SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

E. F. Schumacher

This classic book on New Age economics is as relevant now as when it was authored and first published. Small Is Beautiful expressed a set of ideas and im­pulses that had given rise to the New Left of the sixties, had exercised the best people of that generation, and had gone on to energize countless millions of others, in Amer­ica and elsewhere, searching for live alternatives to the dead end of Western corporate imperialism. It was a philosophy that drew from, and built upon, what is best described as the decentralist tradition of Western society, that of institutions built to the human scale within harmonious self-regarding communities run by participatory democracy and fueled by self-sufficient regional economies deeply conscious of the limits of natural re­sources and the need for ecological harmony. It is a wonderful statement which makes the kind of common sense that could help the survival of life on earth become at least a decent possibility.

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“Schumacher [is] eminently, practical, sensible and eloquent; versant in the subtleties of large-scale business management yet equally in touch with the down-to-earth realities of a simple Indian village. His book is a most unusual economic treatise, enormously broad in scope, pithily weaving together threads from Galbraith and Gandhi, capitalism and Buddhism, science and psychology.”– The New Republic