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Contributions from
the Column
Tribune
Development theory: Who's Who? (Part 39)
Ivan Illich (1926-2002)
02/2003
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Development theory: Who's Who? (Part 39)
Ivan Illich (1926-2002)
Criticising the western model of development
By Aram Ziai and Cord Jakobeit
In the 1970s, Ivan Illich formulated a criticism of the industrial society and the modern age which is also relevant for the developing countries. He pointed out the impossibility of generalising the western development model and called for an alternative way of satisfying needs. His ideas are today taken on board in particular in the "post-development approaches", whose champions radically demarcate themselves from conventional thinking on development.
I. Life
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna on September 4, 1926. His father, a landowner and civil engineer, was a Catholic Croat, his mother a German Jew who was baptised in the Lutheran faith and had Spanish and American ancestors. Due to the Nazi racial laws he had to leave Austria, took his Abitur (final school-leaving certificate) in Florence in 1942, and subsequently studied in Rome where at first he read natural sciences and then theology and philosophy. He took a first-class honours degree, and in 1950 was ordained as a priest. Having obtained a PhD in Salzburg in 1951 with a thesis on Arnold Toynbee, the British economist and social reformer (1852-83), Illich began his clerical career as a poor people's priest in New York City. After some years during which he got to know the misery of the Puerto Ricans in Manhattan's Upper West Side, he became the vice-chancellor of the Catholic University of Santa Maria in Puerto Rico. He adopted US citizenship, trained Catholic development aid workers at the Center for Intercultural Formation, New York, and in 1961 founded in Cuernavaca, Mexico, his own "thinkery", as he called it, which later became the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC).
Following long confrontations with the Vatican, he resigned his priesthood in 1969. In the 1970s, Illich was one of the most noted critics of modern civilisation, technology, education and medicine, whose many books which followed each other in rapid succession were read widely. He taught as a university lecturer in New York, Kassel (Germany), Berkeley (California) and Marburg (Germany), and in 1986 became a professor at Pennsylvania State University. From the beginning of the 1990s his life centred on Bremen, in North Germany, where he was a visiting lecturer at the city-state's university. But he also spent some months at Penn State and in Mexico each year. Dogged by serious illness in recent years, he largely withdrew from public life. Ivan Illich died on November 2, 2002 in Bremen, aged 76.
II. Work
Criticism of the thoughtlessness of the modern age
Illich's writings show him to have been a universal scholar who dealt with equal facility with issues of Middle Ages ecclesiastical history, modern transport systems, the beginnings of the written word, or the change in relationships between the sexes. He was known best for his criticism of the institution of the school, which - like his studies on energy, transport and the public health sector - can be read as parts of a fundamental criticism of the modern industrial society. His works were not systematically elaborated theories, but rather pamphlets whose provocative theses were meant to bring about changes.
The essence of Illich's criticism was that the institutions and technologies of the modern industrial society (their "tools") had become independent vis-à-vis the people, meaning that their continual growth had only negative impacts (schools that made people more stupid, hospitals that made them sick, time-consuming acceleration), and increasingly encroached upon the autonomy of the individual. In his book 'Tools for Conviviality', published in 1973, Illich showed how people were formed by industrially-produced goods and services into docile consumers. When thirst could no longer be quenched by water but only by Cola, when the demand for education was perceived as a demand for schooling, and when people's own capabilities of healing, travelling, building houses and burying their dead – present in all societies in history – were lost because they were monopolised by guilds of experts, then a "radical monopoly" was in place (1970: 142). "The monopoly of the experts defines what deviation is and what remedies against it are needed," (1978b: 42).
Illich said industrial production kept people dependent on industrial products and led to ever more uniformity and powerlessness among them. This was all the more so when the tools became counter-productive at some time. A transport system aimed at ever faster individual traffic produced traffic jams, road deaths and dying forests and hindered the movement of cyclists and pedestrians. In what was probably his best-known book, 'Deschooling Society' (1971), he portrayed how a school system oriented on ever more compulsory schooling monopolised education to such an extent that only reports and certificates counted, not knowledge acquired non-formally. He said independent learning was increasingly being replaced by the obligatory consumption of knowledge. The physician system monopolised the healthcare system so that even simple healing methods were reserved for the specialist class, although a growing number of illnesses was caused by professional medical treatment ('iatrogenic Epidemic', 1974: 10). Thus, the industrial society created prosperity, but only an "impoverishing" one whose resources were too scarce to be shared by all and which destroyed the freedom and rights of the weaker (1978b: 14).
Illich in no way propagated doing without modern technology; it simply had to be "convivial". It had to be useable without an expert's licence or compulsion or violation of other people's rights to freedom. The telephone, bicycle and postal service were examples of such modern, convivial tools. Illich visualised a post-industrial society in which several complementary modes of production certainly could coexist. But he made clear that he was not delivering a detailed fiction of a society of the future. Rather, he was merely suggesting a guiding principle for action that helped prevent an independence of human tools which impinged on freedom.
Illich as development theorist
Both his CV and the beginning of his publication work in 1970 manifest Illich as a development theorist. His diagnosis claimed worldwide validity. He saw the special relevance of his theses for the so-called developing countries in that they "still have the chance to avoid going through the industrial age" (1974: 9). He said the beginning of their modernisation showed particularly clearly how striving for maximum prosperity and maximum productivity by means of non-convivial tools created shortages. "For every car that Brazil puts on the roads, 50 people lack a good bus network. Every refrigerator sold narrows the prospect that a public cold store will be built. Every dollar spent in Latin America on doctors and hospitals costs ... 100 human lives. If one had spent every dollar on providing safe drinking water, one could have saved the lives of 100 people. Every dollar spent on the school system means more privileges for the few at the cost of the many..." (1970: 139), because these schools were available to only a small section of the population.
Illich complained that all political camps remained rooted in orthodox perecptions. "The providers of development assistance and the preachers of revolution both hope for more from the same thing. Under more education they understand longer school years, under better health more doctors, under greater mobility more fast cars. ... The goals of development policy are always and everywhere measured according to the consumer values of standard packaging around the North Atlantic, and therefore mean always and everywhere more privileges for a few" (1974: 59). However, in Illich's view this development led merely to modernising poverty, to well-meant (in contrast to A.G. Frank's malicious or intended for power-political reasons) creation of underdevelopment. For, he said, on the one hand it destroyed functioning subsistence structures, and on the other it suggested that a worldwide dissemination of the "American way of life" was possible. That created a demand for industrial goods and services which could never be met. Illich interpreted "underdevelopment" here as a mental state: "Underdevelopment appears as a mental state when the needs of the masses are converted to a demand for solutions packaged in new brands which will always be unreachable for the majority" (1970: 142). According to Illich, generalising the western development model was absolutely impossible because its tools implied unequal access to them and there was "not enough money in the world to take development to success by this path" (1970: 150).
His proposal is therefore an alternative way of satisfying needs, since in the long term it will be about areas that have different capital structures. He outlined many alternatives that were tailored to Third World conditions: buses instead of private cars, clean water instead of expensive medications, healers instead of doctors and nursing sisters, communal supply stores instead of costly kitchen fittings, walking instead of public transport in cities, standardisation of hygienic hut-building instead of slums, and rights to an average share of learning aids and free choice of the time and content of learning instead of a school system. Illich summed up: "We must try to survive in a Third World in which human resourcefulness can peacefully overcome the power of the machines. There is only one way to reverse the disastrous trend to increasing underdevelopment...to laugh at today's valid solutions in order to eliminate the demand that they make necessary" (1970: 146 f.).
III. Impact
Diverse food for thought
It is not exactly easy to prove that Illich had a direct influence on development theory and policy. It was only seldom that someone cited him directly, because his ideas and proposals were too radical and unconventional. Nevertheless, elements and impulses from Illich's "objectionable" thoughts have been absorbed in many concepts that have emerged since the early 1970s.
The first to be mentioned is surely Illich's concept of satisfying basic needs, which ushered in a break with the then fixation on large-scale industrial and infrastructure projects and a switch to guaranteeing basic supply of the poor. Also, the realisation that under certain conditions in the regions of the South state-of-the-art technology that requires a great deal of maintenance and is prone to breakdown can often be counter-productive, and that locally controllable and appropriate technologies deliver better results, can be attributed to Illich (besides Schumacher).
With his demand for limits on growth and a turning away from the industrial society, which preceded the report of the Club of Rome, Illich also had a formative influence on the ecological movement. The ecological change of course in the form of "sustainable development", which is acceptable to the elites, can also be credited to Illich. True, he criticised vehemently the new officialdom of experts that dictated the needs of the people. But his calls for comprehensive research into technologies that enabled a "growing number of people to make ever more with ever less" (1974: 176), depicted exactly the basic pattern that was taken up in "Factor Four" (Weizsäcker, et al. 1995) and related concepts. And when the study "Zukunftsfähiges Deutschland" (Sustainable Germany) (BUND and Misereor 1996) selected not only efficiency but also sufficiency as the model for converting industrial societies, this was also an echo of Illich's concept of "convivial moderation", meaning conscious self-limitation and well-considered abstention.
Illich's influence on development theory is most noticeable in the "post-development approaches" (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997), that have adopted and further developed his thoughts in largely unadulterated form. The core of these approaches is rejection both of every "development" according to the model of the industrialised nations, and of every alternative "development", which cites its concomitant destruction of autonomy, subsistence structures and the cultural diversity of local communities.
Invitation to criticism and rebuttal
There are certainly some things to criticise about what Illich advocated. The first thing to mention is without doubt his idealising of rural or local subsistence communities, to which great parts of his thoughts inevitably boil down. There is a tension between these communities and his emphasis on freedom and autonomy of the individual. Illich does not adequately address this tension beyond suggesting legally secured democratic decision processes. Also, whether in his concept an equitable consumption of energy can also be asserted by means of official orders, or whether political consensus remains more an apparently utopian basic prerequisite, is still an open question.
Another problematical point is Illich's differentiation of natural needs and "false" ones induced by the industrial society. True, he certainly gave sound reasons for the latter's coming into being, such as due to the manipulative tools and mechanisms of the modern industrial society. Most likely, it also cannot be disputed that many of these needs cannot be generalised and that they destroy people's autonomous capability of satisfying their needs. But what if the overwhelming majority of the people (regardless of whether in Africa or in western Europe) happily do without the possibility of an autonomous satisfaction of their needs in favour of industrial goods and services? If we make a sweeping statement alleging that they have the wrong idea, does that not mean we are not taking their wishes and needs seriously and that we claim to know better, which comes, at least, uncomfortably close to the officialdom of experts that Illich attacked so sharply?
On this point, the normative basis of Illich's concept becomes clear. His theses on the convivial society rested on the postulate that a society in which all people could be guaranteed survival in justice and autonomy was desirable – even with renunciation of much of the products of the modern industrial society which many saw as achievements. That is why, and Illich was certainly aware of it, the change to a convivial society demands nothing less than a "Copernican change" in the people's values system. Paradoxically, however, as all experience teaches, such changes take place only slowly.
Books by Ivan Illich
- 1970 Celebration of Awareness: Call for Institutional Revolution. New York.
- 1971 Deschooling Society. New York.
- 1973 Tools for Conviviality. New York
- 1973 Energy and Equity.
- 1974 Medical Nemesis.
- 1978a Towards a History of Needs. New York.
- 1978b The Right to Useful Unemployment.
- 1982 Gender. New York.
- 1988 (With B. Sanders) ABC: The Alphabetisation of the Popular Mind. San Francisco.
Quotes translated are from the German editions.
Books about Ivan Illich and recommended further reading
Schiller, Theo (1985): Illichs Politik der neuen Unmittelbarkeit [Illich’s Policy of the New Immediacy], in: Pfürtner, Stephan H. (Pub.): Wider den Turmbau zu Babel.
Disput mit Ivan Illich. [Against the Tower of Babel] Reinbek
Rahnema, Majid/Bawtree, Victoria (Pub., 1997): The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books
Dr Aram Ziai, sociologist and political scientist, is lecturer at Aachen Technical College. Aram.Z@gmx.net
Dr Cord Jakobeit is a professor of political science, with focus on international politics, at the University of Hamburg. cord.jakobeit@uni-hamburg.de
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