Ralph Borsodi (December 1888 – October 27, 1977)[2] was an American agrarian theorist and practical experimenter interested in ways of living useful to the modern family desiring greater self-reliance (especially so during the Great Depression).
[4] Borsodi was also influenced by Thomas Jefferson, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche,[5] Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Laurance Labadie.
He set up the non-profit Independence Foundation, Inc., with Chauncey Stillman and others, which acquired a tract of about 40 acres of land on Bayard Lane near Suffern, New York.
In 1937, Borsodi, with Herbert Agar and Chauncey Stillman, started a journal called Free America, which advocated local agrarian democracy.
With Bob Swann, Borsodi created a land trust that functioned as an economic, banking, and credit institution, probably influenced by the ideas of Josiah Warren.
[6] Called the Independence Foundation, Inc., Borsodi intended it as a new and ethical way of making low-cost, cooperatively shared credit available to people who wanted to build homesteads in the community.
He created a commodity-backed bartering currency called the Constant, reminiscent of Josiah Warren's "labor notes" at the Cincinnati Time Store.
[2] Borsodi was cited as an important modern critic and creative thinker by Helen and Scott Nearing in such writings as Living the Good Life, a book sometimes credited as being the clarion call of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s.