E. F. Schumacher and Intermediate Technology

E. F. Schumacher is best remembered as the author of the best-selling Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (1973), one of the key books of the counterculture of the 1970s and the only such one written by an economist. He was also the instigator of the intermediate technology movement in the field of economic development, promoting the idea from the early 1960s and then going on to establish the Intermediate Technology Development Group. This article discusses the evolution of Schumacher’s ideas on technology and development, showing how they reflected his own personal transformation from conventional Fabian to traditionalist critic of the West.