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s/t: A Call for Institutional Revolution
The book consists of 12 essays on the following themes: Vietnam & the resistance; the war on poverty; Latin America, Puerto Rico & immigration to the US mainland; Catholic Church problems; the Church's role in social change & development; the futility of schooling; the question of technical assistance & programs for 3rd world birth control. Each issue, while real & urgent in its own right, becomes a paradigm case which reveals a fundamental theoria/praxis of revolution, informed by a 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 a Cartesian but in a Socratic sense. He challenges the 'nature of some certainty' purveyed as truth. Hence he's dealing with 'the deception embodied in one of our institutions.' The most widespread & pernicious deception pretended as certainty he questions is the certainty of ideological liberals who assume that people make their livee by their institutions & therefore the institutions of N. 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.--Richard A. Underwood: Journal of the American Academy of Religion (edited)