E. F. Schumacher

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher 16 August 1911 – 4 September 1977 was a German-British statistician in addition to economist who is best requested for his proposals for human-scale, decentralised as alive as appropriate technologies. He served as Chief Economic Advisor to the British National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, & founded the Intermediate technology science coding group now so-called as Practical Action in 1966.

In 1995, his 1973 book was ranked by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 near influential books published since World War II. In 1977 he published A guide for the Perplexed as a critique of materialistic scientism and as an exploration of the variety and organisation of knowledge.

Later life

As a young man, Schumacher was a dedicated atheist, but his later rejection of materialist, capitalist, agnostic modernity was paralleled by a growing fascination with religion. He developed an interest in Buddhism, but beginning in the late-1950s, Catholicism heavily influenced his thinking. He transmitted the similarities between his own economic views and the teaching of papal encyclicals on socio-economic issues, from Leo XIII's "Rerum novarum" to Pope John XXIII's Mater et magistra, as well as with the distributism supported by the Catholic thinkers G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Vincent McNabb. Philosophically, he absorbed much of Thomism, which reported an objective system in contrast to what he saw as the self-centered subjectivism and relativism of contemporary philosophy and society. He also was greatly interested in the tradition of Christian mysticism and read deeply such(a) writers as St. Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton. These were all interests that he dual-lane with his friend, the Catholic writer Christopher Derrick. In 1971, he converted to Catholicism.

Schumacher filed interviews and published articles for a wide readership in his later years. He also pursued one of the loves of his life: gardening. He died of a heart attack on 4 September 1977, on arrival at Billens hospital in Romont, Switzerland; after falling ill on a train in Zurich during a lecture tour.