When Small Was Beautiful: Petty-Bourgeois Utopianism and the Sources of Neoliberalism, 1960 – 2000

Abstract

In the decades that followed the Second World War, many commentators celebrated large-scale organizations – corporations, unions, welfare bureaucracies – as the foundation of the unprecedented economic growth that societies across the capitalist world enjoyed. At the same time, a loosely affiliated group of dissenters began to question the pretensions of “bigness” and to argue that “small is beautiful.” This dissertation tells the story of this intellectual current through a series of case studies, each of which considers the context, thought, and influence of a specific “partisan of smallness.” Although the protagonists of this story were largely anglophone, their ideas were inspired by their experiences in developing countries across the world – countries that also served as the main laboratories for their practical proposals. This story is thus a global one. The men and women studied here developed a sweeping and potent critique of midcentury capitalism, lamenting the impersonality of modern bureaucracies, the dreariness of work in large corporations, and the environmental harm caused by heavy industry. As a cure, these partisans of smallness prescribed a thorough shrinking of the basic institutions of government and economy, a retreat from expensive and complicated machinery, and an embrace of “appropriate technology” that could be purchased and used by individuals and families of modest means. In their most ambitious moods, they dreamed of establishing a decentralized political and economic order, a petty-bourgeois utopia. Although the small-is-beautiful vogue is often seen as a short-lived trend that ran out of steam by the early 1980s, this dissertation argues that its significance and influence was deeper and more durable than is usually recognized. Beginning in the 1970s, some of the proposals of the partisans of smallness were taken up by major international development agencies, most notably the World Bank, where they helped inspire a turn away from earlier developmentalist ambitions and toward austerity. In an ironic and not entirely intentional manner, then, this heterodox critique of midcentury capitalism contributed to the rise of neoliberalism. Small-is-beautiful ideas also lived on in some of the most influential works of modern social science, especially in the thought of James C. Scott. Even today, prominent figures on both the left and right of the political spectrum can be seen as inheritors of the tradition studied here, whose story therefore constitutes an important chapter in the history of the origins of our times.