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ABC, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind
Ivan Illich, Barry Sanders, Barry Saferstein
In ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind philosopher and cultural analyst Ivan Illich and medieval scholar and literary critic Barry Sanders have produced an original, meticulous and provocative study of the advent, spread and present decline of literacy.
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Tools for Conviviality
Tools for Conviviality was published in 1973, only two years after Deschooling Society. In this work, Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elit...
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The Right to Useful Unemployment
In this political essay, Ivan Illich 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.
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Shadow Work
In five essays, followed by extensive notes and bibliographies, Ivan Illich embarks on a major historical and sociological analysis of modern man’s economic existence. He traces and analyzes options which surpass the conventional political ‘right-left’ and the technological ‘soft-hard’ alternativ...
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Limits to Medicine
First published in 1976,, the arguments made by Ivan Illich then are equally true today.
‘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. In Limits to Medicine, Ivan... -
In the Mirror of the Past
During the 1980s Ivan 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. The topics with which...
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H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness
Philosopher and social analyst Ivan Illich, one of the most influential thinkers of second half of this century, directs his attention to water, the ‘stuff’ of purity and the creative force of the imagination without which life in unthinkable. He deals with the dual nature of water, as life-givin...
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Gender
In this book, Ivan Illich insists that we analyze attitudes to male and female in both industrial society and its antecedents in order to recover a lost ‘art of living’. He argues that only a truly radical scrutiny of scarcity, with special attention in this study to the sexes and societ...
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Energy and Equity
Ivan Illich, Jose Antonio Viera-Gallo, Ivan Day
For a number of reasons we are today accustomed to living with an ‘energy crisis’ -- because high prices affect our household budget, because, intermittently, the flow of fuel has been cut off or threatened, by geopolitical events or, increasingly, we are concerned by the environmental damage cau...
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Celebration of Awareness
Ivan Illich, Erich Fromm, Ivan Day
As a formidable critic of some of society’s most cherished institutions, such as compulsory education and organised religion, Ivan Illich wrote of the need for radical humanism and established an idea of social virtue. This book contains essays by Illich which challenge conventional orthodoxies a...