Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (Vienna, 1926 – Bremen, 2002) was an Austrian theologian, philosopher and social critic whose work is hard to pin down and deliberately provocative. He has been variously described as an anarchist or a "radical humanist". His writings question the institutions that modernity presents as engines of progress: schooling, professional medicine, work that creates nothing of one's own, and the heavy consumption of energy that economic growth demands. He belongs to the anti-industrial strand of thought, and his ideas are still read alongside ecology and debates about equity.

His family combined a Catholic landowning line from Dalmatia on his father's side with a Sephardic Jewish background, converted to Christianity, on his mother's. During the Second World War his mother took him to Florence to escape Nazi persecution. There he studied histology and crystallography, then theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained in 1951 and turned down a diplomatic career in the Holy See, choosing instead to serve as a parish priest in New York among Puerto Rican immigrants. In 1956 he became vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, a post he lost in 1960 after clashes with the church hierarchy.

In 1961 he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he founded the Intercultural Documentation Center (CIDOC). It began as a training centre for missionaries and soon became a forum for criticism of development models imposed by wealthy nations. His views on global inequality brought him into conflict with Rome, which called him in for questioning. In the late 1960s he gave up active ministry, though he continued to see himself as a priest. The centre closed in 1976.

His thought took shape in works such as Deschooling Society (1971), which argues that compulsory schooling reduces learning to the consumption of a curriculum and that most of what we know is learned outside classrooms, and Tools for Conviviality (1973), which separates tools that serve people from tools that subject them to a monopoly of experts. Illich proposed a convivial society in which individuals keep control over their instruments, in medicine, transport and housing alike. In Medical Nemesis (1975) he applied the same lens to health care, describing the harm caused by excessive medicalisation.

In his last twenty years he suffered from a cancer of the face and refused institutional treatment, relying instead on meditation and yoga, and on opium for pain. His influence today reaches degrowth, political ecology and the critique of institutionalised schooling and medicine.