A BIBLE FOR DECENTRALISTS

...At the international level, responsibility for use of the air, the high seas and exhaustible mineral resources is assigned not to a "world government" but to appropriate international "authorities" exercising clearly specified and limited powers...

...his natural habitat may well have been the desert...

...Leadership is vested in a natural elite which exercises power largely by persuasion...

...a permanent family-land nexus must be assured by a system of land tenure based on use, Ownership being vested in the human family at large...

...he would base agriculture on the organic farming gospel of Sir Albert Howard which excludes the use of inorganic fertilizers...

...But as an orderly, concise, economical job of describing a military campaign of tremendously great importance, nothing could surpass Normandy to the Baltic...

...Monty Depicts the Great Drama NORMANDY TO THE BALTIC...

...that mothers, for their own and their babies' physical and emotional health, should nurse their babies rather than feed them out of bottles...

...THIS...

...5.00...

...IN MAKING THESE AND OTHER value judgments Borsodi invokes a principle of "homuiiieMj* end ifflSJSSS a.good deal of statistical and other jSUSSa "mm* E£Bm mm judgments, but on balance it would seem provable that families wfceife adept Borsodi's etSucsdtenel "nos*ne~ are likely to do much better by themselves end by society than the'average...

...There is . et and for that reason, to me anyway, the much more effective drama than the tlnsely glamor we have inherited from Hollywood and are using as a kind of eriatz emotionalism...

...OF COURSE...

...A quarter of a century ago he published "National Advertising Is Prosperity," which anticipated much of the attack on our ad-man's pseudoculture, contained in the books of Stuart Chase, Arthur Kallett, and this writer...

...Or that educators should take weir heads out of the sand and note that we spend four times as much every year on advertising and salesmanship—consisting mostly of mis-education on how to live —as on our entire school system...

...The responsibility of the educator, as Borsodi sees it, cannot be discharged either by serving the totalitarian masters of fascist or communist states, or by adapting the child to the centralizing drift of capitalist industrial democracies...

...Progress is good or bad—"right progress" or "mal^progress"—depending upon whether or not it serves this ends...

...In the "Ideology of "Normal Living" and in later sections on the "Normal Individual" and the "Normal Family" he makes implicit value judgments on practically every problem of living, from the cradle to the grave...

...Monty's present volume can be nt home in the family'library or in that same class in military science...

...When severed from these roots the family ceases to be normal...

...To me those arguments, while initially interesting, soon grow dull, and belong, if any place, in a class in military science...

...Borsodi bases his system upon an attempt to define end implement the good life of man, defined as a creature interested primarily in survival, procreation and self-expression...

...Revfewed By JAMES RORTY AFTER THIRTY YEARS OP PADDLING his own canoe against the centralizing drift of the century, Ralph Borsodi has given us the first ' third of a bible for decentralists that seems likely, when completed, to be as big a book as Das Kapltal...

...that the normal community should have a population density ranging from 599 to 999 people per square mile...

...The present book utilizes research conducted during this period...

...he believes mating and marriage should occur not too long after puberty, with contraceptives used to postpone the birth of children, and abortion made legal...

...Meanwhile, his present volume, provides evidence of his willingness to face all the implications of his thesis...

...The arm-chair strategists can mull over the complete and excellent maps and spend" many winter nights second and third" guessing Viscount Montgomery of Alamein...

...Marx provided a "science" of history, a rationalization of the idea of progress ending with the dictatorship of the industrial proletariat, the assumed fulfillment of the socialist commonwealth, and the withering away of the state...

...The number of tanks and men and airplanes...

...It is not...

...Not so the British notion of drama...

...Conceivably it could have equally important effects upon the lives of future generations...

...And the vote, says Borsodi, "should never be conferred upon an individual until he or she marries and becomes a full-fledged member of a family with a stake in the land...

...351 plus xv pp...

...This does not mean that the drama Hot...

...It is here in full evidence Montgomery fashion...

...Consequently I feel this type of emotion—the emotion we feel reading Montgomery's account of what happened—is much deeper and more lasting...

...By Field Marshal, the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein...

...Houghton Mifflin Company...

...International police power would be exercised by such an authority, the power »to make war being specifically wltheld from the nation-state by its voting citizens...

...Needless to say, Marshal Montgomery does not play down the part played by the British in the landings at Normandy and the subsequent fighting on the continent...

...For my part, I am glad he was on "our side," and In the event of future troubles in the world...

...Borsodi promises to deal with this problem later, in the second and third volumes of his projected triology, entitled respectively "Education and Ideology" and "Education and Implementation...

...It is a beautiful job of recording events of world-shaking importance without obvious drama...

...IS TO l^AKE a revolutionary of the educator ^Ud to confront him sooner or later like any other revolutionary with the problem: how to capture power...

...that "mercy-suicide" is also morally and socially justifiable...

...For example, he believes that the normal human diet should consist of natural rather than processed foods...

...Whether he was as great a military man as his supporters claim or as overrated a military man as his opponents claim, seams to me unimportant since neither group Is in a sufficiently objective position to judge fairly...

...In 1934, Borsodi founded at Suffern the School of Living which during the years before World War II obtained substantial endowment, employed a considerable staff and enlisted the interest of many well-known educators...

...You can get the atmosphere of tenseness, of expectancy, of big events on the verge of happening not by what is said, but by what is not said...

...In other respect* they are at opposite poles...

...Since Monty gives plenty of facts and figures, he is readily available for criticism and dispute...

...He did not specify what the pie in the sky was to obtain...

...But this is merely another illustration of the man's thoroughness and mastery of detail...

...Perhaps, as some critics say, Monty never belonged in France and Germany...

...But many others felt that in his seeming indifference to other people's time and convenience, his austerity and the awe in which he apparently regarded himself, he left something to be desired...

...Police powers are grudgingly delegated to elected or appointed officers...

...In any case it is not easy to argue with Borsodi's insistence that educatars should teach people how to live instead ef merely Ailing their heads with fragmented facts, and that they should teach adults as well as children...

...The nuclear cell of Borsodi's system is the "normal" human family and its survival-roots in the earth...

...In contrast...

...that voluntary eugenic mating is preferable to romantic love...

...Because "Education and Living" says this better than Borsodi or anybody else has said it before, the book deserves the respect and attention of both teachers and students, of all political persuasions...

...that the support of the aged should be assured not by the state but by the re-establishment of the three-generation family based on the land...

...The normal community is a voluntary association of these land-based famUies^together with the decentralized industries and cooperative, educational and cultural institutions required to serve their collective welfare...

...James Rerty is the author of "Our Master's Voice" and co-author of "Tomorow'i Food...

...It would be comforting to have him .with us again...

...BORSODI IS NEITHER JpRANK nor crackpot, but essentially a conservative professional ma^n, as he describes himself in the preface to his book...

...It will be interesting to watch the response of this group to the volume...

...That may seem to be a sweeping statement...

...And si nee, like other schismatics, Borsodi and his followers have suffered from isolation, with perhaps some tendency to become contaminated with irrelevant faddisms, de-eentralism stands to gam by gathering to itself first-rate critical recruits...

...XlvilisStton...

...The book is not at all verbose and reads very quickly despite Its technical nature...

...Certainly he did not forsee Communist slave labor camps...

...that euthanasia should be invoked to eliminate the senile and helpless...

...that voluntary and compulsory sterilization should be utilized to eliminate morons and defectives as breeders of the race...

...James Bernard Keller *» Professor ef OeeeeemeaU eJ Heasara OaUsgs...

...Reviewed by JAMES BERNARD KELLEY IF TWO OF THE MARKS OF GREATNESS are a flair for individuality and a controversial character, then Field Marshal Montgomery would certainly qualify for a place among the great men of his time...

...In many respects Borsodi's approach is much more like that of the human ecologists, to whom the future of the social sciences would seem to belong...

...m wfHes, >fl| only be steed it we turn for guidance to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of mankind and insist that the teachers "and leaders of mankind do the job which they really should be doing—teaching mankind how tollive...

...What Borsodi has been saying all these years —and it has taken both brains and fortitude to SGG it and to say it —is that modern man cannot hope to operate the technological civilization without the rudder and the brake of a conscious value system, and that the development and application of such a system is precisely what education should concern itself with...

...Marx and Borsodi are alike in that both are industrious and implacable gystematizers...

...Everything is here in exact detail...

...but this is one of those debates which will endure for years, with all Englishmen feeling Monty was the greatest leader on the Allied side, while most Americans will know that had Patton not been hampered by SHAEF politics, he(would have ended the war in Europe months sooner...

...Most of the newspaper correspondents attached to his headquarters seemed convinced of his military ability...

...As a home for these intellectual TJP's Borsodi's decentralism has much to recommend it, being honestly built, intellectually well furnished and not 'Very crowded...

...To most Americans the burning of Rome lacks something unless a symphony orchestra led by Lana Turner backs up Nero's pyrotechnical fiddling...

...There is also a good deal in it for those ideologically homeless refugees from Marxism who worry about the encroachments of the monster state, but sem unable to come up with any counter-ideas of their own other than voting for Dewey...

...the time of the day, the day of the month, the month of the year...

...In 1920 he extricated his family from the toils and frustrations of Megalopolis and retreated to a homestead near Suffern, N. Y. During the thirties he became involved with Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, M. L. Wilson and other Njgw Dealers in the ill-starred "subsistence homestead" development at Dayton, Ohio, which Borsodi vainly insisted should have been made an experiment in adult re-education...

...The character of the man Montgomery is clearly revealed in the pages of this book...

...He has reached his present convictions partly as a result of his own intimate experience with the industrial civilization obtained as a successful consulting economist in New York, serving such clients as the Fairchild trade publications...