Ivan Illich had a strange but profound influence on me in my early 30s and I’ve just downloaded a couple of books to help me understand his appeal – viz Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992) and Ivan Illich – an intellectual journey (2021) both by David Cayley
By then I was a politician – if a reforming one – with increasingly responsible positions as, first, a Chairman of a (newly-established) municipal social work committee and then as Secretary of the ruling group of Scotland’s (and Europe’s) largest Region and its strategist for its central policy relating to multiple deprivation – or social justice as it would be called these days. What, you might well ask, was I doing with a dangerous anarchist who challenged the claims of health and educational professionals?
Illich was an Austrian priest working in South America who set the cat amongst the pigeons of professionalism with his anarchistic critiques of the grip which educational and medical castes had on our minds – namely Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesi (1974) I used to tour the various professional associations in Scotland in those years – using both the Illich critique and the insights I had gained as a Chair of one of the new Social Work Committees to challenge the conventional wisdoms of these professions.
I had, admittedly, been open to community action since first encountering the likes of Saul Alinsky and Paulo Freire as I fought the local housing bureaucracy with local residents in the late 1960s – as you can see in the long 1977 article Community Development – its political and administrative challenge. Alinsky was more of a tactical street-fighter; Freire the deep and inspirational thinker about self-help. But it was Illich who supplied the hard weaponry. The seeds were probably sown a decade earlier – at university – when I was exposed to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and its demolition of those who claimed universal truths. The article given by the link is a critical reassessment of the 2 volume work after 50 years but can’t detract from the powerful impact it had on this reader in the early 1960s. Even at school, I had learned to be a “freethinker” and to be suspicious of what JK Galbraith called “the conventional wisdom”. Illich’s critique in the 1970s of the monstrous arrogance of health and educational
professionals in claiming to know best was, therefore, pushing at an open door for the likes of us….In all the talk of the dominant narrative of Neoliberalism,
this element in my generation’s formation tends to be forgotten. Social Democracy was undermined to a large extent because my generation stopped believing in the big battalions – not least because of the power of such writers as Illich. In so doing, we committed the first but unnoticed
unilateral disarmament! It was the Trade Unions and the working class who had given democracy its teeth. But – as individualists and members of identity tribes - we came to scorn organisational power and allowed Big Money to subvert
democracy with its lobbying, Think Tanks and Corporate Media.I am not, of course, doing Illich justice when I paint his contribution as one largely of criticism. There was also a deep caring and compassion for the ordinary person – and their capabilities. But, somehow, we western readers tended to take that for granted – such was the power of his dismantling of the claims of the powerful. Herbert Gintis was one of the few radicals of the left who recognised the importance of Illich in subjecting “Deschooling Society” to a 27-page critique – most others ignored the man and the hostility he brought to the very idea of modernity and our readiness to accept change. In its stead be preached the importance of relationships and what he called “conviviality:. Indeed amongst the welter of books he produced in the 1970s was "Tools for Conviviality"
And it was probably for this reason that, under the influence of John Stewart
of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), I became an early convert to the idea of corporate planning and management which was then
fashionable - although its time soon passed, with complaints about “silo management”being, if anything stronger in recent years (see Gillian Tett’s The Silo Effect
(2015). I’ve had a curious relationship with management over the past half century –
the first half of my adult life, from age 25, was spent as a reforming politician (my paid job in academia was a bit of a sideline). That changed in the second half of my life from 1990 when I entered the project management world of consultancy
where I was generally Team Leader of small groups of professionals trying to develop the capacity of state organisations in ex-communist countries.
That was, quite frankly, very much a question of the blind leading the blind
since we “westerners” were only subject specialists (usually of only one country’
s system) and had little experience of change management – let alone understanding of the context in which we were working. So I made a point of
doing my homework on what the literature of “change management” (which had started in the mid 1980s and was a decade later the most popular field) had to say. And have continued to try to keep up-to-date with the literature with
this latest Short Note and bibliography on Change.
Some Reading on Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich
https://www.noemamag.com/a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-come/ a short article The Prophet of Cuernavaca – Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West by Todd Hartch (2015)
is a testimony to the man. The Challenges of Ivan Illich – a collective reflection; by L Hoinacki (2002) We Make the Road by Walking – conversations on education and social change; Myles Horton
and Paulo Freire (1990) Myles Horton was a great American practitioner of working class education who teamed up with Freire for this book Tools for Conviviality; is a short book by Ivan Illich (1975) which gives a sense of his style.
https://manhattan.institute/article/the-genius-of-ivan-illich 2022
https://www.scielo.br/j/cebape/a/NJw7rykyqZWT6cj8vYdJJtH/?format=pdf&lang=en Illich's impact on organisational studies
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