capitalism

D
DECENTRALISM
“Small is beautiful,” declared economist E. F. Schumacher
in his 1973 book of the same title, and the epigram encapsulates
the spirit of decentralism. There is a poetic quality
to decentralism, rooted as it is in a love of the particular.
The British writer G. K. Chesterton noted in his novel of
local patriotism, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, that the true
patriot “never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness
of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of
the smallness of it.”
A decentralist believes that political power (and, in
some but hardly all cases, wealth) should be widely dispersed.
He or she believes that concentrated power is the
bane of liberty; its remoteness insulates the wielder of
power from the citizen—or, perhaps more accurately, the
subject. As the most literary of modern decentralists,
the Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has warned,
“Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted,
disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people
who live, or who are privileged to think that they live,
beyond the bad effects of their bad work.” Decentralists
would cite as specific examples the federal policy of requiring
cities to bus children to schools outside their neighborhoods,
which virtually destroyed cohesive ethnic enclaves
in American cities; the siting of public housing projects and
nuclear waste facilities over the objections of residents of
the affected areas; and the deracinating effects of an interventionist
foreign policy that sends young men (and now
women) hither and yon, far from their home places.
From the founding, American political debate has pitted
advocates of a strong central state against partisans of
decentralism. Although James Madison, writing as Publius,
assured readers in Federalist no. 45 that “The powers delegated
by the proposed Constitution to the federal government
are few and defined,” the “Anti-Federalists,” who opposed
ratification, saw in the Philadelphia compact the scaffolding
of empire. Republican government “is only suited to a small
and compact territory,” argued Maryland Constitutional
Convention delegate Luther Martin. Within a unitary government
spread over a wide territory, citizens would have
little opportunity to know those whom they might elect;
lawmakers would govern in ignorance of local conditions,
and tyranny would be necessary to enforce their laws.
This argument has continued throughout American history:
Are liberty, property, and the integrity of small places
best secured by local government or by national (or, increasingly
in the age of globalization, international) authority?
In American politics, this argument has often been
rendered in shorthand as the Jefferson–Hamilton debate.
Although Thomas Jefferson’s presidential administration
sometimes overstepped constitutional bounds (e.g., with his
Louisiana Purchase) and although he was essentially neutral
on the matter of the Constitution’s ratification, he is
regarded as the founding father of American decentralism.
Sketching his ideal in a letter from Monticello in 1824,
Jefferson wrote that even the county was too distended a
district for meaningful citizenship; he favored the creation
of smaller “wards.” In Jefferson’s description,
Each ward would thus be a small republic within itself, and
every man in the State would thus 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. The wit
of man cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable,
and well administered republic.
The wit of man, at least in the United States, had other
plans. The centripetal force of three major wars—the Civil
War and the two world wars—consolidated extraordinary
power in the national government; decentralists were relegated
to the political fringe because as the liberal historian
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., cautioned in his manifesto of cold
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