Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Will Change Your World View, August 5, 2001
Kohr calls for peaceful dissolution of nation states into smaller independent entities which can network or confederate as they choose. His book is a bible of the radical decentralist movement and applauded by anarchists, libertarians, greens alike. It's a fascinating read and will make you realize how much you yearn to belong to a real community and not just be an anoymous cipher in a giant nation state. Quote from Kohr, to give you a flavor: There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation.Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations have been welded onto overconcentrated social units. That is when they begin to slide into uncontrollable catastrophe. For social problems, to paraphrase the population doctrine of Thomas Malthus, have the unfortunate tendency to grow at a geometric ratio with the growth of the organism of which they are part, while the ability of man to cope with them, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic ratio. Which means that, 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. Hence it is always bigness, and only bigness, which is the problem of existence. The problem is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer: not union but division.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On Target, Informed Literature Supports This Early Understanding, October 3, 2006
This is a very important book and as another review notes, it is truly a good thing that it is back in print.
As we migrate from the industrial era of pyramidal top-down command and control empires and police states, into the information era where We the People can impose home rule and buycotts that restore morality and kinship, this author's views are an essential part of the whole pciture, but not the whole picture.
Below I list ten other books, evenly divided betwee "top down is broken" and "bottom up is emergent."
Top down is broken books:
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Bottom up is emergent books:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
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7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who would benefit? Not me!, January 1, 2004
By A Customer
Kohr is trying to sell the masses on the idea that breaking up larger countries and forming a global federal government would be a good thing for all. In Europe he advocates breaking things up on the basis of ethnicity or language and that produces small, homogeneous states. In the USA a European-american ethnostate would be too powerful so he would unite non-whites in their own ethnostates and break up European-Americans into states with conflicting economic interests so that they will be easier to dominate. Above the ethnostates would be a world federal government run by elites. Many layers of government would separate "citizens" from the global meta-government and that would help the rulers override objections to redistributing the wealth created by people of European ancestry and using it to buy the votes of the backward peoples of the world. If the world government didn't redistribute the wealth in this way Marxists would overthrow it. Probably an "economically dominant" minority (as described in "World on Fire" by Amy Chua) would allow a leader of the backward "colonized" peoples to come to power democratically and then bribe him for protection while he stays in power as a dictator (like Ferdinand Marcos, according to Chua). Marxists would favor Kohr's plan because it would produce a highly unstable world government that they could take over. "Economically dominant minorities" would favor it because it provides a pseudo-altruistic cover story for a bid for world power. They could manipulate such a government even more easily and safely than the existing democracies. Hard-core capitalists would favor Kohr's plan because it would create a global free market with no obstacles to the race to the bottom. I think that both parties in USA favor massive immigration because they are controlled by economically dominant minorities, hard core capitalists and Marxists. When USA breaks up Kohr's plan will influence where the new borders are drawn. Sometimes I think some intellectuals are trying to create a meta-religion to bolster a world federal government. Read "Explorations at the Edge of Time" by Richard Falk and decide for yourself. Yussuf Kly has written a book, "A Popular Guide to Minority Rights," where he advocates non-territorial (portable) ethnic autonomy enforced by the United Nations. That would be just the ticket for an economically dominant minority that is dispersed across many countries. They could use this newly minted civil right to get protection from the global federal government when there is a backlash from the indigenous people. Few would argue that "group rights" are not a major factor in USA even though they have nothing to do with the individual rights of classical liberalism. We are moving closer to Kly's proposal all the time. According to Amy Chua the ethnic Chinese make up 1% of the population of the Philippines and control 70% of the economy. The whole world could end up like that with an economically dominant minority ruling through a dictator drawn from one of the backward groups, like Ferdinand Marcos. I would prefer a world of nearly homogeneous nation-states that are as economically independent as possible. Ethno-nationalism isn't evil. I think an ethnic bond is the best way, in the long run, to bridge class differences and avoid putting all humanity's eggs in one basket.
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by E. F. Schumacher
by Joel Garreau
by Ron Paul
by Martin L. Van Creveld
