Another Modernity Is Possible: An Introduction to Ivan Illich

Rather than liberating individuals, the technological progress of modern societies has bound them into new forms of servitude. Schools standardize thinking and limit other ways and spaces of learning. Cars give a sense of freedom but become a heavy burden for their owners and for cities. These are some of the ideas of Ivan Illich, an original thinker who throughout the 1960s and 1970s reflected on technology, education, health, energy, and economics, and outlined a powerful critique of Western modernity and a blueprint for a better society to come.

Another Modernity Is Possible presents both a synthetic overview of Illich’s philosophy and a new interpretation of this social critic’s theses on the counterproductivity of modern technology and his proposal for a radical transformation of society toward conviviality—Illich’s term for social autonomy. Although forgotten for several decades, Illich’s ideas are significant again because they offer a distinctive critique of conventional understandings of technology, capitalism, and modern institutions. They can be considered as an alternative form of critical theory, conceived from the social and economic conditions of the Global South, yet pivotal to the wider debates about the meaning of modernity.