"Ivan Illich alights on such topics as education, history, language, politics, and the church. The conversations range over the whole of Illich's published work and public career as a priest, vice-rector of a university, founder of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and author of such classics as Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, and Deschooling Society.".

A collection of writings from Dalmatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and radical cultural critic Ivan Illich. Focuses on Illich's shorter writings from his early publications through the rise of his remarkable intellectual career, making available works that had fallen into undue obscurity"--Provided by publisher.

"The medical establishment has become a major threat to health. The disabling impact of professional control over medicine has reached the proportions of an epidemic. Iatrogenesis, the name for this new epidemic, comes from iatros, the Greek word for physician, and genesis, meaning origin. Discussion of the disease of medical progress has moved up on the agendas of medical conferences, researchers concentrate on the sick-making powers of diagnosis and therapy, and reports on paradoxical damage caused by cures for sickness take (...) up increasing space in medical dope-sheets [...] The public has been alerted to the perplexity and uncertainty of the best among its hygienic caretakers [...] This book argues that panic is out of place. Thoughtful public discussion of the iatrogenic pandemic, beginning with an insistence upon demystification of all medical matters, will not be dangerous to the commonweal."-- from Introduction. (shrink)

During the 1980s Illich added another dimension to his thought through the study of Medieval history. In the current volume he aims to demonstrate the extent to which the groundwork for the institutions that characterize our world today was laid in the twelfth century.

[opening paragraph] -- I am convinced that `health' and `responsibility' belong to a lost past and that, since I am neither a romantic, a visionary, nor a drop-out, I must renounce both of them. We are occupied with a reflection on contemporary certainties and their history, that is, on assumptions which seem so commonplace that they escape critical testing. Over and over again we find that the renunciation of these very certainties offers the only possibility remaining for us to take (...) up a critical position regarding that which Jacques Ellul calls la technique. As we want to free ourselves from these assumptions, not just run away, my reaction to `taking responsibility for one's own health' is an emphatic `no!'. (shrink)

Two contributions from Dr Ivan Illich follow. The first, in which he sets out his primary thesis of the medicalization of life, is a section from Dr Illich's book `Medical Nemesis'. (It is reprinted with the permission of the author and his publishers, Messrs Calder and Boyars.) The second is a transcript of the paper which Dr Illich read at the conference organized by the London Medical Group on iatrogenic disease. Both are ultimately addressed to the (...) recipients of medical care, the general public, although the second paper is specifically addressed to young doctors and medical students. For Dr Illich the world is suffering from too much medical interference, and a medical edifice has been built which is one of the threats to the real life of human beings - a threat which so far has been disguised as care. (shrink)

More than a book about Illich, this is a conversation with Illich's work as we enter the third decade of the 21st century, just under twenty years after his passing, and almost fifty years since his Deschooling Society was first published. As Illich is beatified and demonised in equal measure, Educing Ivan Illich chooses to focus on the relationship between reform, contingency and disestablishment. As reform stands for a plurality of reiterations that seek effective forms (...) of accordance, in our recognition of contingency we freely claim that even as we might recognize the presence of universality in how everything appears on a shared horizon, we are not denied the existence and dynamic reality of plural possibilities in their inherent contradictions. In this bargain of synchronicity, we find that disestablishing the reified universe by which we have, for so long, traded, staked and even lost our freedom and intelligence, is not just a desire but it becomes a must. Unlike other commentators of Illich's work, Baldacchino argues that what is radical about Illich is not a freestanding concept of deschooling but in how, in disestablishing social life, he exits the walls of the polis by upholding tradition as a disruptive force. In such light Illich's work is read in what remains overdue. Odd though it may sound, this is an urgent need for anyone interested Illich's unique and irreplaceable contribution. To that end, Educing Ivan Illich has far more to offer than is usually expected from a commentary on someone else's work. (shrink)

Examines the life and writings of Roman Catholic Church reformer Ivan Illich (1926-2002) in the context of the wider field of cultural criticism that took shape in the 1960s and beyond.

Originally published in 1993, Silencing Ivan Illich fell out of print when the original publisher went out of business in 1995. The author, David Gabbard, states that the book was pivotal in the evolution of his understanding of schools. Delving into Foucault's work to forge a methodology, he wanted to understand the discursive (symbolic) forces and relations of power and knowledge responsible for the marginalization of Ivan Illich from educational discourse. In short, Illich was "silenced" (...) for having committed the heretical act of denying the benevolence of state-enforced, compulsory schooling. In Silencing Ivan Illich Revisited, Gabbard revisits the text as a means of opening the question of what schools should be. Inspired by Slavoj Zizek's call for a Positive Universal Project, the book provides an alternative vision of what our species ought to be doing in the name of collective learning. (shrink)

What Ivan Illich regarded in his Medical Nemesis as the ‘expropriation of health’ takes place on the surfaces and in the spaces of the screens all around us, including our cell phones but also the patient monitors and (increasingly) the iPads that intervene between nurse and patient. To explore what Illich called the ‘age of the show’, this essay uses film examples, like Creed and the controversial documentary Vaxxed, and the television series Nurse Jackie. Rocky’s cancer in (...) his last film (submitting to chemo to ‘fight’ cancer) highlights what Illich along with Petr Skrabanek called the ‘expropriation of death’. In contrast to what Illich denotes as ‘Umsonstigkeit’ – i.e., a free gift, given undeservedly, i.e., gratuitously – medical science tends to be tempted by what Illich terms scientistic ‘black magic’, taking over (expropriating) the life and the death of the patient in increasingly technological ways, a point underscored in the concluding section on the commercial prospects of xenotransplants using factory farm or mass-produced (and already for some time) human-pig mosaics or chimeras. (shrink)

In 1971, priest, theologian, and philosopher Ivan Illich wrote Deschooling Society, a plea to liberate education from schooling and to separate schooling from the state. On occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later looks at the theological roots of Illich's thought and the intellectual and ideological strands that contributed to his ideas. Guided by the central question of how Illich reached the point of writing Deschooling Society, the book (...) sheds light on how Illich produced a critique of schooling that can be defined by its eclecticism. Bruno-Jofré and Igelmo Zaldívar explore how this controversial book was framed by Illich's early neo-scholastic and anti-modern foundation, his discovery of St. Thomas through Jacques Maritain, and the existential turning points that influenced his public life and intellectual direction in moving from a critique of the Church as institution to a critique of schooling. Drawing from the interpretative theories of Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck, and William H. Sewell and from concepts such as educationalization, transnationality, and configuration, among other heuristic tools, the authors provide an original and cross-disciplinary analysis of Deschooling Society and its place in Illich's journey. (shrink)

Within Michel Foucault’s own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like ‘ungovernable life’. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault’s basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality to Ivan Illich’s critical history of government, I delineate indigenous struggles against governmentalization as a form (...) of ungovernable counter-conduct. Throughout his books from the 1970s to 1990s, Illich wrote a critical history of government surprisingly similar to Foucault’s, from the pastorate to modern political economy. However, rather than merely describing this history, Illich argued governmentalization alienated human beings from their autonomy. As a former missionary priest, he criticized the Church’s and modern governments’ attempts to subsume populations under a conduct of conducts. He advocated anticolonial resistance to subsumption under Western governmental regimes. In Illich’s appreciation of decolonized life, an ungovernable form of life can be discovered, which I defend with the example of Zapatismo and indigenous self-government through mandar obedeciendo. (shrink)

Ivan Illich, philosopher, historian, priest and social commentator died in Bremen, Germany on December 2, 2002. Illich was noted for his critique of the Church, education and medicine but his concepts dealt with more fundamental issues. This article reveals aspects of Illich, the man, and explores his ideas as they apply to the meaning of medicine and, in particular, the role of health care in contemporary society.

In the year 2002, I came across a manuscript by Jean-Pierre Dupuy that linked the work of Ivan Illich with that of René Girard. I immediately set about translating the text, which was published in Spanish as part of the essay collection The Other Titan: Ivan Illich.1 The original “Detour and Sacrifice” can be found in two books that pay tribute to the authors. The first was compiled by Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham, Illich’s disciples;2 (...) the second is a book edited by Sandor Goodhart, Jorgen Jorgensen, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams that celebrates Girard’s work.3The genesis of Dupuy’s text actually goes back to 1996 and was inspired by Ivan Illich’s seventieth birthday, which was celebrated with a series of... (shrink)

Original essays explore the thought and influence of philosopher, educator, social critic, and theologian Ivan Illich.

The notion of Ivan Illich as a social critic, philosopher, or historian is seen as secondary to the principal thrust and purpose of his life and work. To understand Illich, it is more important to see his journey into apophatic expression. After his period as a churchman in the Catholic Church, he developed a unique series of books and articles characterized above all as apophatic theology. The author explains the meaning of the term and examines the different (...) ways in which Illich used this approach. Illich studied technological artifacts, whether individual devices or institutional structures, in terms of their relationship to Christian belief in the Incarnation. His work is interpreted in terms of its consonance with the thought of Jacques Ellul. Having known Illich for more than 40 years, and having lived with him for extended periods, the author also draws on comments Illich made to the author. (shrink)

O objetivo deste texto é explorar aproximações e divergências no pensamento de Paulo Freire e Ivan Illich na forma como eles vêem a relação entre educação e transformação social. Acredita-se que a retomada da polêmica Freire e Illich sobre o problema educação e transformação social pode contribuir para melhor compreender e esclarecer a verdadeira natureza desse problema, já clássico na história da educação moderna.

The article tries to give the sense of the ecological perspective of Ivan Illich, a radical thinker and critic of modernity, which he considers the result of the evangelical message's perversion, operated by the Roman Church. Industrialization, conceived as the ultimate effect of that betrayal, condemns the human being to a condition of dependence and subordination to the goods produced on the market and the services offered by the categories of competent experts. In this way, according to (...) class='Hi'>Illich, he compromises his relationship with others and with the Earth as his home, locking himself in the shell of his own individuality, a prisoner of the needs created by the market. For Illich, restoring the ecological balance is possible only through a substantial change in production rhythms, in order to restore man's mastery of the tools and his own autonomy. (shrink)

La historia del desarrollo está estrechamente ligada a la de la necesidad en el mundo contemporáneo. La crítica a esta articulación ha ganado fuerza en los últimos años, pero quizás la más profunda se encuentre en Ivan Illich y su epílogo a la sociedad postindustrial. La propuesta de Illich, diseminada a lo largo de toda su obra, implica tomar el concepto de necesidad desde un punto de vista humanístico o filosófico: ni la economía ni la psicología pueden (...) agotar el significado de la necesidad. Este artículo trata de recontextualizar el pensamiento illicheano, de amplia repercusión en la actualidad porque sirve de base para movimientos sociales y políticos en contra del consumo (satisfacción de necesidades) y del desarrollo (teorías decrecentistas). En definitiva, se puede considerar a Illich como un hereje frente al evangelio desarrollista. (shrink)

For Ivan Illich, a twentieth-century critical thinker driven by deep faith, sin is a denial of the dignity of another who calls out to me, and a betrayal my own vocation to respond, which were revealed by the Incarnation and the Gospel. Illich thus holds that the criminalization of sin, that is to say, its transformation into a violation of Church law through the imposition of compulsory confession in the thirteenth century, is a perversion of what has (...) been opened by the Gospel. This article explains Illich’s conception and explores its strength, not as historiography of the past, but as carrying a unique resonance with the present. (shrink)