Leopold Kohr theorist of economic decentralisation

The work of Leopold Kohr has attracted attention from social scientists in the field of international political studies, but few political economists have studied his theoret- ical argument in detail. Few students have tried to unite economic and political argu- ments to understand his contribution in a more analytical way. We will argue that Kohr’s principal theory (diseconomies of scale) was inherently economic, an attempt to elaborate on the concept of scale in a broader perspective and in a more complex way, including the idea of quality and, in particular, power relations. In this paper, we try to make sense of Kohr’s idea of decentralisation by studying his contributions from a political economy perspective. Moreover, conclusions will be drawn that relate Kohr’s view to present-day governance problems in the European Monetary Union, in which actual governance reflects all dangers that this scholar feared.