Ideas in Development

E. F. Schumacher was a major pioneer of sustainable development - a new stage in the evolution of environmentalism, as the movement embraced a broader view of its mission. It sought a future for the earth that was more just, technologically progressive in the broadest sense and more environmentally protective and preventative. He formulated early versions of the precautionary principle and promoted a value-based economics.

Barbara Schumacher's amazingly objective biography of her father, Ernst Fritz Schumacher, captures well his wonderful and frustrating life. Although quite accomplished before he earned guru status, his career had also many ups and downs. A very bright fellow and son of a famous German economist, E. F. Schumacher was only hitting his stride and discovering his niche, when he died unexpectedly in 1977 at the age of 66. His second book, A Guide for the Perplexed, an intriguing, compelling, and occasionally crankish statement of his personal philosophy, his spiritual beliefs and practices, and his critique of scientism, appeared posthumously, only weeks following his death. Later, two more works followed - Good Work (some of his American lectures) and This I Believe and other Essays (articles from the periodical, Resurgence).

Chiefly known for his book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Schumacher was named recently the second most important environmentalist by the UK Department of the Environment, right after Rachel Carson. And on October 6, 1995, The London Times Literary Supplement named his bestselling work one of the 100 most influential books published since World War II.

Schumacher also left a large organizational legacy. He was pivotal in creating the Intermediate Technology Group. Now called Practical Action, the organization works at the grassroots level in developing countries exploring more appropriate organizational and physical technologies. There are E.F. Schumacher societies in both the US and the UK, which sponsor annual lectures by notable thinkers and activists, such as David Korten, Jane Jacobs, Thomas Berry, Hazel Henderson, Kirkpatrick Sale, David Brower, John McKnight, David Morris, Frances Moore Lappe, Peter Barnes, and John Todd. A small environmental studies college has been established in his name in southern England. The New Economics Foundation (UK) is another one of his children (formerly called The Other Economic Summit). And one can even argue that the default position on economic policy that is most widely held by anti-globalization activists is a plausible reading and outcome from his work.

E. F. Schumacher did not become himself or the advocate for "small is beautiful" overnight. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Some of the ideas for the international clearing system, advocated by John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, were first developed by Schumacher. He was the principal author of the post-World War II, full employment plan that was tirelessly, but unsuccessfully lobbied for by William Beverage (a great UK liberal, father of its welfare state, and later, made a Lord). Schumacher was chief economist for the National Coal Board and the head of its statistics division.

Despite his long term back-and-forth residency in the UK, Ernst Fisher Schumacher was classified as an enemy alien in Great Britain. He supported the allies' cause and chose exile for him and his wife, rather than help the Nazis. He was kept for a while in a detention camp, but later was assigned a farm laborer job, where he learned a lot about physical labor, the practical side of farming, and the state of British agriculture. Later, he became chairman of the Soil Association and active in the tree planting movement in the UK.

In the late 1940s, he returned to Germany, a hated figure, regarded as a traitor, as part of the contingent of advisors that counseled the German occupation on economic policy issues and nation building. In the fifties and sixties, he visited and went on policy missions to Burma, India, and other developing countries. It was from these trips that he became a fierce critic of conventional, "copy-the-West" approaches to economic development and a great admirer of Gandhi's ideas about responsible and appropriate development.

His vast reading in comparative religion and Eastern and Western spirituality on his long train trips to the Coal Board in London and the Buddhist meditation that he learned in Burma on weekend long retreats transformed Schumacher from a militant atheist to a deeply religious man. (Late in his life, he adopted what Asians call his ancestral religion and became a Roman Catholic.) Despite all his traveling, memo writing, research, and consulting, he came to the conclusion that "inner work" was more important. Furthermore, unless we shift gears and move into a new direction away from a world view that he thought was bringing about a potential environmental catastrophe, fostering a soul-destroying materialism, and fomenting widespread feelings of anomie, all we hold dear could be lost.

Later essays at this blog will critically analyze Schumacher's and his disciples' ideas, but I think that it is best to conclude this article of celebration with a few choice quotes:

• “The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by working with other people on a common purpose; and to bring forth the goods and services for a becoming existence.”
• “Modern civilization can survive only if it begins to educate its heart, which is the source of its wisdom; for modern human beings are now far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom.”
• “I certainly never feel discouraged.  I can’t myself raise the winds that might blow us or this ship into a better world.  But I can at least put up the sail, so that when the wind comes, I can catch it.”