The idée fixe of intelligentsias that big is better.

It is a metropolitan myth to believe that larger scale itself favours openness, democracy or societal initiative. China? The UK? the US, the  former Soviet Union. This is a common idée fixe of intelligentsias, both clerical and secular. As Ernest Gellner indicated (in a 1973 essay on ‘Scale and Nation’), the contemporary obsession with larger scale derives almost entirely from industrialisation and 19th-century urbanisation: that is, from a reading of economics that simply contradicts the human nature studied by anthropologists