coming in April: What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life

What Should We Do? offers a compelling, thought-provoking, and urgently-needed framework for anyone trying to understand how we can relate to and act with each other to co-create a more just world. I love this book and you will too.” –Hahrie Han, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

“Peter Levine makes everyone think more clearly about everything. How fortunate for our country that he’s applied this gift to the realm of civic life. In this insightful and wise book, Levine reveals what it truly means to cooperate, deliberate, and activate—and challenges us to do all three more mindfully.” —Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University, and author Become America 

“Peter Levine is among the leading philosophers of civic life of his generation. What Should We Do? is his magnum opus.  It ranges widely from a masterly review of political philosophy to practical suggestions for addressing issues like the Black Lives Matter movement. For anyone concerned about the state of our democracy and what our role should be, this book is must reading.” –Robert D. Putnam, Research Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, and coauthor of The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

More information and a link to pre-order the book are here. From the back cover …

People who want to improve the world must ask the fundamental civic question: “What should we do?” Although their specific challenges and topics are enormously diverse, they often encounter problems of collective action (how to get many individuals to act in concert), of discourse (how to talk and think well about contentious matters) and of exclusion. To get things done, they must form or join and sustain functional groups, and through them, develop skills and virtues that help them to be effective and responsible civic actors.

In What Should We Do?, Peter Levine, one of America’s leading scholars and practitioners of civic engagement, identifies the general challenges that confront people who ask the citizens’ question and explores solutions. Ultimately, his goal is to provide a unified theoretical foundation for effective civic engagement and citizen action. Levine draws from three rich traditions: research on collective action by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, work on deliberation and discourse by Jürgen Habermas, and the nonviolent social movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using these real-world examples, he develops a theory of citizen action that can effectively wrestle with these problems so that they don’t destabilize movements.

A broad theory of civic life, What Should We Do? turns from the question of what makes a society just to the question of how to relate to our fellow human beings in a context of injustice. And it offers pragmatic guidance for people who seek to improve the world.

When the Lotus Bloomed

Thanks to Cambridge Arts’ Sidewalk Poetry program, this poem is now imprinted in cement at Clarendon Ave. and Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge (Mass.). The text appeared first on my blog. I meant to answer Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali #20, “On the Day When the Lotus Bloomed,” which begins—in Tagore’s own translation from Bengali—“On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.”

By the way, Tagore’s English versions of his own verse are criticized for being sentimental, archaizing, and didactic and less challenging than the originals. For instance, Amit Chaudhuri writes, “Tagore’s English version of the Gitanjali, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1913, is what Mother Teresa once was to Calcutta, the royal family to England, and Kingsley to Gandhi: a tantalising mirage that obstructs the view of what’s behind it.” My response, then, must be even further from Tagore’s Bengali original, which I cannot read. But I think these eight lines convey some of me, and I hope they offer a touch of peace in North Cambridge.

Civic Studies call for proposals for APSA 2022

Call for proposals from Civic Studies (formerly Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society)

Related Group Chair(s): Peter Levine, Tufts University, peter.levine@tufts.edu and Trygve Throntveit, Minnesota Humanities Center, throntv@gmail.com

The Civic Studies Related Group invites proposals for panels, round tables, and individual papers that make a significant contribution to the civic studies field; articulate a civic studies perspective on some important issue; or contribute to theoretical, empirical, or practical debates in civic studies. We especially encourage proposals that emphasize actual or potential civic responses to current social and political crises, their origins, and possible consequences.

Civic studies is a field defined by diversity yet connected by participants’ commitments to promoting interdisciplinary research, theory, and practice in support of civic renewal: the strengthening of civic (i.e., citizen-powered and citizen-empowering) politics, initiatives, institutions, and culture. Its concern is not with citizenship understood as legal membership in a particular polity, but with guiding civic ideals and a practical ethos embraced by individuals loyal to, empowered by, and invested in the communities they form and re-form together. Its goal is to promote these ideals through improved institutional designs, enhanced public deliberation, new and improved forms of public work among citizens, or clearer and more imaginative political theory.

The civic studies framework adopted in 2007 cites two ideals for the emerging discipline: “public spiritedness” (or “commitment to the public good”) and “the idea of the citizen as a creative agent.” Civic studies is an intellectual community that takes these two ideals seriously. Although new, it draws from several important strands of ongoing research and theory, including the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and the Bloomington School, of Juergen Habermas and critical social theory, Brent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis, and more diffuse traditions such as philosophical pragmatism, Gandhian nonviolence, the African American Freedom Struggle. It supports work on deliberative democracy, on public work, on civic engagement and community organizing, among others.

To propose a session, click here when logged in as an APSA member or else navigate as follows: open the conference platform; click “Submit or Edit a Proposal,” click “Submit a Division, Related Group, or Partner Association Proposal,” scroll down to and click “Related Groups,” and select “Civic Studies.”

APSA members can also join the Civic Studies group (free) at this link.

academic freedom for individuals and for groups

One type of academic freedom belongs to individuals. A teacher, researcher, or student either has freedom or not. The question is whether academics may say what they wish to say.

This form of freedom is very important, and I am an avid defender of it, although it has some limits. First, academics shouldn’t be able to say literally anything as part of their jobs, including making demonstrably false statements. Second, it is not always clear when this right should become a positive one. Although I shouldn’t be fired for adopting a controversial position, do I have a right to be hired, published, or invited to speak after I’ve done so? (If I have a positive right to speak, then I want my invitation to the University of Hawaii right now.)

Although academic freedom in the individual sense is important, it is not the only kind. I have worked at universities for 29 years. Only for the last three have I had individual academic freedom, safeguarded by tenure and a right to earn my salary primarily by teaching. Before that, I was always involved in collective efforts–team projects–that had funders, staff, and partners. These projects involved communication and advocacy as well as research. I always had to be careful what I said because that could affect my colleagues and allies. On occasion, I said things that had negative consequences for our fundraising or other goals. Much more often, I held my tongue.

Only very rarely did I experience this situation as a lack of freedom. Generally, I thought of myself and my colleagues as being free in the political sense of the word. We could collaboratively develop and implement strategies to influence society. People who opposed us weren’t violating our freedom; they were freely acting at odds with us. Much more common than actual opposition were decisions not to support us for various reasons. If (for instance) someone chose not to approve a grant proposal that we had submitted, that was not a violation of our rights. The alternative would have been to fund us and reject someone else. We operated in a controversial space with numerous decision-makers and finite resources. To the extent that I complained about limitations on our liberty or rights, it was only when arbitrary–from my perspective–bureaucratic rules interfered. I suppose I would have cried foul if administrators within our own institution had blocked us because of their beliefs, but then I would have been complaining about their overstepping their specific responsibilities. More generally, I expected opposition and competition and didn’t think of those as threats to our freedom.

If you want a classic framework for this distinction, Benjamin Constant’s will serve. Normal academic freedom is an example of what Constant called the “liberty of the moderns.” The freedom to collaborate in a contested space is the “liberty of the ancients.”

I think there are epistemological as well as ethical reasons to enhance collaborative, applied forms of research as complements to individual scholarship.* These approaches come under such headings as “transdisciplinary research,” “civically engaged research,” “community-based participatory research” (CPBR), and “participant-action research” (PAR). For such efforts, we need a robust account of academic freedom as the ability to build things together, often in the face of opposition that is legitimate. The question cannot be whether an individual is permitted to say what is in that person’s mind. It should become a question about the resources and rewards available to groups of people who seek to co-create knowledge and thereby change the world.

According to this theory, when the NIH, the Ford Foundation, or the American Political Science Association increases its support for engaged research, freedom is enhanced. (Support can mean money, training–like ICER–or recognition.) However, there will never be enough resources to allow every group to undertake every project it wants to do. Many applicants will be rejected; in fact, competition is desirable. Freedom of this kind is not a yes-or-no matter but an outcome of wise institutional design and allocation of resources.

*See civically engaged research in political science; how to keep political science in touch with politicsmethods for engaged researchwhat must we believe?civically engaged research in political sciencewhat gives some research methods legitimacy?; etc.

Teaching Honest History: a conversation with Randi Weingarten and Marcia Chatelain

AFT President Randi Weingarten invited Georgetown historian Marcia Chatelain and me to discuss controversies about American history and race in public schools on her podcast. I enjoyed the whole conversation and learned a lot.

You can listen here.

At one point, we discussed the idea of “teaching both sides.” I said that many issues do not have two sides. One view may be correct, or there may be many valid perspectives. I worry that looking for exactly two sides on every issue reinforces partisan polarization. Nevertheless, I see value in identifying issues that have two worthy sides and delving into them. I said that I choose school choice as a signature issue in my public policy course because there are valid arguments on both sides, and it is an opportunity to think about deep value conflicts.

Marcia Chatelain proposed that we really should teach both–or all–sides. Students should study the whole range of opinion. I volunteered that perhaps students should read John C. Calhoun’s defenses of slavery, and she agreed. White supremacy and slavery are parts of history.

I liked her argument and concurred with it. In retrospect, I’d only add that the best way to deal with controversy may vary by discipline. History encompasses all the opinions that people have held, and an important step in historical interpretation involves suspending one’s own judgment to understand what people–even very bad people–were trying to say. Philosophy (and the study of public policy) are inquiries into what is right. In those disciplines, it is more appropriate to be selective and evaluative. At the same time, history is crucial background for reasoning well about ethical and political issues. Anyone who is trying to decide what we should do now ought to know what Calhoun argued, because his deeply and widely held views remain part of our reality. In this sense, history and ethical/political reasoning are complementary, but they do imply different skills–and different educational choices.

See also: “Just teach the facts”; discussing school choice; school choice is a question of values not data; 50 Core American Documents; two dimensions of debate about civics; NAEd Report on Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse, etc.

professionals as grizzled veterans or as reflective learners

In stressful, front-line professions–such as teaching, military service, nursing, or policing–you may encounter the idea of a “professional” as someone who has done the job in one of its harder forms for a long time. People who merely study or teach the topic, or those who have had brief or sheltered experience on the job, are not true professionals.

An alternative sense of a “professional” is someone who has reflected deeply on the role from a variety of perspectives. For instance, reading and talking about the history and sociology of schools may contribute to a teacher’s professional development.

Of course, there are other senses of professionalism apart from these two. I like the idea of “democratic professionalism” developed by Albert Dzur and others: a professional as someone who works with citizens who hold other jobs and roles to strengthen democracy together. There is also a trustee ideal, in which the professional safeguards public values in return for the right to provide certain services.

But those are ideals. In almost any actual professional setting, you can find grizzled veterans telling the newbies how it’s really done, plus formal academic requirements and assessments. These two ways of thinking about professionalism constantly compete for legitimacy, while more idealistic conceptions remain somewhat hidden or marginal.

If veterancy and academic study are the main options, then I’d advocate for a mix of the two. Experience is valuable. It can impart practical wisdom drawn from numerous concrete examples (phronesis). People who have spent years in a job often (not always) deserve respect for their service. Thus there are benefits to hiring veteran professionals as teachers and professors, employing them as mentors, placing students in practical internships, etc.

Yet professionals should also hold a critical stance toward their own role and learn from the concepts and tools of other disciplines. For instance, a teacher is better off understanding the sociology of schools even if the authors of sociology articles would make bad K-12 teachers. Their value does not derive from direct personal experience. Phronesis is useful, but so are other forms of knowledge, including theory and empirical data.

In pretentious settings, such as highly selective college and universities, it can be necessary to fight for the legitimacy of experience and to make space for veteran practitioners. However, in places like police stations and some K-12 schools, it can be hard to make space for critique. Whether teaching professionals in an academic way will improve their practice is an empirical question; the answer will probably vary depending on who teaches what, to whom, and how. There is no guarantee it will work. However, if a profession is going to improve, then at least some people who hold the job must draw insights from outside their field, including from scholarship.

See also: separating populism from anti-intellectualism; Public Work and Democratic Professionalism; Democracy in schools: Albert Dzur talks with principal Donnan Stoicovy; a way forward for high culture.

what would happen to race in a just world?

What is Race? Four Philosophical Views (2019)* presents a debate among four sophisticated, current philosophers of race. All the authors are committed anti-racists who are eloquent about the evil histories of the use of race. They would take similar views on most political controversies involving race. All would reject what Kwame Anthony Appiah (quoted in Quayshawn Spencer’s chapter) called “racialism”: “the view that humans naturally divide into a small number of groups called ‘races’ in such a way that the members of each race share certain fundamental, inheritable, physical, moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics with one another that they do not share with members of any other race.” They would all say that “racialism” is false and evil. Yet they disagree about metaphysical and methodological issues that arise when we ask what kind of a thing a race is, if it’s anything at all.

Their arguments are subtle and hard to summarize, but an example offers a way into the debate. Imagine a future state in which racial injustice is over. All implicit and explicit biases are gone. All structural inequities linked to race have been solved. All appropriate reparations have been fully paid. You can imagine this happening after many decades or centuries of political action in our real world, or as a result of a thought-experiment: aliens from another planet or divine forces have repaired things on earth. What then should happen to the word and the idea of race?

I think Sally Haslanger would say that race would then cease to exist, because it means subordination. To be a little more precise: the meaning of a social construct is the historical tradition of how it has been used in a society. Race has been used in several ways; it has multiple meanings. But one major way is as the basis for privilege and subordination in the USA. Emphasizing that aspect of the word is the right thing to do now because it “highlight[s]—in the relevant cases—how our racializing practices and identities contribute to injustice.” Once racial subordination is solved, there is no good reason to try to change the meaning of the word “race” and continue to use it. People will have races until justice prevails; after that, they will no longer have races. It can be valuable to preserve cultures, religions, and other groupings, but they should be voluntary and specific. Races don’t work like that and would no longer have any justification after the world is just. “I find problematic the idea that a just world is one in which cultural groups can restrict their membership on racial grounds. I embrace, instead, a model of multiple coexisting cultures that are mutable, flexible, and creatively tolerant around issues of ancestry and appearance.”

Chike Jeffers argues that although racial categories originated as a result of white supremacy, racial identities have developed valuable cultural significance for people of color—notably, people who identify as Black (as he does).  “Everyday talk about black people, for example, is best understood as referring to a real group to which one can belong, even if such talk often involves false assumptions.” He envisions a world in which Blackness is preserved and developed even though white supremacy has been defeated. He argues that this is logically possible and also desirable. “Race as a social construction could live on past the death of racism, in my view, given that racial groups could continue to exist as cultural groups. … The continued existence of racial diversity as cultural diversity after the end of racism is therefore, in my view, something good. … [A]s someone of sub-Saharan African descent, I personally desire the indefinite persistence of black people as a cultural group.” (He argues, too, that pan-African solidarity reflects real cultural similarities across the continent before European imperialism and racism; it is not completely reactive.)

Quayshawn Spencer argues that the races currently counted by the US government refer to “human continental populations”:  Africans, Eurasians, East Asians, Oceanians, and Native Americans. Races define distinctions that are useful empirically (mainly for medicine) although they could not possibly justify inequality. A “biologically real entity is an epistemically useful and justified entity in a well-ordered research program in biology.” Race meets this criterion. Thus “a Black person is a person with genomic ancestry from the African population. That’s it. … Furthermore, the degree to which a person is Black is equal to the proportion of her alleles that originated from the African population.” This would continue to be true under just conditions, although then all the associations between racial categories and health issues that result today from injustice would be gone.

Joshua Glasgow says that this situation would prove that race had always been false, and people had simply been racialized in a way that would no longer happen if the world became just. “Even if tomorrow all groups currently recognized as racial had equal power and participated equally in eating the world’s foods, dancing its forms of dance, playing its kinds of music, and so on—even in such a world, I do not think we’d say that on the ordinary concept of race Hillary Clinton somehow loses her whiteness or that Jeremy Lin stops being Asian because of those points of equality.” Therefore, the ordinary concept of race points to something independent of oppression and of culture, and as such, it is a wrong and false idea that should be rejected now. We should recognize and even emphasize racialized oppression but not concede the reality of race.

*Glasgow, Joshua; Haslanger, Sally; Jeffers, Chike; and Spencer, Quayshawn, What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views (Oxford University Press, 2019). See also: why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics; how philosophy is supposed to work; is social science too anthropocentric?; social criticism as reading social forms;

Why Ivan Illich Still Matters Today

Ivan Illich is one of those rare, seminal thinkers to whom I keep returning, again and again, because he fearlessly grapples with core themes that otherwise go ignored.  He addressed, for example, the totalizing power of modern institutions, the corrupting influences of capitalism on spiritual life, and the power of vernacular practice to build more wholesome, insurgent cultures.    

In my latest podcast (Episode #21), I had the pleasure of interviewing David Cayley, a close friend and colleague of Illich’s who recently published a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his thought, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. Cayley is a former broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and independent scholar and author who has written numerous books on topics literary, political, and ecological.

Ivan Illich.  Photo by 'Adrift Animal,' CC BY-SA 4.0

Illich was an iconoclastic social critic, radical Christian, and cultural historian who soared to international fame in the 1970s with searing critiques of Western modernity, Christianity, and the professionalization of care in healthcare, education, and social services. An Austrian-born Catholic priest who often clashed with the Vatican, Illich eventually left the priesthood to become an itinerant speaker, public intellectual, and best-selling author. His thinking was sprawling and eclectic, but much of it focused on how we might pursue deeper, more meaningful spiritual lives in a modern world that seems designed to deny our elemental humanity.

While some of Illich’s perspectives now seem rooted in their time, mostly the 1960s and 1970s, his thinking remains highly relevant to contemporary life in developing a rich, detailed perspective that dissents from modern economics and politics. His work is perhaps even more relevant now that neoliberal capitalism, over the past forty years, has intensified its disempowerment of ordinary people.  

In a series of books, Illich argued that formal education, healthcare, transportation, law, and other systems have come to dispossess us, creating more harm than benefit. In his book Medical Nemesis, Illich showed how the medical profession overmedicates people and pathologizes normal life. Deschooling Society showed how formal education is more focused on credentialing people for the capitalist order than in stimulating genuine curiosity and learning. Tools for Conviviality called for a culture that empowers humans with creative, open-ended tools for sociability.

A common thread in Illich’s thinking was Who gets to define our sense of reality?  He cast his lot with the “vernacular domains” in which we self-organize ourselves – the informal spaces where we perform the “shadow work” of commoning and caring – activities the mainstream economy ignores. Illich also ventured into all sorts of unusual historical excavations, such as a history of the senses in reporting medical problems, silence as a commons, and the role of hair (as a vector for lice) in the history of urban life. (See some of my previous blog posts on Illich here and here, and a 2013 talk that I gave on Illich's contemporary influence.)

By approaching the world from the bottom up, via actual social practices and spiritual needs, Illich’s books and talks were prophetic in laying the intellectual foundations for the world of commoning that has emerged over the past twenty years. By exploring social and spiritual life that exists outside of the market/state imperium — a space beyond the secular, materialistic, economic realm of modern consciousness — Illich affirmed and articulated a rich space for imagining modern-day commons. Cayley has called Illich “a Marx for the age after development.”

Illich was a thinker, like E.F. Schumacher, who insisted “the scale issue is not some frill,” said Cayley. “It is absolutely central, an absolutely crucial issue. When things get too big, they become unmanageable, absolutely and without qualification. There are tools that by definition, by their very nature, cannot be controlled.  They will control us, inevitably.”  

David Cayley

Illich therefore proposed the concept of “convivial tools” that honor human agency and creativity. Convivial tools are not closed and proprietary, in the style of Microsoft Windows, but open-ended, flexible instruments that serve the needs and interests of ordinary individuals and communities.

Illich was among the early critics of standard economics and modern capitalist notions of “development.” He challenged the premise of “scarcity” built into this framework of thought and highlighted the dangers of unlimited growth. Standard economics, he noted, has no sense of “enoughness”; this is not only the source of our ecological problems, but our emotional and spiritual turmoil. This can be traced to capitalist markets, as supported by the state, that steer us toward dependencies on commodities and market transactions, marginalizing our basic human needs and disrupting our relationships with each other.  

In this sense, he argued, modern life represents a 500-year war against subsistence – the idea that we should produce for exchange value and money, rather than for use value and needs. “The economy is not going to save most of the people who are alive in the world today,” wrote Illich. “But it can make their pursuit of livelihood obscure and undignified.” The root error of “development,” said Illich is “an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control of nature.”

While David Cayley’s book is long — more than 450 pages — it vividly synthesizes Illich’s life and work in a text that combines personal memoir, biography, intellectual history, and cultural commentary. The book helps contemporary readers appreciate Illich as a powerful original thinker, a creative and dogged scholar, and a magnetic personality. Though classically educated, Illich wrote and spoke for a popular audience. He was a teacher as well as a theologian of sorts who tried to teach people through his actions and provocations. He was so compelling because he brought his fullest, most vulnerable self to the challenge. Cayley once compared him to an alert bird cocking his head,  trying to take everything in.  

You can listen to my interview with David Cayley here. 

 

Why Ivan Illich Still Matters Today

Ivan Illich is one of those rare, seminal thinkers to whom I keep returning, again and again, because he fearlessly grapples with core themes that otherwise go ignored.  He addressed, for example, the totalizing power of modern institutions, the corrupting influences of capitalism on spiritual life, and the power of vernacular practice to build more wholesome, insurgent cultures.    

In my latest podcast (Episode #21), I had the pleasure of interviewing David Cayley, a close friend and colleague of Illich’s who recently published a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his thought, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. Cayley is a former broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and independent scholar and author who has written numerous books on topics literary, political, and ecological.

Ivan Illich.  Photo by 'Adrift Animal,' CC BY-SA 4.0

Illich was an iconoclastic social critic, radical Christian, and cultural historian who soared to international fame in the 1970s with searing critiques of Western modernity, Christianity, and the professionalization of care in healthcare, education, and social services. An Austrian-born Catholic priest who often clashed with the Vatican, Illich eventually left the priesthood to become an itinerant speaker, public intellectual, and best-selling author. His thinking was sprawling and eclectic, but much of it focused on how we might pursue deeper, more meaningful spiritual lives in a modern world that seems designed to deny our elemental humanity.

While some of Illich’s perspectives now seem rooted in their time, mostly the 1960s and 1970s, his thinking remains highly relevant to contemporary life in developing a rich, detailed perspective that dissents from modern economics and politics. His work is perhaps even more relevant now that neoliberal capitalism, over the past forty years, has intensified its disempowerment of ordinary people.  

In a series of books, Illich argued that formal education, healthcare, transportation, law, and other systems have come to dispossess us, creating more harm than benefit. In his book Medical Nemesis, Illich showed how the medical profession overmedicates people and pathologizes normal life. Deschooling Society showed how formal education is more focused on credentialing people for the capitalist order than in stimulating genuine curiosity and learning. Tools for Conviviality called for a culture that empowers humans with creative, open-ended tools for sociability.

A common thread in Illich’s thinking was Who gets to define our sense of reality?  He cast his lot with the “vernacular domains” in which we self-organize ourselves – the informal spaces where we perform the “shadow work” of commoning and caring – activities the mainstream economy ignores. Illich also ventured into all sorts of unusual historical excavations, such as a history of the senses in reporting medical problems, silence as a commons, and the role of hair (as a vector for lice) in the history of urban life. (See some of my previous blog posts on Illich here and here, and a 2013 talk that I gave on Illich's contemporary influence.)

By approaching the world from the bottom up, via actual social practices and spiritual needs, Illich’s books and talks were prophetic in laying the intellectual foundations for the world of commoning that has emerged over the past twenty years. By exploring social and spiritual life that exists outside of the market/state imperium — a space beyond the secular, materialistic, economic realm of modern consciousness — Illich affirmed and articulated a rich space for imagining modern-day commons. Cayley has called Illich “a Marx for the age after development.”

Illich was a thinker, like E.F. Schumacher, who insisted “the scale issue is not some frill,” said Cayley. “It is absolutely central, an absolutely crucial issue. When things get too big, they become unmanageable, absolutely and without qualification. There are tools that by definition, by their very nature, cannot be controlled.  They will control us, inevitably.”  

David Cayley

Illich therefore proposed the concept of “convivial tools” that honor human agency and creativity. Convivial tools are not closed and proprietary, in the style of Microsoft Windows, but open-ended, flexible instruments that serve the needs and interests of ordinary individuals and communities.

Illich was among the early critics of standard economics and modern capitalist notions of “development.” He challenged the premise of “scarcity” built into this framework of thought and highlighted the dangers of unlimited growth. Standard economics, he noted, has no sense of “enoughness”; this is not only the source of our ecological problems, but our emotional and spiritual turmoil. This can be traced to capitalist markets, as supported by the state, that steer us toward dependencies on commodities and market transactions, marginalizing our basic human needs and disrupting our relationships with each other.  

In this sense, he argued, modern life represents a 500-year war against subsistence – the idea that we should produce for exchange value and money, rather than for use value and needs. “The economy is not going to save most of the people who are alive in the world today,” wrote Illich. “But it can make their pursuit of livelihood obscure and undignified.” The root error of “development,” said Illich is “an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control of nature.”

While David Cayley’s book is long — more than 450 pages — it vividly synthesizes Illich’s life and work in a text that combines personal memoir, biography, intellectual history, and cultural commentary. The book helps contemporary readers appreciate Illich as a powerful original thinker, a creative and dogged scholar, and a magnetic personality. Though classically educated, Illich wrote and spoke for a popular audience. He was a teacher as well as a theologian of sorts who tried to teach people through his actions and provocations. He was so compelling because he brought his fullest, most vulnerable self to the challenge. Cayley once compared him to an alert bird cocking his head,  trying to take everything in.  

You can listen to my interview with David Cayley here.