ABSTRACT
Gathering September 15, 1943, in Manhattan's historic Aldine Club, five hundred "Friends of the School of Living" listened to economist Ralph Borsodi address the question, "What Americans Can Do About the Postwar Collapse". More than any other agrarian writer of the twentieth century, Borsodi aimed at creating a systematic economic theory of decentralism, one including a compelling integration of home production into calculations of economic gain. Crafting a revisionist economic history that anticipated several themes adopted by Lewis Mumford, Borsodi argued that the early Industrial Revolution, resting on application of the steam engine, had given a natural economic advantage to the central factory only for a short, if critical, time. Borsodi attributed the mounting family crisis of his age—fewer and later marriages, more divorces, plummeting fertility, and the disappearance of the three-generation household—exclusively to the economic distortions caused by the artificial dominance of modern industry and the progressive abandonment of the land.
