He saw the truth in their suspicion of universal values. He perceived how a good life could be corrupted. Kohr remains a prophet today because even those social theorists for whom small is beautiful have not yet discovered that the truth of beauty and goodness is not a matter of size, nor even of dimensions or intensity, but of proportion. I see Kohr as the one social thinker who picks up the biological morphology of D'Arcy Thompson and J. B. S. Haldane as the starting point of a social morphology. These scientists studied the proportion between form and size in living creatures.
Mice appear only within rather narrow parameters of size.
Such beings come in sizes from an inch to a foot. Haldane demonstrated that the form, mousy proportion, could not exist outside this lower and upper limit. Since the weight increases with the cube of its size, legs able to move a larger rodent would have to thicken beyond mousy proportions. Kohr discusses society in analogy to the way plants and animals are shaped by their size and sized by their shape. He is uninterested in the timeless and weightless critters elaborated by social scientists.