The Human Scale.

Well here goes.

I'm a committed decentralist, economically, politically, socially and culturally, and I thought I'd start a blog on the Human Scale, decentralism and the diverse related topics from local government to homebrewing. It is a fascinating area of human social thought with a wide variety of ideas, thinkers and ideologies from Anarcho-communism and Peter Kropotkin to rightwing or "American style" libertarianism and Murray Rothbard.

Personally I'm politically a radical decentralist, not quite an anarchist, who believes in as much local government as possible with little above the regional level.

Economically I'm a distributist because I think economic power needs to be decentralised as much as possible and I don't think "free" market capitalism will necessarily do that, but on the other hand I don't think libertarian communism or collectivism is probably necessary.

Socially and culturally I'm not really a leftwing "internationalist". I believe rootedness and identity are important and that tradition can be important as well but on the other hand I'm not a rightwing nationalist by any means. I believe patriotic feelings should be most for your local and region and not too intense and I encourage a degree of what could be called cosmopolitanism.

I have a what could be called a "communitarian-individualist" idea of freedom such as the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet which means I certainly hold the individual and his freedom as upmost but realise the social nature of freedom and particularly the importance of small social groupings to his freedom, order and personality. In that respect I encourage a plurality of local, decentralist associations for individuals to participate in such as kiship, occupational, local, regilious etc with their due autonomy and tradition in but don't want them to get too repressive.

All that said it doesn't mean I'm not influenced by decentralists who widely differ on certain of these views.

Anyway, I hope this blog is the reader's satification and hope to keep it going for some time.