Ivan Illich (born September 4, 1926, Vienna, Austria—died December 2, 2002, Bremen, Germany) was an Austrian philosopher and Roman Catholic priest known for his radical polemics arguing that the benefits of many modern technologies and social arrangements were illusory and that, still further, such developments undermined humans’ self-sufficiency, freedom, and dignity. Mass education and the modern medical establishment were two of his main targets, and he accused both of institutionalizing and manipulating basic aspects of life.
Illich had a cosmopolitan upbringing, having been born in Vienna to a Croatian father and a Sephardic Jewish mother. From an early age, Illich spoke several modern languages fluently and was also well versed in classical languages. He began his formal education in Vienna, and he also attended the University of Florence in Italy. From 1942 to 1946, Illich studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He obtained a doctorate from the University of Salzburg with a dissertation on British historian Arnold Toynbee.
Illich’s work as a priest took him in 1951 to New York City, where he became involved with the local Puerto Rican community. Building on the strong ties he developed in New York, Illich took a leadership role at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico in 1956. He eventually settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and founded the progressive Centro Intercultural de Documentación (Intercultural Center for Documentation) in 1961, which conducted language and cultural courses from an anti-imperialist perspective for missionaries and other students. Illich became increasingly critical of the Roman Catholic Church’s positions on a variety of issues, and he left the priesthood in 1969 after being rebuked by the Vatican. He subsequently taught at universities around the world and published books while maintaining his connection to Mexico.
In Deschooling Society (1971), his best-known and most influential book, Illich articulated his highly radical ideas about schooling and education. Drawing on his historical and philosophical training as well as his years of experience as an educator, Illich presented schools as places where consumerism and obedience to authority were paramount and genuine learning was replaced by a process of advancement through institutional hierarchies accompanied by the accumulation of largely meaningless credentials. In place of compulsory mass schooling, Illich suggested, it would be preferable to adopt a model of learning in which knowledge and skills were transmitted through networks of informal and voluntary relationships.
Illich’s views on the medical establishment, laid out in Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (1975), were equally radical. He disputed the notion that modern medicine had led to an overall reduction in human suffering and asserted that humanity was, in fact, afflicted with an ever-increasing number of ailments caused by medical interventions. Furthermore, he argued that modern medicine, by seeming to offer cures for nearly all conditions—including many that had not been considered pathological by earlier generations—raised a false hope that all suffering could be avoided. The effect, he concluded, was to undermine humans’ individual and communal resources for coping with life’s inevitable hardships, thereby turning them into passive consumers of medical services.
Illich was in high demand as a lecturer and teacher in the 1970s and 1980s; his popularity waned somewhat in subsequent decades. True to his convictions, over the last years of his life he refused medical treatment for a tumour that ultimately caused his death.