Leopold Kohr Documentary

The Small Nation Manifesto by Thomas Naylor

A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power. Leopold Kohr Breakdown of… »

Someone Whose Writings Roman Catholic Social Teaching Needs to Consider

Leopold Kohr: Prophet of a Coming Decentralization? by Steven Yates

A New Book from Jeff Taylor

Politics on a Human Scale: Historiography by Jeff Taylor

Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism (go to the above link for a discount code) - Google Books
Politics on a Human Scale

Related:
And a review by Lee Trepanier of The Primacy of Persons in Politics (John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke, Editors)

Lichtenstein

Small Is Beautiful and It Works: a Guest Post by Ethan Bishop



Related:
Forward to the Human Scale: Dr. Ewald Hiebl at TEDxPannonia

Murray Bookchin

Apparently he was influenced by Leopold Kohr, who is not mentioned in the wiki article. While he believed that the scale of the polity should be small, he is also a believer in democracy. He was the co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology.





The Forms of Freedom: pt 1, 2, 3, 4
Q&A: 1, 2, 3

Bookchin archive
What is Social Ecology
Murray Bookchin on Growth and Consumerism
Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview
The ecology of freedom: the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy
murray bookchin: social anarchism, ecology and education

Withered Anarchism: A Surrebuttal to Murray Bookchin--Bob Black

"Belief Systems" are as flexible as the set of premises being held by someone.

A Crisis of Bigness

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness' by Paul Kingsnorth
Leopold Kohr warned 50 years ago that the gigantist global system would grow until it imploded. We should have listened

The breakdown of civilization in the UK

The tagline for this article at Empire Magazine's FB page:
"The PR behind the release of this new Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol image must be eating her fists right now..."



The UK has not gone the way of past empires yet, but quite a few people have been saying the UK is dead, culturally and spiritually, and it is difficult not to agree with that, given the faint-hearted response by those in charge. So far Theodore Dalrymple and Peter Hitchens have not written anything yet about the "social disturbances." There is this piece by Srdja Trifkovic for Chronicles: London's Postmodern Riots. It's time for the chavs-nots to get their piece of the pie.

Leopold Kohr and his sucessors would look first of all (only?) at the size of the metropolitan area. It is simply just too large to be governed well. There is the lack of accountability for the governments, and the failure of politics to be practiced well when too many people are involved. There is also the loss of paideia -- not just with respect to the modern school system but also the system of laws and punishments, both the "formal" judicial system and the informal social practices and the power of intermediate social entities. Paleos would add that having ethnic diversity (different identities and allegiances) only compounds the problem. Who is at fault for the lack of integration? Of course it is the white people. If only they would go along with the program of the elites in creating a multicultural Britain.

Of course, the professional therapeutic state has its apologists who seek to rationalize the behavior of those rioting and looting. And we hear liberals in government and the mass media who are unable to call evil, evil -- this is just "something that is happening to us" like a tornado or tsunami. (A point made by Lawrence Auster with reference to other crimes.)

I read something yesterday about how a policewoman in the UK sued because she felt discriminated against when she couldn't pass the physical requirements to be in riot gear. She won. That is the state of the United Kingdom, where ideology has triumphed over common sense. How many female officers shirked their duty the past few days because of cowardice, refusing to confront malefactors and staying at a safe distance? How many are "manning" the police lines only because of the shame and ostracization they would experience if they ran? Alte has some pictures illustrating the laughable presence of women police officers in facing disorder of this sort.

Will there be a fourth night of rioting and mayhem?

GLPiggy

Here in the States, NPR has this piece: Who's Behind The Movement To Ban Shariah Law?. Does NPR secretly have a lust for Islam?

Kirkpatrick Sale, Let’s Get Rid of the Economy of Growth

The idea of a steady-state economy was spelled out by John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19th century, and has been taken up and amplified by a whole host of thinkers in recent times, including Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Leopold Kohr, Hazel Henderson, Howard Odum-oh, and myself (Human Scale, 1980). There is today an organization called the Center for the Advancement of a Steady-State Economy, and in the UK a Sustainable Development Commission has recently issued a report called “Prosperity Without Growth.”

But what steady-state scholars have traditionally failed to emphasize, and what I have always held to be crucial, is scale. They have tended to picture such an economy, naturally but erroneously, on the scale of the nation-state, without realizing that it is the size and nature of the state in the first place that tends to foster growth and would be hard-pressed to do otherwise.

A true steady-state economy can operate only at a scale where the people involved understand they are living within, and dependent upon, a finite ecosystem, and make their economic decisions in the mutual self-interest of humans and fellow creatures in that system. The limits and possibilities of the bioregion they live in will constrain all economic activity, which would be primarily to ensure the continued existence of the bioregion at a harmonious and productive level and would preclude destruction or pollution of the sources of economic life.

And ultimately it would depend on community. That is, the level of a few thousand people-maybe five thousand or ten, maybe as many as twenty or thirty-who are able to deliberate and decide how their economy best fits into their ecosystem. They would grow their own food, make their own necessities, generate their own energy, create their own culture, to the maximum extent of human well-being and pleasure within the constraints of the other systems and species they live with.

One may question if it is true at first that it is the nature of the nation-state to have a growth-oriented economy, but it seems historically true, and the centralizing forces both in the economic and political realms do seem to push for it.


Center for the Advancement of a Steady-State Economy
Sustainable Development Commission
Prosperity without Growth? · Economics · Sustainable Development
Prosperity without growth - Background
Prosperity Without Growth (pdf)

Available from Google Books: Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations

Until I get my own copy this will have to suffice.