IN THE 1950s, a social scientist named Leopold Kohr wrote a brilliant but little-noted book called The Breakdown of Nations. Like physicists pursuing a quest for a single unitary principle to explain the principal forces of all matter — gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces binding matter, and electromagnetism — Kohr was seeking a similar unitary principle to explain the breakdown of the institutions of nation-states and empires as well as the governments that run them. From the empires of ancient Egypt and Rome to the Ottoman and British empires, why did such structures implode or fade away?

Kohr’s answer was basic: size. Breakdown, he stated, is the product of social organs that implode when they grow too vast. They need immense and ever-greater amounts of input — wealth, tax revenues, resources — to sustain and nourish their infrastructures. A point is reached when these demands became too great.

Healthy institutions depend on the free flow of communications, top to bottom and back. Ultimately, with too many layers of bureaucracy increasing separation, communications break down. The gap grows between people and their governments, along with the rupture of essential feedback loops that organizations depend on to deal swiftly with acute needs. Human misery and social upheavals spread, external relations worsen, and wars grow exponentially as a result.

To many, the implosion of the Soviet Union bore out Kohr’s theory.

Another clear example of breakdown within a society and its social and governmental units is soaring crime rates. Up to a certain size, Kohr maintained, policemen walk the beats of each neighborhood, in close touch with their people and their situations. When someone breaks the law, close-knit neighbors know who did it. And they tell the friendly beat cop. As populations multiply, neighborhoods begin to break down, and the cop is teamed and put in a squad car. His intimacy with his neighborhood is severed. Criminals become increasingly anonymous, and anonymity makes it more difficult for law enforcement to identify and root them out. Crime soars, police forces are expanded to cope, and their effectiveness drops with size.

The correctness of Leopold Kohr’s breakdown concept was confirmed recently, in my mind at least. The trigger was the crisis of the banking, mortgage, and securities industries, which sprang from bizarre investment instruments based on failure — the inability of new homeowners to support their sub-prime mortgages. Nonetheless, bundles of mortgages were securitized and sold to investors. The bubble was leaking on the local level many, many months before Wall Street and the national financial community took note. Big banks and investment houses continued to lend to ailing mortgage brokers until recently, worsening their exposure.

As early as April of 2006, I wrote in this newspaper that data from regional sources showed a disturbing trend in the rise of home foreclosures in many states. Increasingly, I wrote, “homeowners lured by cash-free mortgages to buy homes an hour away by car from their work . . . are being forced to confront corrosive debt and the threat of foreclosure,” undermining “the American dream” of home ownership. Yet it took 16 long months before the federal government, financial institutions, and national media caught on. Valuable time was lost in trying to cope with the threat of damage to the nation’s economy. Only now is Washington considering ways to deal with the crisis to stave off recession and help homeowners keep their properties.

Here’s another example. It was early last February here in Rhode Island when insurance brokers sent out letters to homeowners that insurers were canceling residential policies as a result of the colossal insurance losses to the industry incurred from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina thousands of miles from the Atlantic coast. It has taken nearly nine months for the national media to note the problem.

The New York Times has finally reported on its front page the sizeable cancellation of storm-insurance coverage to homeowners along the Northeast coast, stating that a shift has at last begun to take place “in how public officials view the new reality in the homeowners’ insurance business,” not to mention its impact on coastal real-estate values that affect even properties too far from the coastline to be harmed.

Milo Clark has written in Swans Commentary about the effects of time lag that “the nature and causes of human misery and social problems are relatively constant over time but have increased in scale as more people are crowded into megalopolitan complexes once called cities. It is now announced that more than half the world’s population lives in urban conurbations. Mega cities spawn mega slums, festering sores on the body politic. We are plagued not just with wars but big wars ever more focused on civilians than warriors. Unemployment is epidemic . . . We no longer have poor neighborhoods but sprawling lesions of poverty passing into generations of the afflicted.”

Too big — too much — too many — too late. The ravages of breakdown are finally confronting us with the relevance and consequences of Leopold Kohr’s theory.

Jerry Landay, of Bristol, covered the White House for ABC News during the Watergate crisis.