Ivan Illich
Based on Wikipedia: Ivan Illich
In 1951, a young priest named Ivan Illich celebrated his first Mass in the Roman catacombs—the underground tunnels where early Christians had hidden from persecution nearly two millennia before. It was a fitting beginning for a man who would spend his life questioning whether the institutions claiming to carry forward Christ's message had become the very thing they were meant to oppose.
Illich would go on to argue something genuinely radical: that modern schools make people stupid, modern hospitals make people sick, and modern development makes the poor poorer. But he wasn't some crank ranting from the margins. He was a Vatican insider who became a Vatican exile, a polyglot who spoke a dozen languages, a scholar who taught at universities on three continents, and a thinker whose ideas influenced everyone from educational reformers to the founders of countercultural movements.
He called himself "an errant pilgrim"—a wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim who, after leaving his grandfather's house on a Croatian island, never had a home again.
A Life Shaped by Displacement
Ivan Dominic Illich was born in Vienna in 1926, into a family that embodied the complicated identities of Central Europe between the wars. His father came from a landed Catholic family in Dalmatia, the Croatian coastal region, with property in Split and wine estates on the island of Brač. His mother came from a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity—her father was an industrialist who had made his fortune in the Bosnian lumber trade and built an art nouveau villa in Vienna.
When Ivan was just three months old, he was taken to Dalmatia to be shown to his paternal grandfather and baptized. His mother was Lutheran but converted to Catholicism upon marriage. The family fractured early: his parents divorced when Ivan was six, and his mother took him and his twin brothers back to her father's house in Vienna.
Then came 1942. Ivan was sixteen when his grandfather died, and suddenly the family's Jewish heritage became a matter of life and death. His mother fled with the three boys from Vienna to Florence, escaping Nazi persecution. Italy under Mussolini was hardly safe for Jews either, but it was safer than Austria, at least for a while.
In Florence, Illich finished high school and began studying histology and crystallography at the university—the science of tissues and the science of crystals, subjects about as far from social criticism as one could imagine. But the war's end brought new complications. He was stateless, undocumented, unable to simply return to Austria. So he enrolled in a doctorate in medieval history at the University of Salzburg, not primarily for intellectual reasons but because it might give him legal residency.
Meanwhile, he was also studying theology and philosophy in Rome, because he had decided to become a priest. This dual track—the medieval historian and the theologian—would shape everything that followed.
The Priest Who Sounded Communist
After his ordination in 1951, Illich moved to the United States to pursue postgraduate studies at Princeton. He never finished them. Instead, he became a parish priest at the Church of the Incarnation in Washington Heights, Manhattan—at that time a neighborhood filling with newly arrived Puerto Rican immigrants.
There was just one problem with his name. The parish pastor suggested that "Ivan" sounded too communist for 1950s America. So Illich preached under the name "John Illich." The irony was rich: here was a Catholic priest, trained in Rome, working with impoverished immigrants, being asked to hide his identity because Cold War paranoia made a Slavic first name politically suspect.
Under whatever name, Illich threw himself into serving the Puerto Rican community. He organized cultural events, including the San Juan Fiesta—a celebration of Puerto Rico and its patron saint that eventually evolved into the Puerto Rican Day Parade, still held annually in New York.
His success caught the attention of Cardinal Spellman, the powerful Archbishop of New York. In 1956, at just thirty years old, Illich was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. It was a meteoric rise for someone so young.
It didn't last.
Dangerous to the Diocese
The confrontation came in 1960. Two bishops in Puerto Rico—James Edward McManus and James Peter Davis—had denounced the island's governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, and his Popular Democratic Party for their positions supporting birth control and divorce. The bishops went further, starting their own rival Catholic political party.
Illich opposed them on three grounds, which he later articulated with characteristic precision:
As a historian, I saw that it violated the American tradition of Church and State separation. 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. As a theologian, I believe that the Church must always condemn injustice in the light of the Gospel, but never has the right to speak in favor of a specific political party.
When Bishop McManus directly ordered all priests not to dine with the governor, Illich deliberately disobeyed. McManus responded by ordering Illich to leave his post at the university, describing his presence as "dangerous to the Diocese of Ponce and its institutions."
Dangerous. It's a word that would follow Illich throughout his career—dangerous to the Church, dangerous to governments, dangerous to the entire edifice of modern institutional life.
The School That Taught People to Distrust Schools
After leaving Puerto Rico, Illich moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where in 1961 he founded what would become the Centro Intercultural de Documentación—known by its Spanish acronym CIDOC. On the surface, it was a language school and training center for North American missionaries heading to Latin America.
In reality, it was something far more subversive.
Illich had become deeply suspicious of the global wave of "development" sweeping through what was then called the Third World. He saw the missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers, and development workers as agents of a new kind of colonialism—not military conquest but cultural imperialism, what he called "war on subsistence." They came with good intentions, these fresh-faced volunteers from wealthy countries, but they brought with them the assumption that the American or European way of life was the goal everyone should aspire to.
At CIDOC, Illich tried to teach missionaries not to impose their own cultural values. The center became, as one observer put it, "part language school and part free university for intellectuals from all over the Americas." Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was a crucible of radical thinking about development, education, and the role of institutions in modern life.
The Vatican was not pleased. Illich's critical analyses of Church institutional behavior, combined with associations with liberation theology and suspicions of Marxism, brought him into direct conflict with Rome. Unpopular with the local chapter of Opus Dei—the conservative Catholic movement—Illich was called to Rome for questioning, prompted in part by a Central Intelligence Agency report.
He was not convicted or punished. But he decided it was time to renounce active priesthood. Though he continued to identify as a priest and occasionally performed private masses, the institutional Church and Ivan Illich had parted ways.
In 1976, apparently concerned that CIDOC itself was becoming too institutionalized—too much like the very thing it criticized—Illich shut it down.
The Book That Attacked Schools
The work that made Illich famous appeared in 1971: Deschooling Society. The title alone was provocative. Not "reforming" schools, not "improving" them—deschooling. Dismantling them entirely.
Illich's argument went something like this: We have confused education with schooling. We assume that learning happens primarily in schools, delivered by teachers, measured by credentials. But this institutionalization of learning actually undermines real education. It makes people passive consumers of pre-packaged knowledge. It teaches them to distrust their own capacity to learn. It creates artificial scarcity—you can only learn if you have access to the right institutions, the right teachers, the right credentials.
Worse, the hidden curriculum of schooling teaches people that all of life's important activities should be managed by institutions. If learning requires schools, then health requires hospitals, security requires police, movement requires highways, and so on. The school, Illich argued, was the paradigmatic institution of modern society—the one that trained people to accept institutional dependency in every area of life.
He was unsparing:
Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education.
What did he propose instead? Self-directed education, supported by what he called "learning webs"—networks of people and resources that learners could access on their own terms. He imagined skill exchanges where people could find others willing to teach what they knew, peer-matching services that would connect learners with similar interests, and reference services that would help people find educational resources.
In retrospect, some of this sounds remarkably like the internet. Illich was imagining something like Wikipedia, YouTube tutorials, and online learning communities decades before they existed.
The Book That Attacked Medicine
If Deschooling Society made people uncomfortable, Illich's 1975 book Medical Nemesis made them furious. The subtitle was blunt: "The Expropriation of Health."
Illich argued that modern medicine had become counterproductive—a concept he called "iatrogenesis," from the Greek words for "physician" and "origin." Literally, illness caused by medicine itself.
He identified three types of medical harm. The first was clinical iatrogenesis: the direct damage caused by medical interventions, from surgical errors to drug side effects to hospital-acquired infections. This was relatively uncontroversial—everyone acknowledged that medicine sometimes harmed patients.
The second was social iatrogenesis: the way medical institutions created dependency and undermined people's ability to care for themselves and each other. When every discomfort becomes a medical problem requiring professional intervention, people lose the skills and confidence to cope with ordinary suffering.
The third was cultural iatrogenesis, and this was the most radical. Illich argued that modern medicine was waging "a godlike battle to eradicate death, pain, and sickness." In doing so, it was destroying humanity's traditional capacity to cope with these fundamental aspects of existence. We were being taught to see death as a medical failure rather than a natural part of life, pain as a problem to be eliminated rather than a signal to be understood, sickness as an enemy to be defeated rather than an experience to be integrated.
Health, Illich insisted, is not the absence of disease. It's "the capacity to cope with the human reality of death, pain, and sickness." Modern medicine, in its relentless expansion, was actually making people less healthy by this definition—less capable of living with the inevitable difficulties of embodied human existence.
The Corruption of the Best
Underlying all of Illich's critiques was a theological argument that he developed more explicitly in his later years. He often invoked a Latin phrase: Corruptio optimi quae est pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst.
What did he mean? Illich believed that the Incarnation—God becoming human in the person of Jesus—was the turning point of world history. It opened new possibilities for love and knowledge, inviting believers to see God's face in everyone they encountered. This was the best thing that had ever happened.
But Christianity had been corrupted. The radical freedom and personal encounter at the heart of the Gospel had been turned into institutions, rules, and bureaucracies. The parable of the Good Samaritan, which taught that love cannot be commanded or institutionalized, became the basis for professional charity. The call to heal the sick became an industrialized medical system. The invitation to share knowledge became compulsory mass education.
Western modernity, Illich argued, was essentially corrupted Christianity. All its characteristic institutions—schools, hospitals, development agencies, social services—were perverted attempts to encode Gospel principles as rules and duties. And because they were corruptions of something genuinely good, they were the worst corruptions possible.
This put Illich in a peculiar position. He was a Catholic priest criticizing the Catholic Church—and beyond it, the entire modern world—for betraying what was best in Christianity. He was both an insider and an exile, a believer and a radical critic.
Friends and Influences
Though Illich never called himself an anarchist in print, he moved in anarchist circles and counted prominent anarchist thinkers among his closest friends. Most notably, he was close to Paul Goodman, the author of Growing Up Absurd and a major figure in American anarchist thought.
Illich described their first meeting with characteristic vividness. In 1951, as a twenty-six-year-old newly arrived in New York, he attended a public debate where Goodman argued that New York should immediately decriminalize all drugs, predicting that otherwise the city would become unlivable within a few years.
Well, I was shocked! I would not have suspected that within three or four years we would be good friends and that during the last part of his life he would spend considerable time with me in Cuernavaca. I consider Goodman one of the great thinkers I've known, and also a tender, touching person.
Illich was also associated with John Holt, the educator who became the leading advocate for "unschooling"—the idea that children learn best when they are free to follow their own interests rather than subjected to formal curricula.
In his final years, Illich acknowledged that he had been greatly influenced by J. C. Kumarappa, an Indian economist who had advised Mahatma Gandhi. Kumarappa's book Economy of Permanence argued for economic systems based on local self-sufficiency rather than industrial growth—ideas that resonated deeply with Illich's critique of development.
The Wandering Years
After closing CIDOC in 1976, Illich spent the remaining decades of his life traveling between the United States, Mexico, and Germany. He held positions at Penn State, the University of Bremen, and the University of Hagen. He continued to write and lecture, though his influence waned—particularly among the French left, where he had been popular in the 1970s. After François Mitterrand's Socialist Party won power in 1981, Illich was considered too pessimistic for a moment when the left finally controlled the government.
His later work became increasingly focused on the history of reading, the alphabet, and the transformation of text in the age of computers. He was interested in how technologies shape perception and thought—not just schools and hospitals, but the very tools we use to think with.
Throughout these years, Illich suffered from a disfiguring growth on his face that he refused to have treated. Friends reported that he managed the pain through traditional methods—yoga, meditation, and reportedly large amounts of opium. It was, perhaps, a final act of resistance against the medical system he had spent so much of his life criticizing.
Ivan Illich died on December 2, 2002, in Bremen, Germany. He was seventy-six years old. His last wish—to die surrounded by close collaborators in Bologna, amid the creation of a new learning center—was not realized.
What Remains
Illich's influence has proven more durable than his declining reputation in the 1980s and 1990s might have suggested. The Dark Mountain Project, a creative cultural movement founded in the 2000s that seeks new stories for understanding modernity, explicitly draws inspiration from his ideas. The homeschooling and unschooling movements owe him an enormous debt. Critics of medicalization and overtreatment—a growing concern as healthcare costs spiral and opioid epidemics spread—find themselves repeating arguments he made half a century ago.
And then there's the internet. Illich imagined "learning webs" connecting people who wanted to learn with people who could teach, matching learners with shared interests, providing access to educational resources outside institutional control. He was describing, decades early, something like what the World Wide Web would make possible. Whether the reality has lived up to the promise—or whether the internet has simply become another institution capturing human activity and creating new dependencies—is a question Illich did not live to fully address.
Perhaps the most enduring aspect of Illich's work is his insistence that we ask uncomfortable questions about things we take for granted. Schools educate. Hospitals heal. Development helps. These seem like obvious truths. Illich's life work was dedicated to showing that they are not truths at all, but assumptions—and that these assumptions, when institutionalized and made compulsory, often produce the opposite of what they promise.
He never had a home after leaving his grandfather's house on that Croatian island. But he left behind a body of work that continues to make readers uncomfortable in the best possible way—forcing them to question whether the institutions that promise to help them are actually doing so, or whether they have become, as Illich might put it, the worst corruption of what was once the best.