The Breakdown of Nations (Buch von 1986)

Verbindungen

• Leopold Kohr verfasste ~

Angaben

Leopold Kohr: The Breakdown of Nations. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

Neuauflage des 1957 erschienen Buches. Mit einem Vorwort von Ivan Illich – eigentlich eine Rede vor dem 1982 in Salzburg zu Ehren Kohrs abgehaltenen Symposium über das menschliche Maß. Das Vorwort wurde von I. V. Porsolt übersetzt; die deutsche Fassung ist in »Small is beautiful« enthalten.

Klappentext

Leopold Kohr was the first writer to put into words as early as 1941 the revolutionary ideas taken up later by E. F. Schumacher and the ‘small is beautiful’ movement. In the specially written Foreword to this new paperback edition of The Breakdown of Nations, Ivan Illich hails Kohr as the discoverer of the ideas promoted more recently by Schumacher and by Illich himself.

Starting from the idea that there is only one primary cause behind all forms of social misery – bigness –, Kohr argues that sanity, peace, even survival, will be achieved on this planet only when the major national states are broken up into small states. The problem as he sees it is less how to grow than how to stop growing, and the answer lies not in union but division. He believes that the idea and ideal of littleness is the only antidote to the cancerous disease of excessive size, and therefore urges the restoration of a healthy system of small and easily manageable regional and city states such as existed in former times.