Volume 30, Number 8 · May 12, 1983
Back to Utopia
By Keith Thomas
Gender
by Ivan Illich
Pantheon, 192 pp., $11.95
Ivan Illich is the leading contemporary exponent of the romantic anarchist tradition. Like Rousseau, Godwin, or Tolstoy, he inveighs against the coarseness of modern materialism, deplores economic growth, and preaches a return to simplicity and authenticity. As a Catholic priest in the 1950s, he strongly opposed the papacy's plan to export American-trained missionaries to Latin America. As vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico from 1956 to 1960, he resisted the extension of compulsory schooling to the third world. At Cuernavaca in Mexico in 1962 he founded the Center for Intercultural Documentation, an institution designed to achieve the 'de-Yankification' of Latin America. During the last twelve years or so he has issued a relentless series of little books designed to expose what he sees as the most insidious features of contemporary society.[1] Currently, he is teaching medieval history in Germany, an activity more closely related to his political objectives than might at first be apparent.
Review, 3186 words
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