This, his first book, established Ivan Illich as a formidable and passionate critic of the social myths and cherished institutions of modern industrial society. Committed to a radical humanism he set himself the target of breaking down the ideologies which alienate men from men as well as from their traditional sources of human dignity and joy. The author challenges newer orthodoxies and current ideas of social virtue by his profound questioning of bourgeois and liberal assumptions. He urges us to a new celebration of awareness so that we can escape the existing dehumanizing systems by our unwillingness to be constrained and our willingness to accept responsibility for the future.
Ivan Illich presents a startling view of schooling: schooling (as opposed to education) has become our modern dogma, a sacred cow which all must worship, serve, and submit to, yet from which little true nourishment is derived. Schools have failed our individual needs, supporting fallacious notions of ‘progress’ and development that follow from the belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are proper yardsticks for measuring the quality of human life. Our schools have become recruiters of personnel for the consumer society, certifying citizens for service, while at the same time disposing of those adjudged unfit for the competitive race. The author offers radical suggestions for reform.
A work of seminal importance, this book presents the author’s penetrating analysis of the industrial mode of production where enterprises, ranging from health services to national defense, are ‘each producing a service commodity, each organized as a public utility and each defining its output as a basic necessity’, and eventually imposing their uses on the consumer. Illich chooses ‘conviviality’ to mean the opposite: ‘individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value’. The overall objective is to survive with justice, avoiding the bleak prospects of totally planned goals and desires and total loss of individual privacy.
In this essay, by means of a detailed survey of the way people travel, Ivan Illich develops his arguments against industrial society. He argues that speed is a source and tool of political manipulative power in rich as well as poor countries. The ideology of continual growth of both socialist and capitalist systems imposes intolerable social inequalities. The overconsumption of energy not only destroys the physical environment through pollution but causes the disintegration of society itself. Illich advocates a radical political decision to neutralize the energy crisis by the limiting of traffic, which he argues corrupts and enslaves, and results in a further decline of equity, leisure and autonomy for all.
‘The medical establishment has become a major threat to health’. This is the opening statement and basic contention of Ivan Illich’s searing social critique. Decimating the myth of the magic of contemporary medicine and ruthlessly examining the rituals conducted by the medical profession and its adjuncts, he demonstrates how the fulfilment of genuine human needs, such as the maintenance of good health, has been turned by over-professionalization into a nightmarish spiritual and physical agent of destruction: treatment creates illness. In response Illich calls for a halt to the expropriation of man’s coping ability and presents an alternative to the inevitable Medical Nemesis that will set in unless the autonomy of the individual is re-established.
Ivan Illich, Irving Kenneth Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan, Harley Shaiken
Why do we spend so much on health services, and levels of treatment do not improve? Why do we spend so much on education and our children seem to learn less? Why is so much spent on law enforcement and criminal justice systems and our society seems less secure and less just? This fascinating and controversial collection of essays questions the power of the professional over an apathetic citizenry.
Here Ivan Illich, possibly at his most controversial, calls for the right to useful unemployment: a positive, constructive, and even optimistic concept dealing with that activity by which people are useful to themselves and others outside the production of commodities for the market. Unfettered by managing professionals, unmeasured and unmeasurable by economists, these activities truly generate satisfaction, creativity and freedom.
This major historical and sociological analysis of modern man’s economic existence traces and analyzes options which surpass the conventional political ‘right-left’ and the technological ‘soft-hard’ alternatives and presents the concept of the ‘vernacular’ domain: ‘the preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation.’ Illich deals provocatively with the controlling uses of language and science and the valuation of women and work.
Ivan Illich insists that we survey attitudes to male and female in both industrial society and its antecedents in order to recover a lost ‘art of living’. In pre-industrial communities there was ‘vernacular gender’: the sexes accepted their differences which were expressed in speech-idioms and apportioned tasks. The increasingly powerful forces of organized religion, and the rise of a commercial culture, created images of the sexes which acquired self-perpetuating power. Our present industrial society has debased ‘vernacular gender’ into ‘economic sex’ — less secure and more savagely crippling. Illich argues that only a radical scrutiny of scarcity can prevent an intensification of this grim predicament.
‘Water throughout history has been perceived as the stuff which radiates purity: H2O is the new stuff, on whose purification human survival now depends. H2O and water have become opposites: H2O is a social creation of modern times, a resource that is scarce and that calls for technical management. It is an observed fluid that has lost the ability to mirror the water of dreams’. Tracing the history of the use and abuse of H2O as a source of commodity in twentieth century life with its quest for odorless hygiene, Ivan Illich contrasts these matters with an examination of the history of ideas, mythologies and visions associated with water.
Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders (medieval scholar and literary critic) have produced an original and provocative study of the advent, spread and present decline of literacy. They explore the impact of the alphabet on fundamental thought processes and attitudes and culminate their research in an examination of the present erosion of literacy in the new technological languages of ‘newspeak’ and ‘uniquack’; and they point out how new attitudes to language are altering our worldview, our sense of self and of community.