Tools for Conviviality

Ivan Illich | Essais | Harper & Row | Date de parution: 1973 | ISBN-13: 9780060121389 | Couverture: Rigide | Anglais

"I choose the term 'conviviality' to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members."

-From Chapter II

A work of seminal importance, this book presents Ivan Illich's penetrating analysis of the industrial mode of production which characterizes our contemporary world. The mass production of education (see Deschooling Society) serves as a paradigm for other modern industrial enterprises, "each producing a service commodity, each organized as a public utility and each defining its output as a basic necessity." Such industrial enterprises include systems of public transport, communication, health services, welfare, national defense, in short, any industrialized service agency which eventually imposes its use upon its consumers.

Tools for Conviviality offers Illich's concept of the multidimensional balance of human life which is needed as a framework for evaluating man's relation to his tools. "When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself... The parameters of human endeavors within which human life remains viable must be explored.

"Only within limits can machines take the place of slaves: beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom. Only within limits can education fit people into a man-made environment: beyond these limits lies the universal schoolhouse, hospital ward or prison. Only within limits ought politics be concerned with the distribution of maximum industrial outputs, rather than with equal energy inputs."

The conviviality sought is one in which man's personal energies are under his personal control, in which the use of his tools is responsibly limited. The over-all objective is to survive with justice, avoiding the bleak prospects of totally planned goals, desires, lives and total loss of individual privacy. This book claims our attention for the urgency of its appeal, the stunning clarity of its logic, the overwhelmingly human note which it sounds.

IVAN ILLICH was born in Vienna in 1926. He came to the United States in 1951, where he served as assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rican parish in New York City. From 1956 to 1960 he was as-signed as vice-rector to the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. He was a co-founder of the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and since 1964 has directed research seminars on "Institutional Alternatives in a Technological Society," with special focus on Latin America.