EF Schumacher: Sure I’m a crank: “a small element in a machine that makes revolutions”

EF Shumacher: the Buddhist economist proud to be called a crank. And how his word-of-mouth bestseller changed the world.

The humane economist EF Schumacher always said "his arm would wither if he voted Conservative". Yet, says Robert McCrum in The Observer, 40 years after the publication of his seminal book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, Schumacher "looks set for rediscovery", largely thanks to David Cameron. "Several of the better themes of the Big Society" owe a good deal to Schumacher's influence: from its environmentalism and concern for the well-being of the individual in society, to its "emphasis on breaking up large-scale institutions into smaller elements". Schumacher, in fact, "turns out to be a natural godfather for the coalition".

A German-born Englishman, Schumacher revelled in defying categorisation, says The Guardian. The arguments in Small Is Beautiful have been plundered by everyone from eco-warriors and counter-cultural activists, to enemies of the Big State and management consultants arguing for breaking up big firms. Born in Bonn in 2011, to a family of diplomats and academics, Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher came to Britain in 1930 as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar to study economics, notes the Distributist Review. He later moved to New York to teach at Columbia University. Finding "theory without practical experience unsatisfying", he returned to Germany to try his hand at business, farming and journalism. In 1937, "appalled with life in Hitler's Third Reich", he and his wife, Anna Maria, left for England.

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