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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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Beyond Economics and Ecology
Ivan Illich, Jerry Brown, Sajay Samuel
This volume resonates with contemporary political discourse in the U.S. and many developed nations with its focus on the relationships between employment, prosperity and sustainable and affordable energy. In four essays, Illich lays explains his theories on the effectiveness of cars, air trav...
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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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Disabling Professions
Irving K. Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan, Harley Shaiken
A controversial collection of essays by Ivan Illich, Irving K. Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan and Harley Shaiken in which they challenge the power and mystery of the professions, medicine, education and the law.
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Deschooling Society
First published in 1971, Deschooling Society is a blistering critique of compulsory mass education. The author argues that schools and universities support misleading notions of ‘progress’ and development, fostered by the belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are...