If there is a slogan or catchphrase that sums up the way the world’s mind has changed in the past year, it is “too big to fail”. When governments rushed to the aid of failing financial institutions last autumn, everyone sensed there was something wrong with the way our societies and economies were organised. For a while, the world appeared to have rediscovered a lot of age-old wisdom about hubris and excess. Yet we have lost the sense that big institutions can be a problem even when they are not failing. Managing bigness is always a problem because big companies, big organisations, big political units, tend to narrow the individual initiative of those who belong to them.

Montesquieu thought about the ideal size of countries, Tolstoy championed handicrafts over the mechanisation of the railway age, and the American jurist Louis Brandeis identified a “curse of bigness” in the finance industry that seems eternal and insoluble. But the thinker whose name is most often linked to these matters was probably E.F. Schumacher, who in 1973 published the classic work on the size of institutions, Small Is Beautiful.