Thinking Small to Solve Everything

Revisiting Leopold Kohr's The Breakdown of Nations

Sep 03, 2025

In an era defined by global superpowers, sprawling supranational unions, and mega-corporations, the dominant political and economic solutions often call for more integration, more scale, and more centralization. But what if our very size is the problem? This is the radical and compelling argument made by Leopold Kohr in his 1957 masterpiece, The Breakdown of Nations—a work that laid the philosophical groundwork for the "small is beautiful" movement and remains a crucial text for any political scientist questioning the fundamentals of state structure and social health.

Who Was Leopold Kohr? The Prophet of Scale

Before delving into the book, it's essential to understand the man behind the ideas. Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) was an Austrian-born academic, economist, and political philosopher. His life and work were profoundly shaped by the tumultuous events of the 20th century.

A contemporary and close friend of figures like E.F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) and Ivan Illich, Kohr was forced to flee his homeland following the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938. He served as a wartime correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, an experience that cemented his views on the violent nature of large-state power politics. He later taught economics and political philosophy at universities in Puerto Rico, the United States, the United Kingdom, and his native Austria.

Kohr was an intellectual iconoclast, operating outside the mainstream of postwar thought. While others debated the merits of capitalism versus communism, Kohr argued that both systems were merely different responses to the same underlying problem: excessive size. His work is a foundational pillar of anarchist thought, decentralism, and human-scale ecology, made relevant by modern movements from bioregionalism to Scottish independence and Brexit.

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The Context: A World Rebuilding and Scaling Up

The Breakdown of Nations was published in a unique historical moment. The world was deeply entrenched in the Cold War, a bipolar struggle between two gigantic ideological blocs. The seeds of European integration were being sown with the Treaty of Rome, which “determined to lay the foundation to an ever closer union”. The prevailing wisdom, on both left and right, was that "bigger is better"—that large states and economies of scale were necessary for progress, security, and prosperity.

Kohr’s book was a direct challenge to this consensus. He wrote in the shadow of two World Wars, which he saw not as clashes of good versus evil, but as inevitable collisions of overgrown, cancerous state powers. His thesis was a direct refutation of the then-dominant realist and liberal internationalist schools, arguing that the structure (size) of states was a more critical variable for analysis than their ideology or foreign policy.

Main Insights: The Core of Kohr's Thesis

Kohr’s central argument is elegant in its simplicity. He posits that social problems are not caused by specific forms of government or economic organization but by their size.

The Law of Scale: The primary insight is that there is an optimal size for human social and political organization. Beyond this point, growth becomes a pathology, leading to what he calls "the disease of giantism."
Social Problems as Size Problems: Kohr flips the script on political analysis. Poverty, bureaucratic inefficiency, cultural alienation, and even war are not first-order problems themselves. They are second-order symptoms of the first-order problem: a unit (a state, a city, a corporation) that has grown too large to manage itself effectively or humanely.
The Irrelevance of "Isms": For Kohr, the debate between capitalism, socialism, fascism, and communism is a distraction. A large capitalist state and a large socialist state will suffer from the same core ailments: impersonal bureaucracy, concentration of power, and social alienation. The system matters less than the scale.

The Content: Arguing for a World of Small Units

The Breakdown of Nations is not a dry policy paper but a sweeping work of history, philosophy, and economics. Kohr builds his case through several key strands of argument:

Historical Analysis: Kohr surveys history from the Roman Empire to the British Empire, arguing that their collapse was not due to moral failure or external conquest, but to internal disintegration caused by administrative overstretch and the inability to manage their vast territories.
The Theory of Size: He develops a social physics of sorts. Just as an object doubles in surface area but cubes in volume when it grows (changing its fundamental properties), a state that doubles in population more than cubes its administrative and social problems.
The Argument for Partition: Kohr's solution is not to reform large states but to break them down through a process of peaceful partition. He points to successful small states like Switzerland (a confederation of cantons) and Luxembourg as models of prosperity, stability, and cultural cohesion. He envisions a Europe—and a world—of small, autonomous regions, cooperating voluntarily where necessary, much like the Hanseatic League of old.
Critique of Universalism: He attacks the one-size-fits-all approach of large states, arguing that local laws and customs are always better suited to local conditions than edicts from a distant capital. Kohr tied the inability of centralized power to adapt to problems like cultural erosion and loss of local autonomy.

Conclusion and Relevance Today

Leopold Kohr was dismissed by many in his time as a utopian eccentric. Today, his work feels remarkably prescient.

The Failures of Giantism: We see the "disease of giantism" all around us: in the bureaucratic inertia of massive federal governments, in the "too big to fail" financial institutions whose collapse threatens the global economy, and in the cultural and political alienation felt by regions within large nation-states (e.g., Catalonia in Spain, Scotland in the UK).
The Success of Small States: Modern studies consistently show that small, nimble nations (like the Nordic countries, New Zealand, and Ireland) often outperform larger ones in metrics of democracy, happiness, economic agility, and policy innovation.
Subsidiarity and Devolution: The core principle of Kohr's thought—that political decisions should be made at the smallest possible level—is a formal principle of the European Union (subsidiarity) and the United States Constitution. This is a driving force behind political movements demanding decentralization and localism.

Kohr does not provide a detailed blueprint for how to break down nations, and critics rightly point to challenges like global climate change or pandemics that arguably require large-scale coordination. However, his fundamental question remains powerful and unanswered: At what point does the scale of our institutions become incompatible with democracy, freedom, and human well-being?

The Breakdown of Nations is essential reading because it forces us to question the most fundamental assumption of modern politics: that growth and integration are always and inherently good. It offers a provocative lens through which to view the political fractures of the 21st century and a compelling argument for the creative power of smallness.

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