Leopold Kohr - The Breakdown of Nations

by Kirkpatrick Sale

The first time I ever came across 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 acceptable i 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.

Naturally my interest was piqued, particularly since I was coming 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 time I encountered it was in E. F. Schumachers Small Is Beautiful, 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 Kohrs seminal book The Breakdown of Nations, as it happened he also allowed that it had been published some 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 10,000 books, on the floors, on the staircase, on the tables, behind the tables, holding up the tables, and you could never find the Kohr without somehow getting rid of a couple of thousand books first. So if I was going to have a chance to read this man, Id best look elsewhere. I tried the secondhand bookstores that still populate parts of Fourth Avenue and lower Broadway in New York; not only were there no copies of Breakdown, but none of the wizened old men, peering over rimless bifocals with the air of knowing every book since Gutenberg, had ever even heard of it. I tried the book services that promise they can find any book anywhere 100,000 books in stock/hunting? just ask us 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 miser 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 branch libraries: no listings. I went to the NYU Library a few blocks from my home: their only copy was in some distant Wail Street branch, and when I called there they said they could find no trace of it. So finally I went to the 42nd Street Library, granddaddy of them all, and within minutes I was at last sitting down with a copy a pristine, barely touched copy, it was no surprise to find of Kohrs 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 captivated. Whoever this man was, he could write: skillfully, with wit and grace and point. He constructed his arguments with deadly logic, for the most part 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 no 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 immodest 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 specialists have dug out.

And the theories that informed the book they were, to my mind, nothing short of brilliant, certainly among the most important contributions to political philosophy in recent decades. When first published in 1957 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 late 1970s, when 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 Breakdown 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, elevators, and the like without these taking up so much room that there is not enough left over for living space, a phenomenon that actually begins to happen in a building 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 bureaucracies 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 rather the size of the unit: even saints asked to administer a building of 400 floors or a nation of 200 million 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 mouse were to be as big as an elephant, it would have to become an elephant that is, it would have to develop those features, such as heavy stubby legs, that would allow it to support its extraordinary weight. City planners realize that accumulations of people much above 100,000 create entirely new problems, more difficult and serious than those of smaller cities, and that it is virtually impossible for a city exceeding that limit 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 presidents, astronomers, corporation executives all realize that the sizes of the units in their own particular areas of concern are vitally important to the way their affairs are run and goals accomplished.