Ivan Dominic Illich (/ɪˈvɑːn ˈɪlɪtʃ/ iv-AHN IL-itch; German: [ˈiːvan ˈɪlɪtʃ]; 4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was an Austrian Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic.
[4] His father was a civil engineer and a diplomat from a landed Catholic family of Dalmatia, with property in the city of Split and wine and olive oil estates on the island of Brač.
[6][7] Her father, Friedrich "Fritz" Regenstreif, was an industrialist who made his money in the lumber trade in Bosnia, later settling in Vienna, where he built an art nouveau villa.
Ellen Illich traveled to Vienna to be attended by the best doctors during childbirth; Ivan's father was not living in Central Europe at the time.
While working on his doctorate, he returned to Italy where he studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, as he wanted to become a Catholic priest.
However, he deviated from these plans in order to become a parish priest at the Church of the Incarnation in Washington Heights, at that time a barrio of newly-arrived Puerto Rican immigrants.
The success of Illich attracted the attention of the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, and in 1956, at the age of 30, he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, "a position he managed to keep for several years before getting thrown out—Illich was just a little too loud in his criticism of the Vatican's pronouncements on birth control and comparatively demure silence about the nuclear bomb.
As a politician, I predicted that there wasn't enough strength in Catholic ranks to create a meaningful platform and that failure of McManus's party would be disastrous on the already frail prestige of the Puerto Rican Church.
"[13] After ten years, critical analysis from the CIDOC of the institutional actions by the Church brought the organization into conflict with the Vatican due to associations with liberation theology and suspicions of Marxism.
Unpopular with the local chapter of Opus Dei,[13] Illich was called to Rome for questioning, due in part to a CIA report.
[9] In 1976, apparently concerned by the influx of formal academics and the potential side effects of its own "institutionalization", Illich shut the center down with consent from the other members of the CIDOC.
Illich, who had been made a monsignor at 33, himself resigned from the active priesthood in the late 1960s[18] but continued to identify as a priest and occasionally performed private masses.
However, his influence declined after the 1981 election of François Mitterrand, as Illich was considered too pessimistic at a time when the French Left took control of the government.
[19] During the last days of his life he admitted that he was greatly influenced by one of the Indian economists and adviser to M. K. Gandhi, J. C. Kumarappa, most notably his book, Economy of Permanence.
[20] While Illich never referred to himself as an anarchist in print, he was closely associated with major figures in left-anarchist circles, notably Paul Goodman and unschooling advocate John Holt.
He had recently played a major part in getting a law passed which recognized that the state should not interfere with the private activities of consenting adults.
A perverse attempt to encode the New Testament's principles as rules of behavior, duty, or laws, and to institutionalize them, without limits, is a corruption that Illich detailed in his analyses of modern Western institutions, including education, charity, and medicine, among others.
[5][26] Illich believed that the Biblical God taking human form, the Incarnation, marked world history's turning point, opening new possibilities for love and knowledge.
Thus, Illich's envisioned disestablishment of schools aimed not to establish a free market in educational services, but to attain a fundamental shift: a deschooled society.
"[35] Deschooling Society was highly regarded by John Holt and other leading advocates of unschooling, and has been widely read in the homeschooling community since its dramatic growth during the 1980s.
He wrote that "[e]lite professional groups ... have come to exert a 'radical monopoly' on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a 'war on subsistence' that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how.
He argued that the medicalization in recent decades of so many of life's vicissitudes—birth and death, for example—frequently caused more harm than good and rendered many people in effect lifelong patients.
He marshalled a body of statistics to show what he considered the shocking extent of post-operative side-effects and drug-induced illness in advanced industrial society.
He introduced to a wider public the notion of iatrogenic disease,[40] which had been scientifically established a century earlier by British nurse Florence Nightingale (1820–1910).