Digital Commons Network^™

The Place Of Law In Ivan Illich's Vision Of Social Transformation, Bruce K. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

This Article discusses Ivan Illich’s direction for social reform that led to his book, "Tools for Conviviality", where Illich targeted development, technology, and the exploitation of nature. Illich identified three key cultural institutions that needed to be reclaimed in order to bring about an inversion of industrial society: science, language, and law. This Article focuses on the rule of law and its central institutional invention—formal adjudication.

The Author suggests that Illich’s idealism can still be found in the law reform litigation effort and identifies the diminished stature of the ideal of disinterested adjudication as a significant threat to Illich’s hopes …

Symposium: Radical Nemesis: Re-Envisioning Ivan Illich's Theories On Social Institutions Foreword, Jennifer L. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

The eight articles in this Symposium issue reflect the divergent topics that Ivan Illich managed to reflect upon in his life’s works. The topics include discussion of prisons, education, family law structures, privatization of welfare services and its impact on labor consciousness, media, and the rule of law.

The Symposium was a daylong conference of ideas that invited the engagement of those who joined. The students of Illich and students of students of Illich shared with those of us who had not studied at his side, his passion for ideas, his insights, and his invitation for anyone with or without …

Shadow Works And Shadow Markets: How Privatization Of Welfare Services Produces An Alternative Market, Bridgette Baldwin

Faculty Scholarship

The Author attempts to fuse Ivan Illich’s misplaced ideas of gender roles with how privatization of welfare services has legitimized a shadow economy and work through mandated community service jobs. The Article provides a historical perspective of how social services were handled, leading to the current cost/benefit legacy of welfare privatization utilized by the Wisconsin Works program (W-2). Wisconsin’s program requires women recipients to engage in volunteer work, creating a subsidized labor force for private agencies based on the presumption that work, even meaningless and menial tasks, establishes job-readiness for women on welfare. The Author suggests that we need to …

Illich, Education, And The Wire, Erin E. Buzuvis

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses on two texts—first, Illich’s 1971 "Deschooling Society," which calls for abolishing institutionalized education in favor of decentralized, personalized relationships that promote intentional learning; and second, The Wire’s fourth season, which is particularly focused on the exercise in futility that is the Baltimore public school system. Read together, these texts explore the problem of institutionalized education and the solution Illich proposes of intentional learning communities. But while both texts help us understand the shortfalls of institutionalized education, neither is particularly prescriptive when it comes to undoing the current state of affairs and weaning our society off of institutions, …

Illich (Via Cayley) On Prisons, Giovanna Shay

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers whether, more than a dozen years after publication of Cayley’s book "The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives," Illich’s theories help us to make sense of America’s “prison-industrial complex.” The Author concludes that our current situation reflects in part the dynamics of his theory of “counterproductivity,” but that Illich did not take sufficient account of the salience of race and class in American criminal punishment.

Exchange As A Cornerstone Of Families, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

This essay up-ends critical theorist Ivan Illich’s critique of economic thinking as replacing households defined by vernacular gender with married pairs in “inhumane” sex-neutral economic partnerships. It challenges Illich’s view of exchange as a destroyer that has meddled in families for only a few hundred years, citing sociobiological literature to counter his case against exchange with one valorizing two exchanges that I call “primal deals” that played crucial roles in the evolution of humans, families, and day-to-day life. These primal deals—especially the primal pair-bonding deal between men and women—continue to play a central role in families and family law today. …