dwellers with the services they expect-running water, waste disposal, heat, electricity, elewtors, and the like-without these taking upsomuch room that there is not enough left over for living space, a phenomenon that actually begins to happen in a build- ing over about ninety or a hundred floors. A nation becomes too big when it can no longer provide its citizens with the services they expect-defense, roads, posts, health, coins, courts, and the like-without amassing such complicated institutions and bureau- cracies that they actually end up preventing the very ends they are attempting to achieve, a phenomenon that is now commonplace in the modern industrialized world. It is not the character of the building or the nation that matters, nor is it the virtue of the agents or leaders that matters, but rat!xr the size of the unit: even saints asked to administer a building of qoo floors or a nation of zoo mil!ion people would find the job impossible. The notion that size governs is one that has long been familiar to many kinds of specialists. Biologists realize, as J. B. S. Haldane showed many years ago, that if a mowe were to be as big as an elephant, it would have to become an elephant-that is, it would 1 Cambridge University professor Austin Robinson, writing a few years after Breakdown was first published, acknowledged that, after a complete search of the political literature of the previous POOy ears, he experienced “a feeling of incredulity” that he was unable “to discover a volume of antecedent literature such as the subject seemed to have deserved.” (The Economic Consequences of the Size of Nations), Macmillan [London], 1960, p. xiii. ix FOREWORD have to develop those featuies, such as heavy stubby legs, that would allow it to support its extraordinary weight. City planners realize that accumulations of people much above 100,ooo create entirely new problems, more dificult and serious than those 01 smaller cities, and that it is virtually impossible for a city exceed- ing that litnit ever to run in the ‘black since the municipal services it must supply cost more than any feasible amount of taxation it can raise. Hospital administrators, bridge engineers, classroom teachers, sculptors, government bureaucrats, university presi- dents, astronomers, corporation executives-all realize that the sizes of the units in their own particular areas of concern are vita& important to the way their affairs are run and goals accomplished. Kohr‘s achievement is that he has taken this perception a,-d applied it in a most fruitful and convincing way to the societies in which people live. He has shown that there are inevitable limits to the size of those societies, for, as he puts it, “social problems have the unforamate tendency to grow at a geometric ratio with the growth of an organism of which they are a part, while the ability of man to cope wiii Lt hem, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic ratio.” In the real political world, in other words, there are limits, and wually fairly couscribed limits, beyond which it does not make much sense to grow. It is only in small states, Kohr suggests, that there can be true democracy, because it is only there that the citizen can have some direct influence over the governing institutions: only there that economic problems become tractable and controllable, and economic lives become more rational; only there that culture can flourish without the diversion of money and energy into statist pomp and military adventure: only there that the individual in all dimensions can flourish free of systematic social and governmental pressures. Thus, the purposes of the mod- ern world might better be directed not to the fruitless pursuit of one-world&m but to the fruitful development of small, coherent regions, not to the aggrandizements of states but to the breakdown of nations. I sat there stunned: this was a truly impressive work. That it should have been greeted with such indifference in ,957 was un- fortunate, but not so surprising. That it should not have an audi- ence today, however-in an era in which the overdevelopment of Western nations had brought on unchecked inflation, resource depletion, and worldwide pollution; in which major cities x