Life and work[edit]
Kohr was born in a Jewish family on 5 October 1909 in the small town of Oberndorf, near Salzburg, and it remained his ideal of community.[1][2] He often commented on the fact that the Christmas carol "Silent Night" was written and composed as "Stille Nacht" in his home village. He earned doctorate degrees in law, at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and political science, at the University of Vienna.[3] He also studied economics and political theory at the London School of Economics.[4]
In 1937, Kohr became a freelance correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, and he was impressed by the limited, self-contained governments of the separatist states of Catalonia and Aragon, as well as the small Spanish anarchist city-states of Alcoy and Caspe. He became a close friend of the journalist George Orwell and shared offices with the correspondents Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux.[5]
Kohr fled Austria in 1938 after it had been annexed by Nazi Germany, and he emigrated to the United States. He later became an American citizen.[1][4][6]
Kohr taught economics and political philosophy at Rutgers University, New Jersey, from 1943 to 1955.[4] From 1955 to 1973, he was professor of Economics and Public Administration in the University of Puerto Rico, in San Juan, except for a period in 1965–1966 during which he was professor of economics at the University of the Americas, in Mexico City, Mexico. During those years he developed his concepts of village renewal and traffic calming and "lent his advice to local city planning initiatives".[3] He also advised the independence movement of the nearby island of Anguilla.[4]
After many rejections by American and British publishers, Kohr's first book, The Breakdown of Nations, was published in 1957 in Britain after a chance meeting with the anarchist Sir Herbert Read.[1]
Kohr moved from Puerto Rico to Wales, where he taught political philosophy at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1968 to 1977.[7][8] The project of Welsh independence, founded on the ideal of cymdeithas (community) was dear to him, and Kohr became a mentor to Plaid Cymru and a close friend of its leader, Gwynfor Evans.[4]
After retiring from teaching, Kohr divided his time between Gloucester, England, and Hellbrunn, outside Salzburg.
In 1983, in Stockholm, Sweden, Kohr received the Right Livelihood Award "for his early inspiration of the movement for a human scale".[8] In 1984, Salzburg created the Leopold Kohr Academy and Cultural Association "Tauriska" to put his theories of regional autonomy into practice.[4]
Kohr was planning to return to his hometown of Oberndorf to live when he died in Gloucester, England in 1994.[4][9] His ashes were buried there.[4] The Salzburg journalist Gerald Lehner completed a biography of Kohr, based in part on long audiotaped interviews, in 1994.[5]
Kohr was described as a charming conversationalist and a witty and elegant debunker of popular assumptions.[10] The author Ivan Illich described him as "a funny bird—meek, fey, droll, and incisive", as well as "unassuming" and even "radically humble".[10]