Celebration of Awareness: A Call For Institutional Revolution

s/t: A Call for Institutional Revolution
The book consists of a series of 12 brief essays on the following themes: Vietnam & the resistance, the war on poverty, Latin America, Puerto Rico & immigration to the US mainland, problems of the Roman Catholic Church, the role of the Church in social change & development, the "futility of schooling," the question of technical assistance, & programs on behalf of birth control in the 3rd world. Each issue, while real & urgent in its own right, becomes a paradigm case which reveals a fundamental theoria/praxis of revolution, informed by a fine philosophical & theological discipline & sensibility which transcends, tho it cannot avoid, concrete issues in a given time & place. In each essay, Illich uses the method of radical doubt--not in the Cartesian but rather in the Socratic sense. He is challenging the "nature of some certainty" which has been purveyed as truth. Hence he is dealing with "deception--the deception embodied in one of our institutions." The most wide-spread & pernicious deception pretended as certainty he questions is the certainty of the ideological liberal who assumes that man makes his life by his institutions & that therefore the institutions of North American industrial civilization can & should be translated to the 3rd world for its own good: especially the institutions of schooling & technical assistance designed to help a given nation emulate the affluence of the US.--from Richard A. Underwood: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 43, No. 2, Book Review Supplement (6/1975), pp. 405f

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter, he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence (Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the United States, he died in 2002.