Who was Ivan Illich?
Because of his apparent retreat into silence and the official neglect of his work over the last 30 years, many of today’s readers may not even know who Ivan Illich was. For many of those who did know and were influenced by his work, the obituary notices and tributes jolted the memory, and left many wondering what had happened to him since the heady countercultural days of the books which made him, for a time, a global intellectual celebrity: Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973) and, above all, Medical Nemesis (1975). With these books Illich generally subverted and questioned the holiest trinity of modernity’s sacred cows: school, technological and developmental progress, and the medical establishment. His fundamental argument, widely admired in some quarters and ridiculed and caricatured in others, was that once our institutions developed beyond a certain scale, they became perverse, counterproductive to the beneficial ends for which they were originally conceived.
Because of his apparent retreat into silence and the official neglect of his work over the last 30 years, many of todays readers may not even know who Ivan Illich was. For many of those who did know and were influenced by his work, the obituary notices and tributes jolted the memory, and left many wondering what had happened to him since the heady countercultural days of the books which made him, for a time, a global intellectual celebrity: Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973) and, above all, Medical Nemesis (1975). With these books Illich generally subverted and questioned the holiest trinity of modernitys sacred cows: school, technological and developmental progress, and the medical establishment. His fundamental argument, widely admired in some quarters and ridiculed and caricatured in others, was that once our institutions developed beyond a certain scale, they became perverse, counterproductive to the beneficial ends for which they were originally conceived. T
