Illich at 100
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Over the first weekend in September, 2026, there will be local gatherings around dinner tables and picnic blankets and in convivial spaces of different kinds, in places around the world, to mark what would have been the 100th birthday of Ivan Illich.
Whether you’re a newcomer to Illich’s work, a long-time reader or anywhere in between, you are warmly invited to be part of this.
[https://aschoolcalledhome.org/illich-at-100/](co-conspirator)
Ivan Illich was a mercurial figure, straddling identities; a man around whom myths gather, while labels refuse to stick. Born in Vienna in 1926, raised between there and his grandfather’s home on the Dalmatian coast, he was a teenager when his family had to flee the Nazis. In adult life, he spoke for the virtues of grounding in a ‘particular soil’ and ‘a shared local culture’, yet recognised that his own destiny was to live as ‘a wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim’.
As a Catholic priest in the 1950s and 60s, he defended the syncretic local forms of faith he found in Latin America against the forces of the Vatican and modernising development programmes, and created a remarkable language school, think tank and free university at the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
As a prominent public intellectual in the 1970s, his wanderings took him around the world and into numerous fields, sparking international debates around education, energy and medicine, shaping the movements of environmentalism and appropriate technology, critical development studies and degrowth, and working closely with activists from Gustavo Esteva to John McKnight.
He outlived the years of his fame and went on gathering with friends to collaborate on a deepening historical enquiry into the assumptions on which economic modernity was founded, and he died peacefully during a nap at his friend Barbara Duden’s house in Bremen in December 2002.
Two decades later, his work continues to light a flame in the dark for philosophers and theologians, hackers and technology critics, farmers and Indigenous activists, and to provide illumination for many movements and projects.
- Read more about some of the projects and collaborations inspired by Illich: https://dougald.substack.com/p/the-illich-archipelago