According to The London Times Literary Supplement of October 6, 1995, Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher ranks among the hundred most influential books published since the Second World War. The selection was made by a group of writers and scholars hoping to create "a common market of the mind" to bridge the cultural divisions of postwar Europe. Others to be so acknowledged were Simone de Beauvoir, André Malraux, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Carl Gustav Jung, and Erik Erikson. Although less academic than many of the other works, 'Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered' foreshadowed with extraordinary accuracy many of the major issues we would be struggling with at the end of the century. Since its publication in 1973 it has been translated into approximately twenty languages

Economist E. F. Schumacher was a tall man who cast a long shadowparticularly, as the lectures attest, in the realm of ideas. At the time of his death in 1977 he was eulogized as "a prophet standing against the tide" and "a man who asks the right questions of his society and of all societies at a crucial time in their history." This assessment remains valid. From a perspective that has since witnessed the routinization of the hostile corporate takeover and the use of the euphemism "downsizing"a term that originally referred to reducing the size of carsfor firing employees, the compassion inherent in an "economics as if people mattered" is all the more compelling. Adamantly opposed to excessive material consumption, meaningless growth, corporate domination, and world-scale economic systems, Schumacher would have been gratified to see how his ideas, steadily gaining momentum over the years, have created a significant undertow to counter the present GATT-dominated global dynamic.

The particular genius of the thinking of E. F. Schumacher lay in his union of the theoretical and the practical, embodying a rare combination of sound epistemology and pragmatic common sense. He was also a deeply spiritual man with a strong love for and understanding of the natural world. Although he had been well-known in Europe since the end of the Second World War, it was not until the publication of Small Is Beautiful that his influence became widespread in North America. At the time of his premature death in 1977 he was recognized throughout the United States and Canada and had met with a number of national figures, including former President Carter.

The life of E. F. Schumacher mirrored directly the events of the first three-quarters of the century that is now ending. He was, paradoxically, a man both of and very much ahead of his time. Like Lewis Mumford, he was critical of unthinking acceptance of technological innovation masquerading as progress, warning against individual and local loss of autonomy and quality of life. Schumacher, known as Fritz to his friends, was born to a traditional academic family in Bonn, Germany, in 1911. According to his daughter, Barbara Wood, in her biography E. F. Schumacher: His Life and Thought he proved a quick and talented student, and in 1930 he was chosen to represent Germany as a Rhodes scholar at New College, Oxford. Two years later he made his first trip to America, where he discovered an intellectual freedom he had never known before. In 1934, however, increasingly anxious about the rise of National Socialism in Germany, he left a promising career in New York and returned home. The situation there confirmed his worst fears. Many of the people he respected, understandably intimidated, were closing their eyes to the evils around them. At the core of his own opposition to the Nazis was his rejection of their habitual manipulation of information and their flagrant violation of the truth. With deep foreboding, in 1936 he left Germany with his new wife to settle in England, the country that was to become his home.

From then on, either directly or indirectly, he was part of the unfolding events of his time. With other German expatriates in England he agonized over the fate of his country and of Europe. Once the war had begun, with anti-German feeling running high, Schumacher, the patrician intellectual, was relegated to the country to work as a farm laborer. At one point he was taken from his wife and infant son and interned for three months in a detention camp, where he initiated a number of practices to improve sanitation as well as the quality of the food. He later came to consider his time at the camp to have been his real university. It was there that the thinker became a doer.

Upon his release he returned to the farm, preoccupied with the question of the economic prerequisites for a lasting peace in Europe. His writings on the subject brought him to the attention of a number of prominent people, and he was soon drawn into discussion sessions on the post-war economy. After becoming a British citizen in 1946, he was sent to Germany as a member of the British Control Commission. In thinking about the reconstruction of German industry, his ideas on what was appropriatea word that came to be strongly associated with himin terms of scale and ownership began to take form. As he studied the restructuring of Germany's economy, the strategic role of energy, soon to become a linchpin of his thinking, became apparent to him. He became equally convinced of the necessity for currency reform as a means of preventing the concentration of wealth among the few at the expense of the many, another of his legacies that remains very much alive in the present movement to establish local currencies.

In late 1949 Schumacher was asked to become an economic advisor to the National Coal Board of Britain. He accepted and remained in his post as Chief Economic Advisor for the next twenty years. To accommodate his growing family he bought a house with a large garden in Surrey. This proved to be another turning point for him; he became fascinated with his garden, joined the Soil Association, and became an enthusiastic exponent of organic gardening. Observing natural processes at work in his garden, he developed an insightful understanding of the interrelated complexity of living systems. In anticipation of advanced ecology and the Gaia theory of future years he wrote then: "It makes sense that nature is an unbelievably complicated, self-balancing system in which the unconsidered use of partial knowledge can do more harm than good. As far as I can see, chemical agriculture has over-reached itself. It is working against nature instead of with her." Later, in Small Is Beautiful, he noted that ". . . the wider human habitat, far from being humanized and ennobled by man's [sic] agricultural activities, becomes standardized to dreariness or even degraded to ugliness."

One of the major influences on Schumacher's thinking was the work of a little-known Austrian economist named Leopold Kohr. In The Breakdown of Nations Kohr treats the subject of scale, attributing the ills of the modern world to bigness. He writes: "If a society grows beyond its optimum size, its problems must eventually outrun the growth of those human faculties which are necessary for dealing with them." Schumacher referred to Kohr as "a teacher from whom I have learned more than from anyone else."

An inveterate reader, Schumacher studied the Buddhist and Taoist sages and was deeply impressed by the nonviolent message of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1955 he was offered a United Nations assignment in Burma and seized the opportunity to see Asia for himself. The time he spent there was to have a lasting influence on his thinking. He found the land, the culture, and the people of Burma compellingly beautiful. He was moved by their freedom from materialism and their apparent happiness under conditions that would be deemed impoverished in developed countries. This reinforced his inclination to look beyond abstraction and theory to embrace the constants of health, beauty, and permanence. He wrote: "Economics means a certain ordering of life according to the philosophy inherent and implicit in economics. The science of economics does not stand on its own feet: it is derived from a view of the meaning and purpose of life . . . ."

Prophetically, he further noted: "A civilization built on renewable resources, such as the products of forestry and agriculture, is by this fact alone superior to one built on non-renewable resources, such as oil, coal, metal, etc. This is because the former can last, while the latter cannot last. The former cooperates with nature, while the latter robs nature. The former bears the sign of life, while the latter bears the sign of death." Later, in his most famous essay, he advocated a Buddhist form of economics based on "Right Livelihood" as part of the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. Fundamental to such an economics would be simplicity and nonviolence, the importance of community, and the necessity and dignity of work. Schumacher returned from Burma convinced that a sustainable form of economics must be found that would be appropriate as a path for the developing world, "a middle way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility." He spent the rest of his life seeking and advocating that path.

Schumacher was equally foresighted in his analysis of the industrial world. In 1958, before the founding of OPEC and to the disbelief of his colleagues, he warned that Western Europe would attain "a position of maximum dependence on the oil of the Middle East . . . The political implications of such a situation are too obvious to require discussion." Even greater than his concern about the conflicts that would ensue was his fear of the possibility of a nuclear exchange. He became adamantly opposed to the use of nuclear energy. The accumulation of large amounts of toxic substances, he claimed, "is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated . . . ." Echoing the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolence he wrote: "A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent. . . . Non- violence must permeate the whole of man's [sic] activities, if mankind [sic] is to be secure against a war of annihilation."

In India in 1961 Schumacher had his first exposure to the grinding poverty of much of that subcontinent. It was in brooding over the lot of millions of people there that his pivotal idea and most lasting legacy was born. He came to believe that the cause of their profound moral and physical impoverishment lay in the demoralizing impact of the industrialized West on traditional, formerly self-sufficient cultures. What was needed, he urged, was a level of technology more productive and effective than that employed traditionally in rural areas but simpler and less capital intensive than Western technologies. His groundbreaking concept of intermediate technology had taken form.

This idea was wholeheartedly embraced by a younger colleague, a Scot named George McRobie, who was to be key to its development. The first of Schumacher's articles on intermediate technology appeared in The Observer in 1965 and was given an enthusiastic reception. He and McRobie responded by forming a small, self-financed group soon to become well-known as ITDG, the Intermediate Technology Development Group. They set up an office and began researching the kinds of equipment that could be made available to small-scale farmers and crafts people. This quickly developed into a buyer's guide; it too was well received, leading them to increase their efforts to fill the gaps in existing technologies. It was Schumacher's intent to combine traditional and advanced knowledge for creating new technologies to address questions of impact and scale. ITDG grew rapidly as a result of the deep chord it had sounded around the world. Intermediate technology was seized upon as an innovative tool for tackling the problems of poverty. It fell to Schumacher, as he became recognized as an international figure, to become intermediate technology's global ambassador and interpreter.

Schumacher believed that it was vital for poor people to be able to help themselves and that intermediate technology could enable them to do so. He traveled widely, advocating small-scale technologies as well as enterprises, workshops, and factories that would serve communities in such a way that no one need be exploited for another's gain. The technologies and community structures he envisioned would produce material sufficiency rather than surfeit and would be a source of work, which he considered everyone needed in order to become fully human. Again prophetic in his insights, he was convinced that the affluence of the West could not be maintained indefinitely and tried to teach that the hope of the powerless and the poor lay in becoming as independent as possible of the corporate dynamic.

With the publication of < is>in 1973, the status of E. F. Schumacher was transformed to one approaching that of guru. He made several trips to North America, where, especially among young people, his words rang true. The nonviolent message of intermediate technology and economies of scale was seen as just as applicable to the Western world as to nonindustrialized areas. Schumacher wrote: "The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical."

Schumacher urged people to be constantly observing and questioning what goes on around them, and not merely with regard to technology or economics. He would have us examine honestly the foundation and scale and civility of our lives, our vitality, integrity, and spiritual wholeness. He was involved in a lifelong quest, rarely settling for a single answer beyond that of absolute honesty but instead seeking long and diligently for the most intelligent, adaptive, sustainable, and hopeful means for us to conduct our lives as if peopleand naturemattered