Excerpts on Decentralism by Kirkpatrick Sale

From Vermont Commons (May 2007)

The Decentralist Movement – A Third Way

Just a few weeks ago I took seven large boxes of books from my library to give to the E.F. Schumacher Library just outside of Great Barrington, Massachusetts – books I’d gathered for years on decentralism, anarchism, community, separatism, and the like – and I was struck once again by the depth, tenacity, and importance of the movement to which I was contributing.
For the Schumacher Society and its library were established to provide an intellectual and activist home for what we can call, loosely, the decentralist movement. This is the Third Way that has existed for a century or so outside the varieties of centralists, both conservative and liberal; a movement that has vigorously put forth cogent alternatives to the modern capitalist industrial nation-state.

The Schumacher has most of the library and all the papers, speeches, and articles of Fritz Schumacher, the economist and philosopher whose work outlining the decentralist way went far beyond the notion of “small is beautiful” – however trenchant that idea may be – to include self-managed firms, Buddhist (“right livelihood”) economics, intermediate technology, organic farming, alternative energy and matters of scale in all human endeavors. But it also has the libraries and papers of a number of other decentralist figures.

Among them are George Benello, a scholar and activist whose library emphasized worker ownership, alternative technology, and the Yugoslavian decentralized economy; Ralph Borsodi, the founder of the School of Living and keystone of the homesteading “back-to-the-land” movement in the 1930s; Richard Bliss, a teacher whose material concentrates on the quasi-anarchistic Catholic Worker movement and the English Distributists (who were also called leaders of “a third way”); Henry Geiger, for four decades editor of the decentralist weekly MANAS, whose copies are available on line from the Library; Robyn van En, the creator of the Community Supported Agriculture movement; and Bob Swann, a co-founder (with John McClaughry, David Ehrenfeld, and me) of the Schumacher Society in 1980, who for years acted as its president and guiding light, as well as serving as a leading theorist of land trust organizations.

That’s an impressive group, and it argues that the decentralist movement has not only been wide-reaching and comprehensive but durable and impactful. No, it has not had the kind of support from the capitalist system that has created and sustained the conservative and neo-conservative movements or the various do-gooding liberal parties and unions – largely because it generally stood opposed to large-scale corporate capitalism and the large-scale governments that were its handmaidens. So it has gone along with small and under-funded organizations, working in different parts of the country on different parts of the problem, sometimes without even knowing the others existed. But the point is that it has gone along, for more than eighty years (if we figure its modern beginnings with the Distributists and Southern Agrarians in the 1920s), and it is still to be found everywhere.

Let me see if I can distill the essence of decentralism, and its appeal.

1. Decentralism is the basic human condition. The community is the oldest human institution, found absolutely everywhere throughout the world in all kinds of societies. As Rene Dubos has pointed out, more than 100 billion human beings have lived on earth since the late Paleolithic period, and “the immense majority of them have spent their entire life as members of very small groups . . . rarely of more than a few hundred persons.”
2. Decentralism is the historic norm, the underlying system by which people live even where there arises, from time to time, those centralizing empires that historians like to focus on and pretend are the principal systems of humankind. Empires are infrequent, do not last long, and are sparsely located. Yes, there was a Greek empire, for example, but it lasted effectively for fewer than 20 years; the real story of Greece is long centuries of decentralization, each city-republic with its own constitution, its own social life and cultural peculiarities, hundreds of separate communities that created the Hellenic civilization that is still a marvel of the world.
3. Decentralism is deeply American, from the anti-state Puritans, through the communalistic Quakers and Mennonites and religious sects, and on to the original colonies, independent bodies protective of their special differences and characters. The war that separated us from Britain was not a revolutionary war – we desired to have our own country, not take over Britain’s – but a secessionist war. A unified state did eventually arise after it, the product of powerful banking and mercantile forces desiring centralized authority, but it was not especially centralist at that time, and even then contrary forces proved powerful, too. Emerson and Whitman and Thoreau gave voice to the old New England traditions of town-meeting democracy and parish rule. Utopians and communards like Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Josiah Warren gave voice to the yearning for community control and villages free from outside interference.

In the 20th century that tradition continued with the Country Life movement and other communal impulses; with Lewis Mumford and the original Regional Plan Association, devoted to a resurgence of regionalism; with the Southern Agrarians, determined separatists explicitly – and eloquently – opposed to the national government and its economic hegemony. And think of Henry George and the Georgists, Paul Goodman, Arthur Morgan and his Community Service organization, Ivan Illich, Gary Snyder, Helen and Scot Nearing and their Good Life Center, Wendell Berry, Thomas Berry, Chellis Glendinning and the neo-Luddites, Jerry Mander and the anti-globalists – well, the list could go on into the thousands.

4. Decentralism continues even now, it is alive and well in this country and around the world. I cannot say it is a dominant mode, anywhere, but I can point to all those ineradicable threads to be seen throughout the American scene: the wonderful bioregional movement, for example; the resurgent Indian tribal societies and organizations for tribal culture; the growth of worker-owned firms from 1600 twenty years ago to more than 10,000 today; the phenomenon of cooperative businesses, which as of 2005 had revenues of nearly $1trillion; the spread of such efforts as community currencies, community land trusts (100 of them today, at least ) and community-supported agriculture (1,140 farms) and local farmers’ markets (4,400 in 2006); the 250,000 private government associations housing more than 50 million people.

All of this is evidence that this great tradition, this basic human impulse, is still to be found in the United States, no matter how autocratic a power it has become.

And in the rest of the world, as well. Separatism, of course, is a powerful force in almost every land, famously in Canada, Spain, Italy, France, and virtually everywhere in Africa, existing in a hundred splinter movements and “independence” parties and groupings wherever you look. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia split up. Montenegro became an independent state in 2006; Kosovo is becoming one, in its own way. Catalonia gained significant autonomous powers in 2006, as did Aceh in Indonesia. More than 50 percent of the people of Scotland in a recent poll wanted complete independence from England, and that seems likely to happen within a couple of years.

There it is: the Third Way. Ever powerful. And we – you – are a part of that great tradition.

…

The following excerpts are from Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future, published in 2017, only slightly changed from the original volume published in 1980.

Society Without the State

In a healthy society of non-human primates, there are no nations, no extended organizations, no supraterritorial forms that might resemble a state. Troops of primates do have a social cohesion about them, creating various temporary leaders or hierarchies according to the function at hand—one for fighting, say, another for vigilance, a third for feeding— and establishing customs and ground rules of permissible behavior. But nowhere do these basically autonomous troops combine into larger associations, nowhere do members of the same species, though clearly knowing themselves to be essentially related, attempt to create large- scale units of social control. “Superorganizations, alliances made up of two or more troops,” as anthropology expert John Pfeiffer notes, “have never been observed among baboons or any other nonhuman primates.”

In a healthy brain, though there are many major processes operating at once, there is none, either physical or psychological, that is dominant. In the words of neurologist Gary Walter:

We find no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big Brother. Within our heads our very lives depend on equality of opportunity, on specialisation with versatility, on free communication and just restraint, a freedom without interference. Here too, local minorities can and do control their own means of production and expression in free and equal intercourse with their neighbours.

 

Only in the diseased and malfunctioning brain does one process ever become dominant.

In a healthy ecosystem, the various sets of animals, whether themselves organized as individuals, families, bands, or communal hives, get along with each other without the need of any system of authority or dominance—indeed, without structure or organization of any kind soever. No one species rules, not one even makes an attempt, and the only assertion of power has to do with territoriality—the claim of one or another species to a particular area to be left alone in. Each community in the system has its own methods of organization, its own habits and styles and food supplies, and none attempts to impose these on any other or to set itself up as the central source of power and sovereignty. Predation there will be within such an ecosystem, and some basic wariness by the fly of the frog and the frog of the snake and the snake of the hawk, but there is no inter-special warfare, no pseudo-Darwinian war of all against all; on the contrary, there is balance and adjustment, the broad cooperation of nature’s communities with each other and with their particular environment. Independence, complexity, variety, flexibility—these are the characteristics of the healthy ecosystem, and, among all creatures, only the human has ever tried to transgress that principle.

In a world in which the decentralist tradition was allowed to proceed to its logical endpoint, in which separatism and localism were permitted to run their courses, the importance of the centralized state would of course diminish rapidly. It is not even difficult to see, in time, the beginning of that process long held dear by philosophers both of the right and the left, the “withering away of the state.” For as local units took unto themselves the regulation of internal harmony and democratic governance, the point and purpose of the traditional nation-state would rapidly decline, its functions absorbed by local populations with a more precise perception of the problems and a more realistic understanding of their solutions.

Examples of societies that have lived, and lived long and well, without the trappings of the state are surprisingly common, once one begins combing through the scientific literature. In fact they are so common, occurring right throughout the Indian societies of both North and South America, through much of North Africa and almost all of the great region from the Sudan to the Kalahari, and throughout the islands of the South Pacific from Sumatra all the way to Polynesia, occurring among patrilineal as well as matrilineal societies, settled and pastoral as well as hunting and nomadic, large and scattered as well as small and cohesive, isolated and ingrown as well as confederative and cooperative, occurring in such variety and profusion that it comes to seem from the anthropological evidence that this is indeed the basic natural organiza­tion of human societies. As British anthropologist Aidan Southall has said about the historical spectrum, “People with state organizations were exceptional.”

This is the way most humans have organized their societies since the very earliest beginnings of anything that could be called human, so long ago that there is a sense in which its patterns may be encoded in our genes. This is the way even more developed societies must have formed themselves since the beginnings of settled bands and tribes some 15,000 years ago. This is the way the greater part of all humanity must have lived even after a few isolated peoples began forming fixed hierarchies and chieftaincies and states some 5,000 years ago.

Clearly any method of living that has been so widespread and so long-lasting must have something going for it, must be considered in some way successful, even if largely for “primitive” people in “pre­historic” times. Its success in almost every instance seems to be due to a very simple mechanism: the social control exerted by those who feel themselves part of a single, cohesive, multi-entangled social group such that the transgression of one is likely to threaten the well-being of all. It needs no parliament to decree that my act of theft or murder is going to be wrenchingly disruptive of a community, and that if I have even a minimal sense of self-preservation I had better not commit such acts. It needs no chief or ruler to tell me that I must at times tend my neighbor’s cattle and help him in his harvest, for it is perfectly obvious that my own survival depends on his doing the same for me. It needs no policeman or soldier to prevent me, nor prison to scare me, from acts of social disruption, for the social well-being that I shatter, the social peace I destroy, is my own. There is nothing to keep me, strictly speaking, from mayhem; yet there is nothing to propel me either, and everything to restrain me.

As Southall puts it in his important entry in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences:

Fundamental responsibility for the maintenance of society itself is much more widely dispersed throughout its varied institutions and its whole population in stateless societies. . . . In stateless societies every man grows up with a practical and intuitive sense of his responsibility to maintain constantly throughout his life that part of the fabric of society at which at any time he is involved.

Or, more bluntly, Peter Farb about the Basarwi:

They have an intuitive fear of violence because they know the social disruption it can cause in a small group. And they know that because of the poisoned arrows always at hand, an argument can quickly turn into a homicide. This explains why the Bushmen attach no honor or glory to fighting and aggression. Their culture is without tales of bravery, praise of aggressive manhood, ordeals of strength, or competitive sports.

What’s missing from such societies, and what makes them seem so strange to our eyes—as to the eyes of the first Europeans who encountered and usually misreported them—is the concept of power, and hence of hierarchy, control, obedience, all the elements that are necessary to contrive a state. No one here has power, no one wants it, no one even thinks about it—or has a way to think about it. Competence, yes, ability, skill, these are all desirable, even the talent to lead in battle or in dance or in harvesting or in magic. But never does it imply power. French anthropologist Pierre Clastres has described the pathetic turn of Geronimo’s career, after that Apache warrior had been a successful leader of troops in battle and tried to make himself into a chief with political power, demanding that the Apaches join him in further wars against the Mexicans: “He attempted to turn the tribe into the instrument of his desire, whereas before, by virtue of his competence as a warrior, he was the tribe’s instrument.” Quite naturally, the Apaches would have nothing to do with him, and he spent the next twenty years in silly, futile battles with a handful of followers, becoming a chief, and heroic, only in the eyes of the white myth-makers who never understood. Clastres’s conclusion for the Apache, as for the dozens of Central American cultures he has studied: “One is confronted, then, by a vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without power; where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchical subordination; where, in a word, no relationship of command- obedience is in force.” …

Nor should one think that it is only among such archaic peoples that forms of statelessness exist. One can encounter much the same sort of thing, sometimes with a few more touches of formality, often enough in the histories of peoples of acknowledged sophistication.

The Greeks, for example. From the eighth century B.C. on to as late as the fourth, the great majority of Hellenic villages and cities operated without kings, without ruling priesthoods, without fixed aristocracies, organizing their daily affairs through assemblies of citizens and popularly elected leaders. The Greek polis may have created more civic officers than the Dinka did, and it may have relied to a greater extent on codified law, but it had the same avoidance of authoritarian forms, the same distrust of chiefly powers, the same dependence upon popular assemblies for the settlement of disputes. Even Athens, probably more encumbered than most Greek cities because of its size and prominence, studiously avoided the governmental trappings of the riparian empires that had preceded it. It was governed not by imperial wizards and pharaohs but by a public assembly, the ecclesia, a regular gathering of all (male) citizens who wished to participate, which made all important decisions and set all guiding policies and then elected a rotating body of fellow- citizens, the Council of 500, and an assortment of citizen committees to carry them out. So far from having a permanent monarch, Athens until Periclean times generally selected a new “president”—in effect the mayor—every single day by lot from among the Council of 500, and his duties were totally symbolic and ceremonial. And none doubts the sophistication of that culture.

Similarly, the medieval cities were without anything that could be thought of as a state, certainly nothing recognized beyond their narrow borders. They did have their forms of governance, to be sure, somewhat more complicated than the Dinka, with town officers and magistrates and written charters. But they knew no authority beyond their fortified walls, no lord or nation or king (which is why even today the British monarch theoretically has to ask permission to enter the City of London). They were entirely self-administering, self-governing, self- adjudicating (in most places, until the fifteenth century, local priests and often local feudal lords were subject to the decisions of the city’s folkmote or juries). They recognized only the authority of their own citywide folkmotes, open to all citizens, which in turn generally selected the military defensor and the judicial magisters for the town (and it is precisely because they did not have such folkmotes that certain cities— Paris and Moscow for sure, and possibly London and Lisbon as well— were chosen by certain feudal lords and bishops to be the capitals of their growing dominions). And they regarded themselves as completely sovereign, even granting their own citizenship (as Braudel points out, each city “was the classic type of the closed town, a self-sufficient unit, an exclusive Lilliputian native land”).

Even then, the average independent city hardly resembled what we would think of as a “state,” so decentralized were the effective functions of municipal life. Especially in northern and western Europe, each neighborhood or parish normally had its own forms of governance for most day-to-day affairs, its own assembly meeting once a month or more, its own tribunal, priest, militia, and emblems. In addition each trade had its own guild to see to the welfare, protection, and health of its members, with its own assembly, its own courts and punishments, and its own military force armed with its own bows or guns. It was only disputes between the neighborhoods or disagreements among the guilds that went up to the consideration of city officers, and most of these were settled by schemes of local custom and adjudication as honored and respected as those among the Dinka.

There are many other examples of stateless societies to be found in more contemporary history. In sixteenth-century Ireland, we are told, there was “no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice … no trace of State-administered justice.” The Swiss Confederation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was so formless that it had no central government at all but rather an obedient secretariat of two regular officials and a few aides that moved around the country from canton to canton (the entire apparatus of the “state” was once stuck in the snow in a single railway coach near Mellingen), and even though those cantons enjoyed almost total internal autonomy most matters of substance in them were in fact decided by “sovereign villages.” Such religious communities as the Quakers, Dukhobors, Mennonites, and Hutterites have lasted for centuries without any trappings of the state—nor do most of them formally recognize the civil states around them—and with their own law and governance as established by religion, custom, community, and popular democratic assemblies.

But it is probably among the classic New England towns of the eighteenth century that the best modern example of the essentially stateless society is to be found.

Although in strictly legal terms the towns of the province of Massachusetts were part of a considerable state, consisting of a governor and legislature in Boston and a king and parliament in London, in any practical sense the provincial charter of 1691 established a territory without a state, without effective central authority of any kind. Such governance as there was—and it was not much intrusive into most citizens’ lives—was grounded in the towns, the small, scattered settle­ments, very few with more than a thousand people in all, that stretched from the Atlantic to the Berkshires. As Michael Zuckerman describes it in his excellent Peaceable Kingdoms (an awkward misnomer that, for they had nothing to do with kings), these towns “were free enough of both Boston and London to enjoy an autonomy which, if never total, was always genuine,” enabling them to establish “local custom and usage as guides for the management of most facets” of their politics; and they were even able to “set the law aside, without ever a word that went beyond the town boundaries, when the law proved inconvenient for local purposes,” so that “effective law in the provincial community was ultimately only what each particular place would abide by.”

Their operative ideas of appropriate authority and meet relations among men were those they drew from daily conduct in the commu­nities . . . The town became the only governmental agency with more than a sporadic impact on the lives of its residents, and as it came to provide most of them with the only essential experience of public authority they would ever know, it encroached ineluctably upon the traditional prerogatives of the central government. As the Revolution eventually revealed, the very maintenance of order in the province had come to depend, in the eighteenth century, upon the towns.

Talk about the decentralist tradition.

Not only did these towns manage their own affairs for upwards of a century, they did so with extraordinary peace and harmony. The local church, the local market, the town schools, the town meeting, all taught concord and control, all emphasized harmony and homogeneity. And with such success that Zuckerman figures on average only one town out of the 200 in any given year had a quarrel serious enough to take to the legislature in Boston to settle for it.

And of course there was no need for official agencies of public control and public order. There was, to be sure, a constable for each community, but he was a person elected annually, seldom in office more than a year at a time, almost always serving with great reluctance, and having no enforcement powers whatsoever beyond those sanctioned by the town as a whole: “Constables . . . could command compliance only when almost everyone was prepared to give it anyway.” There were in certain centers courts of law, but they were seldom used (it is said that there were probably no more than a dozen lawyers in the whole province in 1750, and most of those in Boston), and they were without any real powers of enforcement; most parties in dispute preferred to establish their own arbitration committees, call together the church elders, or even ask in impartial men from neighboring communities. What kept the peace, what maintained order, were the communal bonds and religious ties, and behind it all, the town meeting.

The town meeting, despite its look of formality, was an instrument hardly more statist than the council of elders found in many Indian tribes. It was nothing more—though nothing less—than the regular occasion for the expression of community solidarity through popular decision-making, about everything that affected the town, from the upkeep of the roads and the tax rates to the amount of firewood to be cut for the minister. All decisions were normally unanimous—what, after all, would be the point of a victory by a majority that left unhappy a minority of neighbors and friends?—and since “the recalcitrant could not be compelled to adhere to the common course of action,” as Zuckerman notes, “the common course of action had to be shaped so as to leave none recalcitrant, and that was the vital function of the New England town meeting.” Even more than in the Greek or medieval city, this was “government by consent of the governed”—always remembering that women were regrettably, except in their lobbying function, excluded—for this de­pended on the open consent, active, perceived consent, by all, not merely a majoritarian segment of, the governed. One can read over and over again in the records of town meetings throughout Massachusetts, and similarly throughout the rest of New England, recurrent variations on this theme: votes “by the free and united consent of the whole,” “by all the voters present,” or this especially felicitous one from Weston, “By a full and Unanimous Vote that they are Easie and Satisfied With What they have Done.” It was this unit, this expression of the real general will, that was the essential political embodiment of the New England people for generations on end.

Here at the very beginnings of American society, here at the fount of the American soul, we find the most developed, the most settled, the most reasonable demonstration of the worth and happiness of life without the state.

We do have to go back for some time in history—except for those few remaining examples of the archaic state particularly in Africa and Australia to find examples of societies without the state, that being the particular burden of the contemporary world. And yet when we do, through anthropolo­gists and archaeologists and historians, we almost never fail to find an extraordinary record of stability and equilibrium that suggests, and goes a long way to proving, that the human animal, without the patterns of the state and the pillars of authority, tends to peace not war, to self-­regulation not chaos, to cooperation not dissension, to harmony not violence, to order not disarray. Indeed, looking at the long human record, it is hard not to find an increase in all of the latter characteristics with the development of the state.

It took me many years to understand it, but I do now—the remark of Proudhon that liberty is not the daughter of order, but the mother.

 

The Decentralist Tradition

The impulse to local governance, to separatism and independence, to regional autonomy, seems an eternal one and well-nigh ineradicable. The long experience of nation-states—in Europe going back several centuries at least, in parts of Asia somewhat longer—has not destroyed that impulse, not in those countries, such as Britain, say, or the United States, where the state has grown to be most powerful and ubiquitous, not those places, such as Iran, where it has been most overreaching and oppressive. Indeed what is remarkable during these long years is how this decentralist tradition remains so resilient—so resilient that every time the power of the nation-state is broken, as during wars or rebellions, immediately there spring up a variety of decentralized organizations—in the neighborhoods, in the factories and offices, in the barracks and universities—that reinstitute government in local, popular, and anti-authoritarian forms.

The historical evidence is unmistakable on this point. In Paris in 1871 the collapse of the empire gave birth to the Paris Commune and its popular assemblies, while every neighborhood began its own committees of governance and defense and most of the business of the capital went on as usual, only with the workers themselves in charge: in Hannah Arendt’s words, “a swift disintegration of the old power, the sudden loss of control over the means of violence, and, at the same time, the amazing formation of a new power structure which owed its existence to nothing but the organizational impulses of the people themselves.”*

In Russia in 1905, and then again more sweepingly in 1917, industrial workers organized themselves into committees that took over factories and shops in practically every industry after the owners and bureaucrats had fled, and the real work of running most of the cities was done—until Bolshevik violence eventually put an end to them—by local soviets, popularly elected assemblies.

In Germany at the end of World War I, workers and soldiers in a number of cities organized themselves into local councils—Rate—in defiance of the Social Democratic regime in Berlin, demanding a new German constitution based on local autonomy through a nationwide Radtesystem, in Munich even establishing for a time a Raterepublik of Bavaria where, a sympathetic observer noted, “every individual found his own sphere of action and could behold, as it were, with his own eyes his own contribution to the events of the day.”

In Spain in 1936-37 the collapse of the national government was followed by the emergence of independent collective governments in hundreds of smaller towns, as we have seen, as well as in a number of the larger cities—Barcelona and Alcoy, particularly—where entire indus­tries were run by self-management, municipal services such as the electric works and streetcar systems were operated by independent collectives, and political and economic affairs were in the hands of “technical-administrative” committees elected within each industry.

In Hungary in 1956, the uprising that toppled the Communist regime led immediately, even in a country little used to popular government, to the formation of an extraordinary array of local councils, in neighborhoods and coffee houses, offices and factories, among writers and soldiers, students and—mirabile dictu—civil servants, indeed every­where in the society, gradually coalescing within days into a rough network capable at least for a time of running the entire country.

In Iran in 1979, after the fall of the totalitarian government of the Shah, local institutions long suppressed suddenly appeared overnight, independent ayatollahs took control of their own provincial towns, neighborhood komitehs (even their name reminiscent of the Paris Commune) emerged to control their own territories in the cities, and at least four of the ancient minorities –  *Baluchis in the southwest, the Kurds and Azerbaijanis in the northeast, and the Arabs of the Persian Gulf—asserted their independence with armed rebellions and demon­strations in the streets.

No, most of these did not last long, and the forces of the statists soon dominated, but the same deep human spirit can be found, too, in America after 1776, in France in 1789, in several European capitals in 1848, in many parts of Italy during the 1850s, in parts of occupied France and Italy in 1918-19, in Ireland throughout the civil war of the 1920s, in China in 1949, in Cuba in 1959, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Chile in 1970, in Portugal in 1974-75, in Angola and Mozambique at that same time, in fact as near as I can tell wherever and whenever a central government loses its hold (and before some new centralizing force, as often as not proclaiming itself revolutionary, takes over). Hannah Arendt has studied this phenomenon, noting with some wonderment how local councils and societies “make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”:

Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders. They were utterly neglected by statesmen, historians, political theorists, and, most importantly by the revolutionary tradition itself. Even those historians whose sympathies were clearly on the side of revolution and who could not help writing the emergence of popular councils into the record of their story regarded them as nothing more than essentially temporary organs in the revolutionary struggle for liberation; that is to say, they failed to understand to what extent the council system confronted them with an entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom which was constituted and organized during the course of the revolution itself.

Everywhere it seems to be the case that the absence of government does not lead to bewilderment and confusion and disorder, as might be imagined if all of government’s claims for itself were true, but rather to a resurgence of locally based forms, most often democratically chosen and scrupulously responsive, that turn out to be quite capable of managing the complicated affairs of daily life for many months, occasionally years, until they are forcibly suppressed by some new centralist state less democratic and less responsive. They seem to be, as Arendt says, “spontaneous organs of the people,” expressive of the natural human scale of politics and inheritors of the long tradition of decentralism.

It is striking to re-read history with eyes opened to the persistence of this tradition, because at once you begin to see the existence of the anti­authoritarian, independent, self-regulating, local community is every bit as basic to the human record as the existence of the centralized, imperial, hierarchical state, and far more ancient, more durable, and more widespread.

Obviously for the 2 million years that humans have been on earth they lived in small clans and groups, as we have noted before, and for the next 10,000 years that they were becoming “civilized” they lived in small communities and towns, needing none but the most limited kinds of governmental structures. Even throughout the era of oriental empires—Persian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian—the greater part of the world’s people still lived in independent hamlets, ever-resistant to the imposition of outside authority, and even within the empires themselves local self-governing communes always persisted. Later, the Essenes, the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls who established an egalitarian community in opposition to Romanic Jerusalem in the second century before Christ, were only one of myriad tribes and sects that lived deliberately outside the Roman imperial influence. And still later the Christians themselves often lived in democratic and independent com­munities, sometimes in secret and sometimes openly but always apart from and hostile to whatever state might claim sovereignty.

The settlements of Greece were typical of such resistant localism: for many centuries they clung to a fierce independence, city upon city, valley after valley, no matter what putative conquerors might intrude, in time achieving that Hellenic civilization that is still a marvel of the world. As historian Rudolf Rocker has written of them:

Greece was politically the most dismembered country on earth. Every city took zealous care lest its political independence be assailed; for this the inhabitants of even the smallest of them were in no mind to surrender. Each of these little city-republics had its own constitution, its own social life with its own cultural peculiarities; and this it was that gave to Hellenic life as a whole its variegated wealth of genuine cultural values.

It was this healthy decentralization, this internal separation of Greece into hundreds of little communities, tolerating no uniformity, which constantly aroused the mind to consideration of new matters. Every larger political structure leads inevitably to a certain rigidity of the cultural life and destroys that fruitful rivalry between separate communities which is so characteristic of the whole life of the Grecian cities.

Even to call it “Greece” is indeed to employ a modern fiction: the citizens of that ancient culture thought of themselves as Athenians and Spartans and Thebans, not Greeks, alike in language and civilization but not in political stamp or rule.

Traditional historians write of the European period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance as if nothing much were going on outside of the consolidation of feudal families into the monarchies of the subse­quent nation-states. But that is like talking of the night as the presence of stars or the ocean as if it were only waves. What was going on throughout the continent from the Atlantic to the Urals, what kept European civilization alive for better than ten centuries, was the maintenance and development of small, independent communities— here in the form of Teutonic and Russian and Saxon villages with their popular councils and judicial elders, there as the medieval city-states with their guilds and brotherhoods and folkmotes, and over there as the chartered towns spread by the hundreds over France and Belgium with their special instruments of sovereignty and self-jurisdiction. Charac­teristic of the look of the continent were the divided cantons of what became Switzerland, beginning with the first democratic commune in Uri in the 1230s, a form that spread through dozens of villages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and lasted until dominance by Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century; at its height a typical canton, the independent Swiss Republic of the Three Leagues, covering about the area of Dallas, consisted of three loosely federated leagues, twenty-six sub-jurisdictions, forty-nine jurisdictional communes, and 227 autonomous neighborhoods—and, as an eighteenth-century traveler put it, “each village . . . each parish and each neighbourhood already constituted a tiny republic.”

That Europe did eventually evolve some families designating themselves royal, and that some of those conquered vast areas of land they liked to call nations, and that the whole became a system of border-drawn nation states such as we know today, does not mean that this was the tide and trend of that long era. Indeed, as between the statist tradition and the decentralist, these thousand years were clearly the period of the latter, into the fifteenth century in western European territories, in some places into the nineteenth century in eastern. No one has understood this period better than the Russian scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, whose careful researches into its long-neglected intricacies, built upon the absolute explosion of interest in village government by scholars everywhere in the nineteenth century, have given us a telling picture of those centuries:

Self-jurisdiction was the essential point [of the commune] and self­-jurisdiction meant self-administration. … It had the right of war and peace, of federation and alliance with its neighbors. It was sovereign in its own affairs, and mixed with no others.

In all its affairs the village commune was sovereign. Local custom was the law, and the plenary assembly of all the heads of family, men and women [!], was the judge, the only judge, in civil and criminal matters. . . .

[In medieval towns] each street or parish had its popular assembly, its forum, its popular tribunal, its priest, its militia, its banner, and often its seal, the symbol of its sovereignty. Though federated with other streets it nevertheless maintained its independence.

This was the rule, mind, not the exception; it was exactly this self-governing community, through pestilence and war, the vicissitudes of nature and of kings, that sustained the many tens of millions of people of Europe for a millennium and more.

Nor did the tradition end with the rise of the nation-state. In many places it persisted quite a time—France did not outlaw local folkmotes until 1789, and Russian communes continued to exist in countless places until finally gutted by Stalin as late as the 1930s—and even in the age of nationalism it is not difficult to find, just below the surface, the roughly independent peasant village, the headstrong town, the self-minding neighborhood, in almost any country of Europe.

And in America. the decentralist tradition, manifested in a persistent anti-authoritarianism and a quite exuberant localism, is basic to the American character. (I am thinking of the European element here, but of course before that was the culture of the original Americans, almost everywhere communal, non-hierarchic, anti-institutional, and carefully localized.)

The Plymouth settlers, after all, were a proud and independent people who made the journey precisely to escape the press of the authoritarian state, and their original village was egalitarian enough, at least in its first two years, to have communal farming, the equal distribution of clothes and food, and cooking and laundry done in common; it turned out to be not a great success and it was abandoned, but it was what they hoped in their souls they could achieve. And when that first village tried to assert its control over such free spirits as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, they simply moved on and started their own independent colonies—the beginning of a long, regular, native pattern of settlement that marked this land for at least three hundred years, until the Pacific stopped the march.

Others, too, who came here were anti-authoritarian by tempera­ment, or tempering—the Quakers and the Mennonites, escaping state persecution, the freed convicts and indentured workers, the en­trepreneurs and political free-thinkers seeking fresh territory. Even such modest governments as the colonies represented seemed to chafe such people, and their resistance climaxed in the “insurrections” of 1675-90, in response to which William and Mary granted new and more lenient colonial charters. That did not halt the movement toward independence, however, and even the kinds of concessions later offered by George III and his ministers—and they were generous—did not succeed in abating the strong separatist spirit. Resistance to unwanted laws and the flouting of colonial authority were common well before the Revolution itself, and riots and rebellions—the Regulator movement against the governments of the Carolinas in the 1760s, for example, and the Green Mountain Boys against the government of New York in the 1770s—were recurrent. These fledgling Americans wanted to be left alone, to sink their roots how and where they pleased.

The Revolution was precisely in this tradition, and the document that began it is permeated with the principles of the sanctity of community borrowed from the philosophers of the Scottish Enlighten­ment, of the primacy of the people over the state plucked from Rousseau, and of the inviolability of local governance that was largely ingrained in the Americans themselves. No better confirmation of these principles was needed than the experience of the colonies in the early years after the Declaration, when most of the British institutions had collapsed and many of their leaders fled, and yet the citizens went right on administering their own affairs, and successfully too. Largely through town meetings, common from Massachusetts to Virginia and not alone in New England, the settlements of the new country raised money and volunteers for the new army (in which, incidentally, the soldiers usually elected their own officers), organized militias for self-defense, and took care of the plowing and planting, the road-repairing and bridge-building, the schooling and policing. As Tom Paine was later to write:

For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War, and for a longer period in several of the American states, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country of Europe.

The government that eventually did take shape over these lands, under the Articles of Confederation, was little more than an extension, a federation, of these existing forms. The Articles, much maligned by statists and regularly misconstrued by textbooks written from the viewpoint of a later age, were “weak” enough, as conventional opinion has it, if by “weak” is meant that the affairs of the country would continue to be the stuff of the daily chaffer-mugger of the village square and the town meeting and not matters exclusively for professionals in some inaccessible capital; “weak” if by weak is meant that, in the words of the Articles’ first and most basal provision, that “each state retains sovereignty, freedom, and independence”; “weak” if popular govern­ment be weak, if local control be weak, if direct democracy be weak. Such matters will always be murky, but there is excellent evidence that the greatest part of the free population supported the Articles whole­heartedly and was little interested in the drive for a stronger government that such misguided people as Hamilton and Madison began pushing after the war. And even when the centralists and commercial interests pushed it through, the Constitution was approved only after the state legislators, “in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers,” demanded that a Bill of Rights be added to it: the danger of the central government it was that was uppermost even in the minds of those who were constructing it.

Certainly those citizens who quickly came to feel its pinch had reason enough to look with suspicion on the new government. We remember them now as authors of the series of revolts—such as Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whisky Rebellion in Pennsylvania—by local communities, mostly rural, that had just finished fighting for the right to run their affairs without the taxations and surcharges of an unrepresentative government and would, by God, do it again. Common to these revolts was the publicly stated desire to escape the hand of usurious banks, to establish local control over currency and taxation, and to select local officials (in the words of Shays’s followers, to allow “each town to elect its own justices of the peace, each county its judges, and each military company its officers”)—all demands that seemed reason­able enough in the light of the principles of the Revolution and the experience of the Articles. But such resistance was inevitably met with force and put down with considerable ferocity by Federal troops and state militias, with jail terms for the leaders who survived.

Not that the youthful United States government was a particularly autocratic one, not that at all. In fact it was run by men who saw themselves as truly libertarian, in service to those principles of federal­ism and republicanism that did much to spread power out from the center to the state capitals and the counties and towns. But it did not take more than a few dozen years before the acute Thomas Jefferson, who had done so much to assure that the new government would be restrained, began to fear that even this much centralism, in the hands of such tyrannically-tempered men as Alexander Hamilton, was beginning to rot the republic and remove the essential affairs of state from those who should of right be tangling with them. Around 1816, after having served his stint in the presidency perhaps not wisely nor too well, he began to revive an idea that had long been part of his political creed: ward government. A system of small “elementary republics,” he began to feel—units of perhaps a hundred men or two, populations of 500 to 1,000 in all—was essential to the salvation of the American state, and a better alternative than his earlier notion of recurring revolutions (“a little rebellion, now and then”). What he urged on all who would hear him was “small republics” by which “every man in the State” could become “an acting member of the Common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within his competence.” “Divide [government] among the many,” he declared, so that each citizen may feel “that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.” Thus a nation of face-to-face democracy, of town meetings, of neighborhood government, where “the voice of the whole people would be fairly, fully, and peaceably expressed, discussed, and decided by the common reason” of every citizen, every day, everywhere.

The Jeffersonian formula was never tried, not even seriously debated in the land—Jefferson himself had effectively retired from public life and chose not to enter new lists at this late date, his passions not quite up to his convictions. And even as it was being voiced, the large shadow of the Federal and state government was moving slowly out to dim and extinguish the small lights of self-government that existed: one after another the towns and cities of the mid-Atlantic region abandoned town meetings or made them ritualistic annual affairs; the corporate form of city government, with mayors and councils, was pushed by conservatives as a way to keep the peace and put decisions into “responsible” hands; and the township system was downgraded in favor of greater power to the state and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Federal governments. It was, as historian Merrill Jensen has put it in his authoritative The New Nation, “the counter-revolution.”

But the Jeffersonian ideal remained, in one form or another, the philosophic pole at one end of American politics throughout at least the first half of the nineteenth century. It was the guide for Thoreau (“That government is best which governs not at all”) and for Emerson (“The less government we have, the better—the fewer laws, and the less confided power”), for Calhoun and the Carolina Nullificationists, and for both white abolitionists and black insurrectionaries who repeatedly defied state and Federal laws. At mid-century there were many who would say with Thoreau:

This government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accom­plished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

The illegal war of 1861 and its centralizing aftermath—wars are always centralizing; that’s why governments have them—brought a temporary halt to this Jeffersonian tradition and weakened the principle of states’ rights forever. But a trace of it broke out again with real ferocity once more in the latter part of the century. Against the increasing monolithicity of government, industry, and political party, there sprang up a variety of movements diverse in cause but similar in resistance to the centralists: the Greenbacks, the Grangers, Oklahoma Socialists, Knights of Labor, Georgeists, feminists, anarchists, communists, Utopians, and above all the groups that fused to become, around 1880, the Populists. The Populists seemed almost to be that party Emerson had dreamed of—“fanatics in freedom: they hated tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, gover­nors, yea, almost laws”—except that they added to this anti-authoritaria­nism a profound regard for communalism, cooperation, federation, networking, and localism, and actually developed an extraordinary variety of ventures to foster those. From Texas to the Carolinas, the Populists represented a major part of American politics, winning over whole towns in the South and West, achieving electoral victories in several states—in fact, gaining control of the North Carolina legislature in 1890 and passing laws for local self-government through county autonomy. It may in the end have proved a failure, but Populism was American to the grain, Jeffersonian at its core, built upon the small farmers and artisans of the still-frontier settlements, rooted in the values of the local community and those enterprises—grange, church, school, newspaper, local shops—that gave them expression, set against all those Eastern institutions— industrial trusts, railroads, big-city machines, national banks—that in fact in time were to suffocate those enterprises.

With the first two decades of the twentieth century the triumph of Federal power was made manifest. The central government was ac­knowledged as supreme, its authority over its population’s pockets (the Income Tax Amendment of 1913) and habits (the Prohibition Amend­ment of 1919) and even lives (the Selective Service Act of 1917) fully established. Those who resisted, on whatever grounds, were given a show of raw Federal power: the Espionage Act of 1917, the Immigration Acts of 1917-18, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Raids of 1919, the Palmer Raids of 1920, and countless little sins of commission in between. What happened then in the 1930s and 1940s, with the familiar events of New Deal consolidation, seemed only a natural extension of the past autocracy.

Even then, the decentralist spirit did not disappear. It found expression in the Agrarian movement of the 1920s and 1930s against corporate giantism and the growing industrialization and urbanization of the South; in the cooperative movement, both agricultural and con­sumer, that set roots then that are still in place today; and in a variety of home-grown radicalisms—of Ralph Borsodi’s homesteaders, Arthur Morgan’s communitarians, the Catholic distributists, the Technocrats, the folk-schoolers, the Black Mountain anarchists, and so on. Many of these eventually joined to found the journal Free America, which for ten difficult years from 1937 to 1946 represented, as nothing in that century did, the voice of decentralism in America, summed up in its founding creed:

Free America stands for individual independence and believes that freedom can exist only in societies in which the great majority are the effective owners of tangible and productive property and in which group action is democratic. In order to achieve such a society, ownership, production, population, and government must be decentralized. Free America is therefore opposed to finance-capitalism, fascism, and communism.

In the middle of the last century the decentralist tradition shook itself awake again after the deadening hand of the Cold War years, aroused first by the black and student insurrections of the 1960s, expressions of a generation that sought, as the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society put it, “a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.” The convincing disillusionment with gov­ernment power as symbolized by Vietnam and Watergate of course added to this spirit, and then evidence of FBI and CIA repression, congressional illegalities, bureaucratic failures, and, with Carter, gov­ernment ineptitude, added further, producing what ex-Congressman Michael Harrington in his farewell statement to the House in 1978 called “a tide of revulsion and rejection” that was “unique to our time, at least in its authentic community.

The decentralist tradition, no matter what, will not die, for it is as wide in the American soul as the country is wide, as deep in the American psyche as the riches are deep. One may well wonder, with historian C. Vann Woodward, why, given its steady opposition to centralization and authority, the American environment nonetheless “should have proved so hospitable to those same tendencies in govern­ment, military, and business. A huge federal bureaucracy,” he taunts, “a great military establishment, and multinational corporations, not to mention big labor, seem to have successfully surmounted all the handicaps to centralization.” But the answer is as easy as it is revealing. The centralizing tendency has always existed in this country alongside the decentralizing—for every Anne Hutchinson a Governor Winthrop, for every Jefferson a Hamilton, for every Calhoun a Webster, for every Thoreau a Longfellow, for every Davis a Lincoln, for every Debs a Wilson, for every Borsodi a Tugwell, for every Brandeis a Frankfurter, for every Mumford a Schlesinger, for every Schumacher a Galbraith. And obviously this century, not only in this country but around the world, has belonged to the centralists and all their totalitarian machinery. But the decentralist movement has not disappeared either, and it seems to have survived Woodward’s decades of bureaucracies and multinationals quite intact. Indeed, one gets the sense that these next few decades may provide its chance again, and I would argue that the anti-establishment support that arose for Donald Trump in 2016 is a sign of that Jeffersonianism still at work.

Our model is the pulse of the twentieth century into the twenty-first: the decentralism of the world. The five empires that existed in 1945—English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Soviet—have all collapsed, spinning off scores of smaller, independent states.  The United Nations began with 51 nations in 1945, today it has 193, and there eight more outside, including the Vatican. Czechoslovakia has split in two, Yugoslavia in seven (counting Kosovo and  Montenegro), the Soviet Union into fifteen. There are separatist movements everywhere.  Global politics is living out the Yeatsian message: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

 

The Search for Community

Anthropological evidence is somewhat sketchy, but it seems clear that the oldest human institution is not the family, as is popularly thought, but the community—the tribe, clan, troop, or village, the larger setting. The family is very old, of course, but as a permanent and conscious social unit it seems to have emerged slowly over tens of thousands of years, well after the early hominids had formed into tribal communities. Bernard Campbell of Cambridge University suggests that the family may have originated sometime in the period of the Australopithecus when small bands of hominids, perhaps a male and one or more females and their children, broke off from a larger community during periods when adverse weather caused food supplies to dwindle. Such small groups were probably able to travel easier and farther in search of food and were able to exist more easily on limited resources, a pattern such as is found even today among certain baboon troops and among the Basarwa of the Kalahari. In time, or with successive hardship periods, such small groups might have eventually developed into deliberate families, lasting a generation and then for successive generations, though probably always within the confines of a larger social grouping.

In fact it is reasonable to assume, as most anthropologists do nowadays, that it was some form of community living that made humans “human.” In other words, it was not until some group of hominids meeting around some water hole began grunting and jabbering at each other in regular ways that speech developed, and those groups in which speech was most successful—where, for example, cries of warning or hunting directions were least ambiguous—were the ones that were more likely to survive. It was not until sufficient bands of people gathered for regular periods that fire, found in some tree trunk hit by lightning or dry grass sparked by a volcano, could be tended day in and day out, a task that was essential in those hundreds of thousands of years before our human ancestors had learned to create fire at will. It was not until individual hominids began operating as groups that they were capable of taking on the larger game animals and covering the kinds of geographical distances that would have been necessary for a regular supply of meat. It was not until groups began the regular sharing of food—a trait found in no other primate—that there were created the social ties and obligations, and eventually the kinship and mating systems,  that distinguish humans from all other animals. It was not until early humans lived in settled groups that they developed art—such as the Lascaux cave paintings— and religion—symbolized by the Sapiens burials at Sungir, Russia, of 28,000 years ago—and manners and customs and traditions and codes and all that goes to make up a culture, however scanty and primitive. The very existence of the community it was that caused the development of so many of those things that over countless millennia shaped the animal that was once known as “Modern Man.”

Moreover, it can be said that the whole process of human success has depended precisely upon the ability of our species not only to live in small groups of twenty-five or so—for that is found in many other primates as well—but to create large communal institutions numbering into the several hundreds and to keep such gatherings intact by mutual aid and cooperation over years and decades and centuries. Amos H. Hawley, one of the pioneers in the study of human ecology, has argued that it has been this human capacity for living in community that has been the essential “adaptive mechanism” throughout human develop­ment. Human beings cannot adapt to their physical environment alone as individuals, he says; only by creating a “human aggregate,” and thus practicing communal and cooperative efforts, are they able not only to survive but in many respects to prevail. One might even justifiably claim therefore that the instinct for community is as old and as vital and as powerful as the instinct for sex, since the former appears to be as necessary for survival as the latter is for procreation.

Indeed there is every reason to believe that the human need and capacity for communality is genetically encoded in modern Homo sapiens. Rene Dubos, who was an eminent microbiologist at Rockefeller Univer­sity in the mid-20^th century, argued that “the social organization based on the hunter-gatherer way of life lasted so long—several hundred thousand years—that it has certainly left an indelible stamp on human behavior.” He points out that 100 billion human beings have lived since the late Paleolithic period, when the Cro-Magnons appeared, and “the immense majority of them have spent their entire life as members of very small groups . . . rarely … of more than a few hundred persons. The genetic determinants of behavior, and especially of social relationships, have thus evolved in small groups during several thousand generations.” He concludes: “Modern man still has a biological need to be part of a group. [This] cannot possibly be altered in the foreseeable future, even if the world were to be completely urbanized and industrialized.”

It seems safe to say, at the very least, that the organization of community is not simply one way of ordering human affairs but a universal way, found in all times and places, among all kinds of peoples. George Murdoch, one of the giants of American anthropology, under­took an exhaustive ten-year “cross-cultural survey” for the Institute of Human Relations at Yale some years ago, during which he and his colleagues studied some 250 different human societies all over the earth, of varying periods, geographical settings, and stages of development. He concluded:

The community and the nuclear family are the only social groups that are genuinely universal. They occur in every known human society, and both are also found in germinal form on a subhuman level.

As fundamental as the family is, however:

Nowhere on earth do people live regularly in isolated families. Everywhere territorial propinquity, supported by divers other bonds, unites at least a few neighboring families into a larger social group all of whose members maintain face-to-face relationships with one another.

Thus, though humankind has not shown itself to be adept at very many social relationships, it can be said that during the long eons of evolution it has probably had more experience with the small community than any other form and has learned to live in groups of that size more successfully than any other.

Given that apparently incontrovertible fact, it would seem sensible for any rational society to attempt to protect and promote the institution of the community. And yet, for all the tossing about of words like “community center” and “community action,” we obviously are not doing so at present in this country or in very many parts of the industrialized world. Small towns are everywhere threatened, and rural populations dwindling; the newly burgeoning suburbs have shown themselves to be particularly weak in creating community cohesion and mutuality; and it is the rare section of the infrequent city in which any strong sense of communality is to be found any longer. It may be too strong to say, with Christopher Alexander, the urban planner at the University of California, that “Western industrial society is the first society in human history where man is being forced to live without” the intimate contacts of community, meaning that “the very roots of our society are threatened.” Yet the increasing loss of communal life is undoubtedly at the heart of the malaise of modern urban culture and its disappearance clearly cannot bode well for the future.

But is it not possible to envision the criteria for an optimum community in the modern world? Just as the human measure can guide us in the design of technology and the creation of buildings, can it not provide a guide in the development of communities?

The cardinal task here, it seems to me, is to discover the limits of a human-scale community, the size beyond which—as the Beanstalk Principle would suggest—it ought not to grow. And here, thanks to various anthropological and sociological records, we have a considerable body of interesting evidence.

The first set of numbers that come up here have been proposed by British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar at Oxford University. He first observed the size limits of non-human primates and determined it was set largely by the size of their brains, specifically the neocortex: “The psychological demands of living in large groups meant that, in primates, species-typical brain size correlates rather closely to the species’ group size.”  For humans he calculated that the normal size of a group “with whom one person can maintain stable relationships” was roughly 150 people.

He then found a number of other examples of what came to be called the “Dunbar number.”  The average size of English villages in the 11^th century Domesday Book was 150.  Eighteenth century parish registers average 150.  The average size for Hutterite and Amish villages before they are forced to split is 150 because they have found that beyond that number peer pressure gives way to some kind of policing.  The basic unit of the British Army,  the company, is from 120 to 180 soldiers.  Gore-Tex set a maximum for its factory sizes at 150, after which a separate factory was formed. The average size of the group that Britons sent Christmas Cards to (in an earlier age, it’s true) was 150.  But in a later age the number of people Dunbar found that most people on Facebook have close relationships with is around 120 to 130. And in a completely different study, Robert Carneiro of the American Museum of Natural History has observed that villages among the Amazonian people he studied in Brazil tended to split up at populations between 100 and 200.

As recurrent as this figure seems to be, I think what it best defines is what Dunbar calls a “social network,” that is, the number of acquaintances an individual can have, suggesting rather close though not necessarily intimate relationship. But I would argue that for a unit that we would call “community,” meaning a group with political (in the broad sense) as well as social cohesion, functioning in a more complex way that a simple network, a larger number is required. And the great body of evidence suggests that this is more than three times as large, or roughly 500.

John Pfeiffer, the anthropological writer who has perhaps as encyclopedic a vision as anyone in the field, goes so far as to call 500 a “magic number” because it recurs so often in human evolution as the limit of a community:

The phenomenon becomes clear and meaningful only after taking census figures for a large number of tribes. Such studies reveal a central tendency to cluster at the 500 level, and this tendency is widespread. It holds for the Shoshoni Indians of the Great Plains, the Andaman Islanders in the Bay of Bengal, and other peoples as well as the Australian aborigines.

This number, Pfeiffer suggests, may have been determined by the nature of human communication and culture-sharing mechanisms: “There seems to be a basic limit to the number of persons who can know one another well enough to maintain a tribal identity at the hunter-gatherer level, who communicate by direct confrontation and who live under a diffuse and informal influence, perhaps a council of elders, rather than an active centralized political authority.” That number may also have been determined by the optimum number of people for mate-selection. Martin Wobst of the University of Massachusetts has made computer calculations of prehistoric societies and determined that for a male to have an adequate pool of mates in his age group in any society in which incest taboos prevailed, he would need a total population of approximately 475 people.

Supportive evidence comes from a number of sources. Accounts of those primates that have developed herds and clans in addition to small- group units often indicate a range from under 100 to more than 700, with an average around 400 or 500: the gelada baboons of Ethiopia, for example, have herds up to 400, while langur monkeys of India tend to split into several herds after more than 550 or so. Joseph Birdsell, an anthropologist at UCLA who has spent considerable time among the Australian aborigines, has reported:

The Australian data show an amazing constancy of numbers for the dialectical tribe [i.e., speaking one dialect], statistically approximating 500 persons. This tendency is independent of regional density. Since the data cover mean annual rainfall variations from 4 inches to more than 160 inches, the size of the dialectical tribal unit is insensitive to regional variations in climatic . . . factors.

Pierre Clastres, a French scholar, estimates that the traditional Tupi-Guarani villages of South America had “a mean population of six hundred to a thousand persons,” based on various sixteenth-century documents, and an actual census in the seventeenth century showed about 450 per village among the Tupis. Various anthropologists in the U.S. have estimated that the “long houses” of the tribes of the Irokwa Confederacy—the meeting places for village gatherings—typically held no more than about 500 people. And archaeological research at sites throughout the Middle East—for example, the work in Mesopotamia of Robert Adams of the University of Chicago and his colleagues—provides evidence that the general size of the earliest village settlements, established in the two millennia after 5000 B.C., varied from about fifty people to perhaps several thousand, but most often clustered somewhere around the 400-500 range.

We may leave it to Rene Dubos, once again, to sum it up: “The biology and psychology of modern Man has certainly been influenced by the fact that, during the past 10,000 years, most people have lived in villages of some 500 inhabitants.”

There is another way of coming at the question of the human limits of a community: Hans Blumenfeld, the urban planner, suggests starting with the idea of the size at which “every person knows every other person by face, by voice, and by name” and adds, “I would say that it begins to fade out in villages with much more than 500 or 600 population.” Constantine Doxiadis, after reducing thousands of data from various centuries, came to the conclusion that what he called the “small neighborhood” would hold approximately 250 people, a large neighborhood some 1,500, with an average around 800-900. Gordon Rattray Taylor, the British science writer, has estimated that there is a “natural social unit” for humans, defined by “the largest group in which every individual can form some personal estimate of the significance of a majority of the other individuals in the group, in relation to himself,” and he holds that the maximum size of such a group, depending on geography and ease of contact, is about 1,200 people; he adds that business firms historically begin to face organizational problems at about this level. Terence Lee, a British sociologist who did a thorough survey of attitudes in Cambridge, England, reported in Human Relations Journal in 1968 that the people themselves thought of their “social acquaintance area” as containing from 0 to 400 houses (some people obviously were not too neighborly), or from 0 to 1,200 people, and the average was under 1,000. And examinations of successful communes over the last century indicate that for the most part they have tended toward an optimum size of 500—as Charles Erasmus, a University of California anthropology professor, has summarized the data, “Successful commune movements . . . have invariably been divided into commu­nities averaging less than five hundred inhabitants.” (He cites the upper limits of 600 for the Shakers, 500 for Amana groups, 300 for Oneida, 800 for Harmony, 500 for Zoar, and 150 for the Hutterites.)

Not many scientific studies have been done on what characteristics of the human brain may set these rough limitations on the size of successful face-to-face communities, but George Murdoch has provided some evidence here. He asked his students and friends to list the people they regularly associated with and knew on a first-name basis; the results showed such a surprising unanimity, ranging from around 800 to around 1,200, that Murdoch concluded that this represents the general “index of familiarity” for human groups. (Try it yourself sometime in a dull moment.) John Pfeiffer also notes that “there is an architect’s rule of thumb to the effect that the capacity of an elementary school should not exceed 500 pupils if the principal expects to know all of them by name” (the average number of pupils in U.S. elementary schools in 2000 was 467, in 2009 475). He goes on to suggest that “the memory capacity of the human brain probably plays a fundamental role of some sort since that influences the number of persons one can know on sight.”

It is possible, too, that the human visual capacity plays a role. Just as the optimal distance for determining the rough outlines of an individual has been determined to be around 450 feet, as we saw in the last chapter, the optimal distance for determining whether a distant object is human at all seems to be around 1,000 feet; this, too, is taken to be the normal optimum for the line of sight of an adult human. Now if we begin by taking this as the maximum space that an intimate community would occupy—the area in which the human form could be perceived from one end of the settlement to the other—the total space would then be 1 million square feet, or about 23 acres (1 acre = 43,560 square feet). Allowing a population density range of from, say, 15 to 40 people per acre (New York City, for comparison, averages 41 people per acre), that provides a community population of between 345 and 920 people. The eye, happily, seems to agree with the brain, again settling on approximately the same range around the “magic” 500 figure. Could that be a remarkable coincidence—or perhaps a reflection of the genetic coding that has effectively determined the limits of human social functions?

There is another number, or rather range of numbers, similarly “magic” perhaps, that recurs in the examination of community, suggesting another desirable, though somewhat larger, size for human groupings. Again, there is an interesting general agreement on the figures from a wide variety of sources.

Although it was the face-to-face village that was the primary communal unit, many societies, and particularly the more successful, often formed larger bands, or tribes, uniting these villages into a common culture. Anthropological evidence suggests that throughout prehistory the upper limit for such tribes—defined as those who speak the same dialect or language or who unite into an association of villages—was everywhere about 5,000 or 6,000. William Sanders and Paul Baker of Penn State University pointed out that tribal units sharing common customs, common language, and common territory might have grown as large as this limit but at that point almost always split into new tribes or else imposed a limit on further growth by establishing a central authority capable of governing population. The University of Arizona’s William Rathje, after using general systems theory to interpret Mayan culture, suggested that this 5,000 number may represent a level at which the social system, at least in early societies, had to limit itself to keep from overloading itself with complexities and burning itself out.

This was about the limit of the earliest cities, too, as near as we can reconstruct the sites—not only in the Middle East, an area that has been particularly well surveyed, but in India, China, North Africa, and Central America. A few might have grown to 20,000 and even 50,000 in their latest stages, shortly before collapse, but as a general rule the urban centers of the millennia before Christ seem to have stayed at between 5,000 and 10,000 people; in the words of Gideon Sjoberg, the urban sociologist, “It seems unlikely that, at least in the earlier periods, even the larger of these cities contained more than 5,000 to 10,000 people, including part-time farmers on the cities’ outskirts.” Architect and planner Constantine Doxiadis calculated that a population of about 5,000 and an area of about two square kilometers were typical of almost all early cities: “Very few of the cities known to have existed during these thousands of years did not have these characteristics.” His explanation for this was that the human animal might have a “kinetic field” set by a ten-minute radius, thus establishing the limits of its normal daily activities, and thus the limits of the area the city could cover and the population it could hold.

This same figure emerges again when we come to the medieval period. Without doubt most places, at least in Europe, had fewer than 2,000 people, but the few trading centers that began to form after the twelfth and thirteenth centuries most commonly held up to 10,000 souls—as Chartres in the twelfth century (10,000), Ypres in 1412 (10,376), Basel in the fourteenth century (8,000). And when we look at the full-fledged cities, particularly those noted for their economic and cultural achievements, it is remarkable how often 5,000 is cited as the upper limit of the precincts, or quarters, out of which these new urban centers were created and into which they were divided. In fact “quarter” originally meant literally a fourth part of a city (or thereabouts), and since we know from Lewis Mumford that the medieval town did not grow beyond about 40,000 people—that was the population of London in the fifteenth century—this would confirm an upper limit of approx­imately 10,000 people per precinct. There is a print showing the layout of the city of Aachen, in 1649, that might serve as a neat example: it shows a circular city bounded by heavily fortified walls, with a large cathedral at the very center and, at the points of the compass, four smaller churches—the church, of course, representing the heart, the “com­munity center,” of the medieval neighborhood. The population at the time was somewhere around 20,000, and the quarters then probably held about 5,000 each.

Coming down to the present, a range of 5,000 to 10,000 shows up with surprising frequency in the recommendations of architects and city planners for the preferred size of a community. Clarence Perry, the grandfather of contemporary planning and the man who redirected attention back to the idea of small-scale communities in the 1930s when they were first threatened by the onrush of the twentieth-century metropolis, is typical. After years of study he hit upon an ideal “neighborhood unit” of from 3,000 to 9,000 people, with an optimum size at 5,000. His theory was that a neighborhood had to be small enough so that everything important—schools, playgrounds, shops, public buildings—was within easy walking distance, and large enough to support an elementary school and a variety of local stores and services. Both conditions could be satisfied, he determined, with a population of about 1,000 to 1,500 families, or an average of about 5,000 people, distributed at roughly 15-20 people per acre, with the total unit then occupying about a half mile square. Since Perry’s formulation, a wide variety of other city planners, of different decades, philosophies, styles, and interests, has also arrived at about the same figure.*

Perry’s “walking distance” principle in particular has become standard among almost all urban planners who give any thought at all to community. Walter Gropius, the architect, has explained the rationale this way:

The size of the townships should be limited by the pedestrian range to keep them within a human scale. . . . The human being himself, so much neglected during the early machine age, must become the focus of all reconstruction to come. Our stride determines and measures our space- and time-conception and pegs out our local living space. Organic planning has to reckon with the human scale, the “foot,” when shaping any physical structure. Violation of the human scale will cause further degeneration of life in cities.

Like Perry, Gropius observed that the maximum distance a person would walk comfortably for ordinary community affairs was about half a mile, and thus he too came up with an optimum “township” size of roughly a half a mile square. Now if we assume that half the space within that area would be given over to public buildings, shops, pathways, and parkland, and if we assume for the remaining 160 acres residential densities somewhere around the models of Gropius and the “garden city” planners, we come up with a range of population—no surprise— around 5,000-8,000 people.

One final piece of evidence on community size comes from Leopold Kohr, who has done more thinking about this from the perspective of the social sciences than anyone to date. Kohr argues that it would take about eighty or a hundred adults to provide the convivial society, that is to say, the number to “fulfill the companionship function to the fullest” and “to ensure both variety of contacts and constancy of relationships”; but, he says, it would take more than that for an effective economic society. In a society with basic specialization—a shoemaker, say, and a baker and a builder and so on—there need to be enough people to consume the goods and services during the course of a year, and eighty or a hundred adults is too small a pool; “economic optimum social size,” he estimates, requires “a full membership of 4,000 to 5,000 inhabitants.” At this level, he argues, “society seems capable of furnishing its members not only with most of the commodities we associate with a high standard of living, but also of surrounding each person with the margin of leisure without which it could not properly perform its original convivial function.” And for the optimum political society only a few thousand people need be added—“a full population of between 7,000 and 12,000”—to provide a sufficient number who can be spared from basic economic routines to perform legislative, legal, political, and security tasks.² This is the size, actually, of various real-world states that survive quite nicely, including the independent state of Nauru in the South Pacific, and such self-administered dependencies as Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Falkland Islands, Saint Helena, and Tuvalu.

 

What we have here, then, with our two ranges of “magic” numbers, is a rough measure of the two basic kinds of community that humans have apparently found the most useful and successful over their many millennia as social creatures. One is the face-to-face association group, with somewhere between 400 and 1,000 people and an optimum of perhaps 500—what we might call the common neighborhood, a small area usually of a few blocks where most of the people know one another at least by sight and in some cases can band together to form small-scale associations. The other is the extended association, a wider alliance of some 5,000 to 10,000 people, usually hovering around the lower figure, that following Constantine Doxiadis I would call the polis, the Greek word for a small close-knit city with shared customs.  These numbers are only suggestive, of course, but if humankind in all races and cultures has chosen to live in these aggregates, the neighborhood and the polis, throughout its evolution, right down to the current era, and if to some degree at least it has solved the problems of collective living at these levels, then they deserve our consideration in a most essential way when we contemplate the design and reconstruction of our social settings.

A town of less than 10,000 is, in modern terms, small, of course—some might say hopelessly small. But, as Gropius says, “It is particularly the small size of the township with its human scale which would favorably influence the growth of distinct characteristics of the community,” including regular associations between people, easy access to public officers, mutual aid among neighbors, and open and trusting social relations. Smallness is simply essential to preserve the values of community as they have been historically observed—intimacy, trust, honesty, mutuality, cooperation, democracy, congeniality. The record on this point is both ample and consistent and does not need to be rehearsed here: the school of historical scholarship beginning with Sir Henry Maine and Georg von Maurer (among many others) in the 19th century and coming down to Lewis Mumford and Murray Bookchin (among many others) in the twentieth and then Andres Duany and the New Urbanists as well at scholars and activists connected with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in the twenty-first.

Recent scholarship following Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone in 2000 has suggested that perhaps we have finally arrived at a place where community is in such decline that it barely exists. Putnam’s point, well made and nicely supported, was that in recent decades participation in voting at all levels has declined, public meetings have declined in attendance, civic organizations from the Elks to Parent Teacher Associations have lost members, and the number of bowling leagues has declined so much that people are now bowling alone.  After the jihadi suicide attacks in September 2001, and later after the Paris jihadi murders in November 2015, popular participation in general has declined as many became cautious about mixing in numbers in public places.

If that is true, it indicates a serious problem with this society and its dwindling “social capital.”  But all the soundings I have taken suggest that this has not diminished the felt need for community, an inherent longing for what was a deep, perhaps biologically imprinted, wish for the kind of support only a community can satisfy.  It is still something taken into consideration by city planners, especially those of the New Urbanism that emphasizes neighborhoods of about a half-mile diameter with everything within a 5-mile walk, narrow tree-lined streets, and public spaces that make up a coherent community.  The fact that since the 1980’s such neighborhoods have been built in many places coast to coast by the New Urbanists and their followers, some of them commanding steeper house prices than their originators planned for, indicates that there is still a market for the inextinguishable need for community.