Book review

Citation

Rankin, A. (2003), "Book review", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415cab.007

Book review

The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection

Edited by Lee Hoinacki and Carl MitchamState University of New York PressAlbany, NY2002

This eclectic and brilliant collection of essays is equally suitable for academic experts and good generalists with an interest in ideas. This in itself would have pleased Ivan Illich. He distrusted experts, although he defended traditional specialised skills and crafts. He loved generalists, but distrusted intellectual shallowness. In the range of subjects he covered, over his long writing career, Illich showed himself to be a true Renaissance Man. Yet unlike the Renaissance Men of history (but, curiously, like Rousseau or even Proudhon), he gave a political voice to the peasant. Like Schumacher, Kohr and our very own John Papworth, he favoured the local over the global, conviviality over rigid hierarchical forms, the traditional and (a favourite word of his) the vernacular over the universalised and abstract.

It is both fitting and ironic that this book should be published in 2002, the year of Illich's death. It is fitting, because it is a tribute to a long literary and political career that spanned three continents. It is ironic because it shows that, in the year of his death, Illich's ideas acquire a new relevance. In a sense, Illich's "ideas" are best understood as a series of questions. For in a century of superstitious devotion to progress, he questioned the value of change for its own sake, especially when it is imposed by bureaucrats or (worse still) idealistic planners. A cosmopolitan himself, his experience of Europe and the USA made him fear both the mega-state and the mega-corporation. He believed in living within limits, in incremental reform that builds on tried and tested practice and custom, rather than grandiose attempts to fashion the new. One of the contributors to this volume, David B. Schwartz, applies Illichian principles to his rambles around the older parts of Harrisburg:

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  As we wander home from the market, we pass many other scenes that have traditions reaching into the past. There are local cafes and diners where neighborhood regulars meet for coffee, even tiny one-person grocery stores. People call out their greetings to each other on the street. Further on, there are two gendered locales: a tobacconist's, where men seated in clusters of leather-covered chairs puff on pricey cigars, and a beauty parlor, where women come to be fussed over and touched; there's always a pot of coffee on in the back. These singular corners, I know from Illich's studies, may be the most significant remnants of all – "rests of gender". In such places one can see traces of a time when men and women used different tools on either side of a gender line, a core characteristic of "asymmetric complementarity," now almost completely faded from Western culture.

As a member of both a "gentlemen's" and a "working men's" club, I am aware of the value of gendered locales, and how they give dignity to men and women alike and how both are diminished by their disappearance. Illich saw the dangers in trying to abolish, wish away or level out differences, whether between the sexes, or between cultures and regions, or between different forms of work. He did not see "progress" in homogenisation, but a terrible diminution of the individual and a loss of soul. Although a maverick theologian, Illich never broke with Rome and retained his lifelong commitment to celibacy. As such, he believed in a politics and economics with a spiritual dimension and should have been a Green pioneer, had the Greens not been hijacked early on by an already ageing "New Left". But today, in a genuinely new century, left-wing ideologies of homogenisation are as hollow as their "right-wing" counterpart – corporate globalisation. As we grope our way once more towards a philosophy of the human scale, we should let Illich be our guiding light. This he has been for another of the contributors, Aaron Falbel, a young man of obvious wisdom and sensitivity with whose words I conclude and commend this volume:

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  The surprising and deeply radical aspect of what Illich has to say is that the danger stems not just from the obvious sources (say, the military, or the hegemony of multinational corporations) but more fundamentally from those elements of modernisation that appear to most people as undeniable benefits: education, health care, transportation, equality of the sexes, communication, self-help, labor-saving machines, economic development, and so on. Partisans of both Left and Right politics see these things as the fruits of progress and, as such, [they] lie outside the sphere of critical debate. They constitute what Illich calls modern certainties. But Ivan Illich, almost alone among scholars and intellectuals, trains his critical gaze on precisely these unquestioned benefits, and sounds the alarm: Corruptio optimi quae est pessima (Corruption of the best is the worst!).

Aidan Rankin