Leopold Kohr

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Leopold Kohr ( nom de plume , 1940s: Hans Kohr , born October 5, 1909 in Oberndorf near Salzburg ; † February 26, 1994 in Gloucester , England ) was an economist , lawyer , political scientist and philosopher . In terms of content, he propagated the decentralization of social organizations and groups to a size in which the function is still possible, but at the same time allows the members a manageability. Kohr was an anarchist and pioneer of the environmental movement . In 1983 he received the " Alternative Nobel Prize ".

Life

education

Leopold Kohr attended elementary school in Oberndorf between 1916 and 1920 . After that he was at the Academic Gymnasium Salzburg until 1928 . In 1928 he began studying law at the University of Innsbruck . At the same time he was also a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science . In 1929 he returned to Innsbruck, founded a social-democratic student group and received his doctorate in 1933 for Dr. jur. Between 1933 and 1937 he served court years in Salzburg and Vienna and also studied political science in Vienna, which he obtained with a second doctorate as Dr. rer. pole. completed. During this time he stayed regularly in Paris .

Journalism

At the beginning of May 1937 Kohr worked against the Franquists as a reporter in the Spanish Civil War for various newspapers in Austria and Switzerland and the French news agency Agence Viator . He made first contacts with the anarchist movement. In the summer of 1937 in Valencia he discussed centralism and systematic mass surveillance with the writer George Orwell, and sat at his desk with Ernest Hemingway, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature , and André Malraux , who later became the writer, adventurer, philosopher and minister . They doggedly reported the turmoil of the Spanish civil war and tried to wake the world up in the fight against fascism .

Together with Otto von Habsburg , Leopold Kohr founded a resistance group in Paris in the spring of 1938. When he returned to Salzburg, he just escaped the Nazis' grasp . In the fall, Kohr boarded the ship in Le Havre and arrived in New York on October 31st . There he was able to live with the former Oberndorf baker Lämmermeyer until he traveled to Toronto . Here he was taken in by the family of the historian George Wrong .

From 1939 Kohr worked in a gold mine in northwest Canada on the edge of the Arctic . As a result of the harsh working conditions, he suffered a sudden hearing loss , which increasingly worsened his hearing. Kohr was an important representative of the “ Austria Free Movement ” in Canada in the political struggle against Hitler . From 1941 to 1943 Kohr worked for the "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" in Washington, DC He worked closely with Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer , who introduced him to the most important editors-in-chief in the USA. Wertheimer was an advisor in the White House at the time .

On September 26, 1941, Kohr's first article about the need to smash the great powers appeared in the left-wing Catholic New York magazine The Commonweal ; it was called Disunion Now . In January 1942 Kohr started a long series in the journalistic fight against Hitler with an article in the Washington Post . He campaigned massively for Austrian refugees in the American public. Together with Otto Habsburg and Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, he influenced the politics of the USA in order to regain Austria's independence after the end of the war and to achieve the return of South Tyrol to Austria.

Scientific activity

Between 1943 and 1955 Kohr taught economics and political philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey . This resulted in friendships with Latin America expert Robert J. Alexander and money expert Anatol Murad, as well as close contacts with Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt .

In 1951 Leopold Kohr completed his main work The Breakdown of Nations , which was only published in England seven years later. In 1953 he visited Liechtenstein for the first time to meet the Prime Minister Alexander Frick . Kohr also taught at the Puerto Rico State University in San Juan between 1955 and 1973 . He supported the island's independence movement and fought against the destruction of Old San Juan by American industrial giants. Here he founded his concept of village renewal and traffic calming .

In 1958 he made the first trip to Wales to meet the pacifist and leading independence activist Gwynfor Evans and was a visiting professor in Swansea . Leopold Kohr helped found an independent state on the Caribbean island of Anguilla in 1967. But British colonial paratroopers brought the experiment to a violent end.

At the end of the 1960s, the British economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher confessed that he had met Kohr, the thinker whose theses seem to be most important for the ecological salvation of the earth. In 1973 Schumacher completed his book Small is beautiful in the house of his friend Kohr in Aberystwyth ; the book became a bestseller .

Together with his friend John Papworth , Kohr traveled to Kenneth Kaunda , the President of Zambia . Kaunda was a great admirer of Kohr's life's work and commissioned him to found an academy in Zambia, which Kohr refused. Kaunda also wrote the foreword to Kohr's book Development without Aid (English title: Development without Aid ).

After retiring in Puerto Rico, 63-year-old Kohr moved to Aberystwyth , where he continued to teach at the university and supported the Plaid Cymru party in the fight against nuclear armament, nuclear power plants and the supremacy of the great powers.

In 1979 Kohr spent his summer vacation in Salzburg. His friend Elisabeth Mortimer introduced him to Alfred Winter , who tried to introduce him to a wide audience. This resulted in intensive friendships with Salzburg's governor Wilfried Haslauer , the futurologist and peace researcher Robert Jungk , the philosopher and theologian Ivan Illich and the founder of the self-sufficiency movement John Seymour .

In 1983 he moved from Aberystwyth to the industrial city of Gloucester in southern England .

Implementation of his theories

In 1986 the Leopold Kohr Academy and the Tauriska Cultural Association were founded in Neukirchen am Großvenediger to put his theory of regional independence into practice. The association and the academy are managed by Susanna Vötter-Dankl and Christian Vötter. In the 80s and early 90s Kohr was invited to several guest lectures at the University of Salzburg . The Leopold Kohr Center with archive (supervised by Ewald Hiebl) has existed at the University of Salzburg since 2008.

In 1992 the brewer Alfred Heineken , inspired by the philosophy of Leopold Kohr, wrote an article about the future of Europe with the title Eurotopia - A Europe of 75 regions, not states . He then commissioned Henk Wesseling to design a corresponding map, which reflected Leopold Kohr's idea of ​​the division of nations in a draft and is based on historical regions such as the Kingdom of Asturias , Normandy and Galicia . In 2011 Günther Witzany published a further developed and more finely distributed version.

In the summer of 1993 Kohr made the first preparations for moving to Oberndorf. It was precisely at that time that burglars destroyed his Gloucester archives.

death

Leopold Kohr died on February 26, 1994 at the age of 84 shortly after heart surgery in Gloucester. The burial of Kohr's urn by the old archbishop of Salzburg, Karl Berg , took place in mid-March 1994 in the grave of the Kohr family in the cemetery in Oberndorf .

In 2019, Leopold-Kohr-Straße in Vienna- Donaustadt (22nd district) was named after him. In Oberndorf, the promenade along the Salzach was named Leopold-Kohr-Promenade .

Think

“Everything is poison. The decisive factor is the dose. ” - This saying by Paracelsus (known as dosis facit venenum ), which Kohr often cites, is fundamental to his“ philosophy of greatness ”. “The size - Kohr does not mean the absolute, but the relative, the too large size - [...] seems to be the central problem of creation. Wherever something is flawed, it is too big. […] The size - and only the size! - is the central problem of human existence, in the social and in the physical sense ” ( The End of the Great , Introduction). Consequently, there is only one salvation for Kohr: "[...] the idea and ideal of smallness as the only serum against the cancerous growth of oversize [...]" Rupert Riedl calls it "Kohr's law" and writes: "Kohr's law says that our living world has to be structured according to the small dimensions of the human being if it wants to become a humane world. "

In addition, Kohr coined the slogan “slow is beautiful” in his speed theory , because the slowness also decreases the mass effect. While the streets of a city are completely sufficient at normal times of the day, there is no traffic at rush hour; while the theater and cinema exits are completely sufficient at the end of the performance, they are too narrow in the event of panic. Leopold Kohr's philosophy emphasizes the dignity and reason of the individual, empowered to be creative and to shape his or her will. A mass of individuals, however, destroys freedom and does not behave like rational beings, but like lifeless particles that obey statistical laws. If the free man joins the crowd, he degenerates from a cultural being to become part of a unit subject to physical laws. The Salzburg philosopher Günther Witzany, a friend of Leopold Kohr, argues that Kohr's philosophy ideally complements the sociological analyzes of Elias Canetti ( mass and power ) and Lewis Mumford's technical philosophy ( myth of the machine ). Elias Canetti meticulously illustrates the relationship between the masses of people and their leaders and the often irrational behavior of the masses, while Lewis Mumford uniquely addresses the dehumanization in centrally organized and technocratically regulated societies.

anarchism

Leopold Kohr rehabilitated anarchism as a political theory. “Free from ideologies! This is anarchism! It is the noblest of philosophies. But a society can only live without a state and without a government if the individual is so ethically brought up that it would never occur to anyone to invade the other's sphere. To get up on his feet. Anarchists who shoot someone are lust killers. They should be locked up! Life sentence. Not because they killed someone, but because they call themselves anarchists. ” For Kohr, anarchism is the non-violent form of coexistence, every human being is by virtue of reason able to treat every other human being with dignity and respect and to practice a form of society together , in which mutual, free recognition is practiced at such a high level that an external (3rd) authority is superfluous. Kohr thus diametrically contradicts the theories of large group order, such as those of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume . Of course, this goal of anarchism is utopian . But that is at the same time its strength and its protection against abuse by capitalist, socialist or other ideologies : If a leader, a party or a state power claims that the goal of anarchism has been achieved, they are exposed a priori as abusers, since this goal is always only pursued , but can never be considered as historically achieved. Although globally utopian, this form of society can at least temporarily be realized in the regional. People who live these values ​​together, at least temporarily, are actually participating in a future form of society.

Awards

Works

His main work

Other works

literature

  • Wolfgang Palaver : Leopold Kohr: Prophet of a Federal Europe? In: Telos No. 91, 1992, 87-93.
  • Gerald Lehner : The biography of the philosopher and economist Leopold Kohr. Deuticke, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-216-30107-9 .
  • Dieter Senghaas : Rescue by the small state !? Reflections on the “Anti-Leviathan” leitmotif in Leopold Kohr's work. In: Leviathan. Journal of Social Science. Vol. XXXVIII, 2010, pp. 251-267.
  • Michael Breisky : Big is clumsy. Leopold Kohr in the age of post-globalization. Passagen, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-8516-5924-5 .
  • Franz Paul Enzinger , Martina Fischer: Kohr for Kids. A Journey to Human Measure , illustrated by Graham Wiseman, Tauriska, 2009/2011.
  • Günther Witzany (Hrsg.): Sustainable city and traffic planning. How much Kohr does the city need? , Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2010, ISBN 978-3-8391-7593-4 .
  • Gerald Lehner : The human measure. A utopia? Conversations with Leopold Kohr about his life. Edition Tandem, Salzburg / Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-902932-01-3 .
  • Helmut Woll : Leopold Kohr. Growth critic from the very beginning. In: Zeitschrift für Sozialökonomie, vol. 186/187, 10/2015, pp. 49–57

Films / documentaries

  • The misery of the big - the power of the small. Leopold Kohr's theses as a way out of the crisis . ORF regional studio Salzburg; Hans Kutil, 2009
  • Leopold Kohr - Return to the human measure of German, Ranfilm, Alfred Ninaus, 2010/11
  • Leopold Kohr - Small is beautiful - Life on a Human Scale Englisch, Ranfilm, Alfred Ninaus, 2010/11

Web links

Remarks

  1. Baptismal Register - TFBIX | Oberndorf near Salzburg | Salzburg, rk. Diocese | Austria | Matricula Online. Retrieved October 24, 2018 .
  2. post European Union (PDF; 2.3 MB)
  3. ^ Riedl, R. 1987. Culture: Late ignition of evolution? Answers to questions about evolution and epistemology. Munich: Piper. P. 165
  4. z. B. “It's not about left versus right, not about socialism versus capitalism, ideologies have had their day.” Leopold Kohr - international Austrian. (March 3, 2015) ( Memento of the original from September 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @ http://hum-magazin.info ; “… The fact that the conflict of this age no longer exists between races, classes, left and right, socialism versus capitalism - these are all leftovers from the past. The real conflict today is between people and the masses, the individual and society… ” Leopold Kohr. The doctrine of the right measure ... selected by Günther Witzany ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @ leopold-kohr-akademie.at (PDF; 70.1 kB), accessed May 8, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / hum-magazin.info @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.leopold-kohr-akademie.at