Book chapter about Illich

We've just learned of a book published in 2009 that contains a lengthy discussion of late Illich. The book is Beyond Western Economics: Remembering other economic cultures, and the author is Trent Schroyer. He is professor of sociology-philosophy in the School of Social Science and Human Services at Ramapo College, in NJ.

This book, an Amazon.com blurb states, "combines intellectual history with contemporary events to offer a critique of mainstream economic thought and its neoliberal policy incarnation in global capitalism. The critique operates both theoretically, at the level of metaphysics and the philosophy of science, and concretely, in case studies of globalization and world events."

Schroyer is possibly the only academic to have published a review of The Rivers North of the Future - in Philosophy & Social Criticism, May 2009. And this book's chapter on Illich is an expanded version of that review. Both sketch out the general outline of Illich's thought, summarize Illich's argument in Rivers North, and draw conclusions about the current relevancy of Illich's historical discoveries and observations. For Illich, Schroyer writes,

... modern evils can best be discerned through the eyes of faith. This is because modernity has been ‘dis-eviled’ by secularizations which transform the felt body and substitute abstractions that sacrifice the present to virtual futures – such as ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘globalization’, etc. Illich sees these future-oriented categories as ‘man-eating idols’.

A limited preview of Schroyer's book is available at Google Books. Amazon sells the book, but surprisingly, it charges $200.00 - not what we'd call convivial. An eBook version is available from Google for $41.60.

A page about the book, shown here, lists the table of contents. The Illich chapter:

Part II Critical Traditionalist Cultural Visions

Chapter 4 Illich's Genealogy of Modern Certitudes

4.1 Who Was ivan Illich ?

4.2 Illich's Regenerative Methodologies

4.3 Ecclesiology as Critical Regeneration Theory

4.4 Origins of Modernity in Perversions of Roman Church 'Reforms'

4.5 From Mother Church to Mother State

4.6 Cultural Colonization of Vernacular Speech

4.7 Perversions of the Contingency Axiom that 'Reformed' the Church

4.8 New Fears and New Psycho-Spiritual Pathologies

4.9 Disembodiments of Modern Sensibility

4.10 Creating Vernacular Free Spaces

4.11 Convivial Living as Post-Industrial Society Practice

4.12 Loss of Vernacular Gender as Condition for Economism

4.13 Truth-Seeking Presupposes Friendship: Illich and Gandhi