Illich at 100
4-6 September, 2026 • Around the world
“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied, it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand. On the other hand, radiating out … for rebirth of community.”
We’re spreading a rumour.
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.
Check out the map to find what’s happening near you, sign up as a local contact to host a gathering – or read on to learn more about this remarkable thinker and why we are celebrating his centenary.
— Dougald Hine & Anna Björkman,
a school called HOME
Local gatherings
Illich drew attention to the possibilities we lose when our lives are organised in ways that are too large or too fast for the kind of creatures we are. So it seemed appropriate to invite a scattering of human-scale gatherings.
You can use the map to find what’s happening near you – or sign up to be a local contact for those who want to gather in your part of the world.
Scroll around the map to find a gathering near you. Click on the pin to open the listing for details, including how to get in touch with the host. If no one has offered to be a local contact in your part of the world yet, then you can sign up through this form.
“If, after my lecture on Fridays, the spaghetti bowl must feed more than the two dozen who fit around the table made from flooring timber, guests squat on Mexican blankets in the next room.”
— ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’
Hosting a gathering
A bowl of spaghetti, a supply of red wine, a lit candle and an extra place at the table for the stranger who might arrive at your door.
That was Illich’s recipe for conviviality. Still is, among his friends and co-conspirators, so you could take it as a starting point for hosting a gathering, or translate that spirit so that it fits your capacity and your setting.
Maybe you’re part of an organisation or a venue that wants to host an event. Maybe you’re just curious to see if there are others near you to whom Illich’s name means something and who would like to get together.
If you fill out the form, we’ll put you on the map, along with anything you’d like to tell people, and they can get in touch with you by email.
Do I need to know lots about Illich to host a gathering?
Not at all! If you’ve got the curiosity to meet others near you who are drawn to his work, then you’re warmly welcome to put up your hand and be a local contact.
Below, you’ll find some starting points for exploring Illich’s work.
When should we hold our gathering?
Illich’s 100th birthday falls on Friday, 4 September, 2026.
We suggest finding a time over that weekend that makes sense to get together where you are. But if you’d like to organise something earlier or later, we’ll be glad to share your invitation here.
What does it mean to be a local contact?
If you sign up, then we’ll put a pin on the map with your name and email and any other details you’d like to share.
People near you can get in touch and hopefully you find a group to get together at some point on or around the weekend of his centenary.
Closer to the time, we’ll be in touch with everyone who has signed up as a host to check if you have further information that you’d like to share through this site.
Meanwhile, if you have any questions, you can get in touch using the contact form.
“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship. Therefore I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and ‘conditioned’ air that hinders the growth of friendship.”
— ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’
So who was this Illich?
A man around whom myths seem to gather, while labels won’t stick.
For much of the 1970s, it’s said that Illich could “draw more people than Bob Dylan to any university campus”. In books such as Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality, he brought the shadow side of modern institutions into question. His early drafts appeared in the New York Review of Books and on the front page of Le Monde, he was courted by world leaders from Pierre Trudeau to Indira Gandhi and in dialogue with everyone from Foucault to Krishnamurti.
But he outlived the years of his fame and went on gathering circles of friends on multiple continents, working in multiple languages, in a deepening enquiry into the hidden assumptions on which industrial modernity is founded. He died peacefully during a nap at Barbara Duden’s house in Bremen on 2 December 2002.
More than a decade later, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggested that Illich was finally approaching his “hour of legibility”. In the year of his centenary, Illich continues to be a lively influence on thought and action in a multitude of contexts.
“Institutions create certainties, and taken seriously, certainties deaden the heart and shackle the imagination. It is always my hope that my statements, angry or passionate, artful or innocent, will also provoke a smile, and thus a new freedom — even though the freedom come at a cost.”
— Celebration of Awareness
“I want to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts, by which I mean the stance and the competence that makes it feasible to enquire into the obvious. This is what I call learning.”
— ‘Ascesis’
Where to start?
Your best route into Illich’s thinking will depend on where you’re coming from. We’ve chosen five short texts from different eras that could offer entry points into his work.
To Hell With Good Intentions (1968)
“Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.”
A blistering address delivered to an organisation of North American students preparing for voluntary work in Latin America. Since the 1950s, Illich had been living and working first in Puerto Rico and then Mexico.
ENERGY & EQUITY (1973)
“The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated.”
The shortest of Illich’s books, Energy & Equity gives a sense of his critique of the counterproductivity of the social systems of the industrial age. It demonstrates why he had such an influence on the environmental movement, but also how far he was at odds with the logic of “sustainable development”, and how his work laid the ground for today’s conversations about degrowth.
SHADOW-WORK (1980)
“Both ‘work’ and ‘job’ are key words today. Neither had its present prominence three hundred years ago. Both are still untranslatable from European languages into many others.”
In the 1980s, Illich turned his attention to a historical enquiry into the hidden assumptions on which industrial modernity was founded. This lecture gives a flavour of what he uncovered.
SILENCE IS A COMMONS (1982)
“Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people.”
In this short talk, given in Tokyo at a forum on ‘The Computer-Managed Society’, Illich brought his historical perspective to the technological transformation of the human and more-than-human world.
THE CULTIVATION OF CONSPIRACY (1998)
“Even before my first Bremen semester could start, Barbara Duden got a house in the Ostertor Viertel, beyond the old moat, just down from the drug corner, the farmers market and the Turkish quarter.”
In his early 70s, Illich was awarded the peace prize of the city of Bremen and gave this beautiful speech looking back on the “thinkeries” he had created together with friends in different seasons of his life as an antidote to the “conditioned air” of academic institutions.
Where to next?
The English language editions of Illich’s books are in print and available to order as paperbacks or eBooks from Equinox Publishing, Sheffield, England.
A collection of otherwise unpublished material is hosted on the website of David Tinapple.
A major archive of Illich papers is held by Stiftung Convivial, Wiesbaden, Germany.
A good way to find your bearings in Illich’s work is to start with Ivan Illich in Conversation, the first of two books which grew out of his friendship with the Canadian broadcaster David Cayley.
Meanwhile, Cayley’s Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey places Illich’s body of work in its context and illuminates its ongoing relevance.
Thinking With Ivan Illich provides a platform for ongoing exploration of the questions he carried. They also publish the journal Conspiratio.
Illich’s legacy is evident in the work of those who have been shaped by his ideas, from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift to Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash’s Grassroots Postmodernism, Barbara Duden’s Disembodying Women to Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress.
What’s the story behind this site?
We are Dougald Hine and Anna Björkman, co-founders of a school called HOME, a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.
Dougald has been walking in the paths of Illich’s thought for over twenty years, becoming friends with many of his surviving co-conspirators, and publishing conversations with some of them in the pages of Dark Mountain.
When we met, Anna found that Illich’s critique resonated with her experience of working in the international development sector, while his centring of hospitality and conviviality was intuitively aligned with her own practice of taking down walls and gathering people around tables.
Thanks to a suggestion from our friend Ayşem Mert, we started talking about hosting a gathering here in Östervåla, Sweden, where our school is based on the weekend of Illich’s centenary – and we’re going to do that.
But the conversation soon turned to the idea that we could help support people elsewhere to meet others near them who would like to get together, to learn more about Illich and celebrate the ongoing stimulation and provocation offered by his work in a manner that the man himself might have appreciated.