A third of a century ago, in 1973, a German economist living in England wrote an international bestseller called Small Is Beautiful.

It had a huge impact.

The book’s author, E.F. Schumacher, became a celebrity overnight. He and his book became the icon of a new generation of environment-conscious politicians, economists and campaigners. The views expressed in Schumacher’s book became so fashionable that Jimmy Carter, following his election to the U.S. presidency in 1976, invited Schumacher to the White House for a photo shoot. Pictures of Carter and Schumacher, arm in arm, were splashed across the newspapers, indicating, so the president would have us believe, that he was in tune with the latest thinking on “economics as if people mattered,” which was the sub-title of Schumacher’s book.

There was, however, a secret behind Schumacher’s book that his millions of admirers did not know. It was a secret that some of them would wish not to know. It was, in fact, a secret that many of them still want to keep secret.

The secret is this: Schumacher was hugely influenced in his writing of Small Is Beautiful by the teaching of the Catholic Church.

At first skeptical that the popes “in their ivory tower” could have anything of worth to teach him in the sphere of economics, he read Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (“of new things”; On Capital and Labor, 1891) and Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (“the fortieth year”; On Reconstruction of the Social Order, 1931) and was astonished at the insight that the social teaching of the Church had to offer.

It was, however, the promulgation of another papal encyclical, Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (On Human Life, 1968), that would have the most immediate impact on his life. This encyclical prompted his wife and one of his daughters to seek instruction in the Catholic faith.

The message that Humanae Vitae conveyed, wrote Schumacher’s daughter, “was an affirmation and support for marriage, for women … who had given themselves entirely to their marriages and who felt acutely the pressure from the world outside that shouted ever louder that homebound, monogamous relationships were oppressive to women and prevented them from ‘fulfilling themselves.’” Although, at the time, Schumacher did not feel able to follow his wife and daughter into the Church, he concurred with their view of the encyclical. “If the Pope had written anything else,” he told a friend, “I would have lost all faith in the papacy.”

On Sept. 29, 1971 Schumacher was finally received into the Catholic Church.

Two years later his world bestseller, Small Is Beautiful, was published — a work, both popular and profound, that almost single-handedly redefined the public perception of economics and its impact upon the environment.

It is, in fact, ironic that the modern environmental or “green” movement derives its weltanschauung (worldview) not from any New Age philosophy or neo-pagan “religion” but from the expertise and wisdom of a world-renowned economist who found inspiration from the social doctrine of the Church.

Schumacher died on Sept. 4, 1977, shortly before his second major work, A Guide for the Perplexed, was published, in which he sought to outline the underlying spirituality and philosophy from which the economic vision in Small Is Beautiful is derived.

Schumacher’s lasting legacy is to illustrate that “subsidiarity,” the essence of the Church’s social teaching as taught by successive popes, as defined in The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and as reiterated by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (Centenary of Rerum Novarum, 1991), has worldwide popular appeal. It is, therefore, ironic that it is sometimes seen as the Church’s best kept secret.

It was with this thought in mind that I decided to write Small Is Still Beautiful as a way of showing how Schumacher’s original book is as relevant today as it was when it was first published, if not more so, and as a means of making the Church’s teaching known to the wider world.

I changed the subtitle to “economics as if families mattered” to show that families are the most important units in any society, and to emphasize this message in the light of the concerted attacks on the family since Schumacher’s book was written. The fact that Schumacher would have endorsed the change of title is evident from his wholehearted support of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on human life.

Schumacher’s ideas exploded like a beneficent bomb, demolishing, or at least throwing into serious question, many of the presumptions of laissez-faire economics. His insistence that the question of scale in economic life should not — and, indeed, morally speaking, cannot — be separated from the overriding dignity of the human person, for many shifted the whole focus of economic thought away from impersonal market forces and back to the dignity of human life.

The tendency of modern economics to genuflect before Mammon in the name of quasi-mysterious market forces and to disregard the dignity of the human person is ultimately not an economic question at all. It is a moral question. As such, we should not be surprised that the whole issue has concerned the Catholic Church for more than a century.

Schumacher warned of impending calamity if rampant consumerism and economic expansionism were not checked by human and environmental considerations. Like a latter-day prophet he asserted that humanity was lurching blindly in the wrong direction, that the pursuit of wealth could not ultimately lead to happiness or fulfillment, and that a renewal of moral and spiritual perception was essential if disaster was to be avoided.

His greatest achievement was the fusion of ancient wisdom and modern economics in a language that encapsulated contemporary doubts and fears about the globalized world. He confronted the presumptions of modernity with the dynamism of tradition. He stressed that the wisdom of the ages, the perennial truth that has guided humanity throughout its history, serves as a constant reminder to each new generation of the dangers of self-gratification. The lessons of the past, if heeded, should always empower the present.

In practical terms Schumacher counteracted the idolatry of “giantism” with the beauty of smallness. People, he argued, could feel at home only in human-scale environments, of which the family was the archetype.

If structures — economic, political or social — became too large, they became impersonal and unresponsive to human needs and aspirations. Under these conditions individuals felt functionally futile, dispossessed, voiceless, powerless, excluded and alienated. He applied similar criteria with regard to “technolatry,” the idolization of technology. He felt that modern technology often pursued size, speed, novelty and violence in defiance of all laws of natural harmony.

The machine was becoming master and not the servant of man, severing him from his natural environment and encasing him in an increasingly artificial world. As techno-man plugs himself into the latest electronic illusions he simultaneously disconnects himself from the real world and its very real problems.

As Schumacher observed: “Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even tells of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.” We were given authority over our environment as stewards of the goodness it has to offer, not as locusts devouring what we have no intention of replenishing.

The moral is easy enough to discern for those who have ears to hear. It is this: Ultimately, small is beautiful because families are the small and beautiful building blocks of a healthy society, and because the earth itself is not only beautiful but small.

Joseph Pearce is writer-in-residence at

Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and is

 co-editor of the Saint Austin Review.

Small Is Still Beautiful is published by ISI Books.