Leopold Kohr

Leopold Kohr (5 October 1909 in Oberndorf bei Salzburg, Austria – 26 February 1994, in Gloucester, England) was an economist, jurist and political scientist known both for his opposition to the "cult of bigness" in social organization and as one of those who inspired the Small Is Beautiful movement.

For almost twenty years, he was Professor of Economics and Public Administration at the University of Puerto Rico.

He described himself as a "philosophical anarchist."

His most influential work was The Breakdown of Nations.

Kohr was born in a Jewish family on 5 October 1909 in the small town of Oberndorf, near Salzburg, and it remained his ideal of community.

He often commented on the fact that the Christmas carol "Silent Night" was written and composed as "Stille Nacht" in his home village.

He earned doctorate degrees in law, at the University of Innsbruck, 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, and 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 a close friend of the journalist George Orwell and shared offices with the correspondents Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux.

Kohr fled Austria in 1938 after it had been annexed by Nazi Germany, and he emigrated to the United States.

He later became an American citizen.

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.

Kohr taught economics and political philosophy at Rutgers University, New Jersey, from 1943 to 1955.

From 1955 to 1973, he was professor of Economics and Public Administration in the University of Puerto Rico, in San Juan, except for a period in 1965–1966 during which he was professor of economics at the University of the Americas, in Mexico City, Mexico.

During those years he developed his concepts of village renewal and traffic calming and "lent his advice to local city planning initiatives".

He also advised the independence movement of the nearby island of Anguilla.

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 the anarchist Sir Herbert Read.

Kohr developed his ideas in a series of books, including The Breakdown of Nations (1957), Development Without Aid (1973) and The Overdeveloped Nations (1977).

Leopold Kohr was highly critical of the claim that the world is split into too many states and opposed pan-nationalist, continental and global unions.

He argued that the success of Swiss Confederation did not lie in a union between the French, German and Italian-speaking peoples, as that would lead to the domination of Swiss Germans and to the gradual decline of other groups.

The reason that Switzerland remained diverse was that instead of having three nationalities, it was federated into 22 cantons, representing the actual cultural divisions of Switzerland.

Kohr argued that number of autonomous cantons "eliminates all possible imperialist ambitions on the part of any one canton, because it would always be outnumbered by even a very small combination of other".

According to Kohr, a European Federation of unequally large states would lead to a domination of a single nation and thus an erosion of dialects and smaller languages "with just the same inevitability as the German federation, in which 24 small states were linked to the one 40-million Power of Prussia ended up in Prussian hegemony".

For him, a successful European unification can be based only on the Swiss model, which would entail splitting the existing nation-states into smaller ones on the basis of cultural and historical regions.

Kohr moved from Puerto Rico to Wales, where he taught political philosophy at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1968 to 1977.

The project of Welsh independence, founded on the ideal of cymdeithas (community) was dear to him, and Kohr became a mentor to Plaid Cymru and a close friend of its leader, Gwynfor Evans.

After retiring from teaching, Kohr divided his time between Gloucester, England, and Hellbrunn, outside Salzburg.

In 1983, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "his early inspiration of the movement for a human scale."

In 1983, in Stockholm, Sweden, Kohr received the Right Livelihood Award "for his early inspiration of the movement for a human scale".

In 1984, Salzburg created the Leopold Kohr Academy and Cultural Association "Tauriska" to put his theories of regional autonomy into practice.

Kohr was planning to return to his hometown of Oberndorf to live when he died in 1994.

His ashes were buried there.

The Salzburg journalist Gerald Lehner completed a biography of Kohr, based in part on long audiotaped interviews, in 1994.

Kohr was described as a charming conversationalist and a witty and elegant debunker of popular assumptions.

The author Ivan Illich described him as "a funny bird—meek, fey, droll, and incisive", as well as "unassuming" and even "radically humble".

Kohr described himself as a "philosophical anarchist", 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.