«A condensation of a huge and refreshing system of unrthodox ideas.»
Arthur Koestler

More than forty years ago, a brilliant economist of German origin, very well regarded by an economic theorist of the likes of John M. Keynes, decided to distill the wealth of knowledge he had treasured throughout his life to pour them into a singular book, A Guide to the Perplexes, whose title makes a nod to the almost homonymous work written in the 12th century by the great Cordoba philosopher Maimónides.

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1911-1977) was one of the deepest inspirations of the alternative and ecological perspective of the economy, which he wanted to transform into a humanized "meta-economy". In the latter part of his life, in the seventies of the last century, Schumacher felt the need to write two books, one of economics and one about the philosophy that underlies all economic activity. At no point did he doubt that his medullary book would be philosophy, but he thought the former would reach more people and help bring together a wider audience around his second text. And so it was: in 1973 he published Small Is Beautiful, with enormous success, as he had intuited, because it was translated into a dozen languages and his message reached millions of people. The small is beautiful, carrying the suggestive and ironic subtitle of A Study of the Economy as if people mattered, concluded that both capitalism and Marxism are outdated philosophies, lost in their abstractions and, worst of all, empty of all human content. Schumacher was one of the pioneers in understanding that indefinite growth was a dangerous mirage for the future and that human activities depend on the natural world.