Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

'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 the 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.' The conviviality for which noted social philosopher Ivan Illich is arguing is one in which the individual's personal energies are under direct personal control and in which the use of tools is responsibly limited. A work of seminal importance, this book claims our attention for the urgency of its appeal, the stunning clarity of its logic and the overwhelmingly human note that it sounds. 'Shrewd, open and passionate' The Guardian. Book jacket.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments(p. vii)
• Introduction(p. ix)
• I Two Watersheds(p. 1)
• II Convivial Reconstruction(p. 10)
• III The Multiple Balance(p. 46)
• 1 Biological Degradation
• 2 Radical Monopoly
• 3 Over programming
• 4 Polarization
• 5 Obsolescence
• 6 Frustration
• IV Recovery(p. 84)
• 1 The Demythologization of Science
• 2 The Rediscovery of Language
• 3 The Recovery of Legal Procedure
• V Political Inversion(p. 100)
• 1 Myths and Majorities
• 2 From Breakdown to Chaos
• 3 Insight into Crisis
• 4 Sudden Change

Extracto provisto por Syndetics

CONVIVIAL RECONSTRUCTION The symptoms of accelerated crisis are widely recognized. Multiple attempts have been made to explain them. I believe that this crisis is rooted in a major twofold experiment which has failed, and I claim that the resolution of the crisis begins with a recognition of the failure. For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not "work" and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools. The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person's range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that "work" for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves. Excerpted from Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna in 1926, and became a parish priest in New York in 1951. He was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico in 1956, and in 1961 he founded CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentation) at Cuernavaca in Mexico where he developed many of the ideas in his books. He is the author of Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Disabling Professions, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. He died in 2002.