Leopold Kohr (5 October 1909 – 26 February 1994) 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.
During those years he developed his concepts of village renewal and traffic calming and "lent his advice to local city planning initiatives".
[10][11] 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.
[11] In 1984, Salzburg created the Leopold Kohr Academy and Cultural Association "Tauriska" to put his theories of regional autonomy into practice.
[13] A friend of Raphael Lemkin, Kohr wrote to express his concern "that the crime of genocide will end up giving rise to the very conditions it seeks to ameliorate", by increasing the potential for intergroup conflict.
[14] 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.
[11] 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.
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.
[15] Kohr argued that the sovereign duchies of Holy Roman Empire excelled in scientific and intellectual development, founded numerous universities and produced a countless amount of philosophers and architectures.
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 into overconcentrated social units.Kohr was an important inspiration to the Green, bioregional, Fourth World, decentralist and anarchist movements.
[4] In The Breakdown of Nations, Kohr expands on his thought: to his mind, only small states can be true democracies, as only they can provide every citizen a possibility to directly influence the government.
[16] After Germany's defeat and its containment following World War II, the belligerent nation ostensibly turned into a peaceful one, and Russia came to being identified as the chief aggressor in Europe instead.
Kohr argues that Marx's "changing mode of production" as vehicle of history should be replaced with "changing size of society" instead as social norms desired by Marx such as just price, fair wage and gift culture as well his respect for accomplishments, solidarity and mutual aid are found not in modes of economy but rather in life in small communities.
Once growing societies expand so much that they cannot be self-sustainable, they "produce the equalizing, materialistic, semi-pagan, inventive climate of which the machine mode of production is not cause but consequence".
[20] As Borrás-Alomar observes, Kohr draws a correlation between a size of the state and its power and argues that the "bigness" that results proportionately increases risk of wars and destruction while providing no positives.
He focuses on Europe and analyses its history under his theory, concluding that large states must be dismantled into natural small nations in order to preserve peace.
For Kohr, uniting the world will not help, and the great powers must be cut to a size that makes it impossible for them to cause harm anymore.
Everyone within that state must accept thar one system with no compromises available, even if half of the population could be opposed to it, which for Kohr shows the totalitarianism of "bigness".
[25] He then states that large empires usurp academic development only because the peak of human progress was achieved before the times of worldwide great powers.
He describes democracy as a "system of divisions, factions, and small-group balances", which slowly wither away under internal consolidation of a large state and with it the ability for cultural and intellectual flourishment.