Leopold Kohr

Bio

Kirkpatrick Sale:

"Leopold Kohr was born in 1909 in the little town of Oberndorf, in central Austria, a village of 2,000 people or so, famous until then only for being the place where “Silent Night” was written. (I once asked Kohr what influences were most important in the formulation of his theories about size, expecting him to cite some ancient philosopher. He paused, wrinkled his forehead, and said, “Mostly that I was born in a small village.”) Oberndorf, too, was in the cultural orbit of the once-independent city of Salzburg, some fifteen miles away, and though it was not until he was nine that Kohr first visited there, the accomplishments of the city remained impressed upon him his entire life. As he was later to describe it:

The rural population that built this capital city of barely more than 30,000 for its own enjoyment never numbered more than 120,000.... Yet, single-handedly they managed to adorn it with more than 30 magnificent churches, castles, and palaces standing in lilied ponds, and an amplitude of fountains, cafes, and inns. And such was their sophisticated taste that they required a dozen theaters, a choir for every church, and an array of composers for every choir, so that it is not surprising that one of the local boys should have been Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. All this was the result of smallness, achieved with not an iota of foreign aid. And what a rich city they made it into.[3]

A city, in effect, very much like the city-state Kohr came later to admire and advocate.

Kohr attended gymnasium in Salzburg, graduating in 1928, and later that year registered at the law school in Innsbruck. Then, while a friend signed his name to attendance records there, he went off to England to study at the London School of Economics, at the time bustling with such eminent teachers as Harold Laski, Hugh Dalton, F. A. Hayek, and Phillip Noel-Baker. That proved an excellent place for learning English, and not bad for learning economics, but it meant that for the next two years after he returned to Innsbruck he had to work with what were known as “crammers” to catch up on the courses he had missed and to spend long hours reading in cafes over a single cup of coffee.

During these days the menace of Hitler was growing in the country to the north, but somehow it did not touch the law students of Innsbruck very directly. Kohr was a founder of the Socialist Club at the university — his father, a country doctor, had been what he calls a “liberal socialist” — and enjoyed developing his rhetorical skills in debating the fascists of the day. But, he admits, looking back, “I was adrift”: none of the -isms then prof-ferred looked to be very desirable, and friendship seemed more important than any ideology. That was a perception that was to stay with him his entire life.

Kohr graduated from the Innsbruck law school in 1933, full of — as he confesses — youthful surety about the importance of the legal profession and a belief that the best lawyers were those who managed to get their guiltiest clients acquitted. It didn’t last long. On a trip to Copenhagen that summer a young Danish woman he was courting penetrated his lawyerly posturing with a simple, “You are too cold” — and the pain of that assertion, so at odds with what the young man knew to be his real self, made him realize instantly how far his legal training had led him astray. He never practiced law, nor read another law book, from that day on.

Footloose again, Kohr enrolled for another degree, this time in political science from the University of Vienna, one of the foremost universities in Europe at the time — though, Kohr says now, “somewhat too big for my tastes.” Again he spent two years of intensive academic work, again using the local cafes as his study halls, and he finished in 1935 with the credits for his second degree — into a Europe in turmoil.

Nowhere more so than in Spain, then on the eve of its civil war. Though Kohr’s ideas were still incompletely formed, the struggles of the Spanish republicans seemed to speak to much of what Kohr held important, and so he spent the next six months there, working as a freelance correspondent for a number of French and Swiss newspapers, armed with nothing but a Spanish dictionary and a copy of Don Quixote. “That is when it started,” he remembers now. From visiting the independent separatist states of Catalonia and Aragon, from seeing how the Spanish anarchists operated small city-states in Alcoy and Caspe (“I’ll never forget reading the sign, Welcome to the Free Commune of Caspe”), Kohr took away an understanding of the depth of European localism and an appreciation of the virtues of limited, self-contained government. What he left behind, incidentally, were some of the trappings of pomp: “I forgot my pajamas and my visiting cards when I left Madrid, and that’s the last time I’ve ever had either one.”

In 1938, with Hitler’s rise in Germany and the likelihood of war ever more imminent, Kohr, then based in Paris, decided to go to America. Impossible, he was told: it would take at least a year to get a visa, a year more to book passage. He did it in a week. Dashing back to Austria and using all his charm to wangle a temporary visitor’s visa to the United States, he slipped back through Germany into France via the Orient Express, and five days later was on his way to New York. It was, he says, “the power of ignorance.”

Landing penniless in New York, Kohr learned to eat “Automat banquets” — relish, ketchup, mustard, and other free condiments — and made contact with some of the Austrian community in America. Then when his United States visa was about to expire, he went on to Toronto to see if he could get landed-immigrant status there. Weeks and weeks of Laocoonian tangles with the Canadian immigration bureaucracy ensued — one official even told him he would have to go back to Austria, then under Nazi occupation, to get the necessary papers — but ultimately he was taken under the protective umbrella of Professor George M. Wrong, the “father of Canadian history,” and his status, and safety, were assured.

For the next twenty-five years Leopold Kohr was to make his home in North America. From 1939 to 1940 he was given a fellowship from the University of Toronto, and for the next year served as a secretary to Professor Wrong. It was during this time that his ideas on size and the division of nations began to take form, and in 1941 he published his first article on the subject (Commonweal, September 26, 1941, though he was given the byline “Hans” Kohr), arguing even then that Europe should be “cantonized” into the kind of small regional politics that existed in the past: “We have ridiculed the many little states,” he concluded grimly, “now we are terrorized by their few successors.”

After the war, Kohr joined the economics faculty of Rutgers University as an assistant professor, where he was to serve for the next nine years. Most of the ideas that permeate Breakdown were worked out during this Rutgers period, and it was there, during the Christmas recess of 1952, that he fashioned the book, working every day from early morning to late afternoon in his campus office, each day adding another chapter, until by January the manuscript was complete. In April 1953 Kohr finally sent out the manuscript to a succession of American publishers, both academic and trade: some interest but no takers. It then made the rounds of the English publishers, with the same story: nibbles but no bites. The feeling ran high in those days for world government and for the American and British imperiums, and a book seriously proposing the reorganization of nations on a smaller scale found little favor. Kohr was discouraged, and on a junket to Oxford, sitting next to some unknown man at some unpromising lunch, he unburdened himself to his neighbor about the sorry fate of his manuscript: “The trouble with these publishers is that they cannot place me — they haven’t met a legitimate anarchist in the past half century.”

His companion looked suitably sympathetic and said, “Why don’t you let me have a look at your manuscript? I am an anarchist myself — and also a publisher.” He handed Kohr his business card: “Herbert Read, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.”

Herbert Read, of course, was easily the foremost anarchist thinker of the day — a fact which, Kohr later said, instantly “made ‘me wish for the ground to open beneath my chair” — but he graciously offered to read the book and see what he could do. Dutifully Kohr sent the book, still dubious. Read got the point immediately and published the book straightaway in the fall of 1957.

The British reception was, at best, mixed. A few reviewers commended its charm and style, but the whole tenor of the book seemed to set them on edge: “a maddening little book” is how the prestigious Economist referred to it. Questioning of empires, even empires about to disintegrate, was bad form. In the United States, where Rinehart imported a pitiable 500 copies, publication of Breakdown had all the impact of a single vote in a nationwide election: it was ignored by every periodical except the Political Science Quarterly where Kohr’s colleague, the economist Robert J. Alexander, dutifully noted it as “thought-provoking” and added, accurately, “it will probably not be taken as seriously as it should be.”

In the meantime, Kohr had been invited to the faculty of the University of Puerto Rico, and there he spent most of the next ninteen years — teacher, pundit, widely read columnist, author, lecturer, and island figure — until his retirement in 1974. During those years, Kohr turned out a number of distinguished books, all of them working around the size theories presented in Breakdown (quoting Confucius, Kohr says, “I know only one thing — but that permeates everything!”): The Overdeveloped Nations (Germany 1962, Spain 1965, reprinted in the U.S. 1978), Development Without Aid (Wales 1973), and The City of Man (Puerto Rico 1976). He appeared regularly in both scholarly quarterlies and popular publications, Business Quarterly, American Journal of Economics and Society, Vista, Spectator, and Land Economics among them. He also wrote a series of newspaper columns for three of Puerto Rico’s dailies and appeared regularly in Resurgence, the self-styled “magazine of the fourth world” — that is, of the small nations and independent-minded regions of the world — begun in Wales in 1966, And increasingly he appealed in the United States and the United Kingdom as a lecturer, particularly on university campuses, and was by all accounts successful and provocative.

Yet despite all that, Leopold Kohr remained virtually unknown, a prophet without honor except among a small and faithful band. He did gain an ardent and most vociferous circle of friends, including people like Herbert Read, Welsh nationalist Gwynfor Evans, American adman Howard Gossage, architect Richard Neutra, and Puerto Rican leader Jaime Benitez; and he did slowly win a most prestigious group of admirers, including some of the finest minds of our age, people like Fritz Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Kenneth Kaunda, and Danilo Dolci. But despite this, despite the importance of his contributions in a society bedeviled with bigness, despite his undoubted singularity in an era that makes celebrities even of weightlifters, he continued — and continues — to be a figure unrecognized in the larger world.

No matter. After his mandated retirement from Puerto Rico in 1974, Kohr accepted an offer to lecture in political philosophy at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, where he was able to cement his relations with the growing Welsh nationalist movement and work in support of its ideas of an independent and self-reliant small nation. He settled into a small townhouse there, a block away from the sea, and he opens it to friends and students of all ages, a most attractive host, it is said, and a niost engaging raconteur. And there he lives today, a small, energetic figure, seen around the town jogging or drinking at the pub or talking at the’ local hall, arguing, entertaining, listening, telling stories, making friends, and always, sometimes gently, sometimes passionately, teaching about the theories of size and the virtues of smallness."

(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/leopold-kohr-the-breakdown-of-nations)