In 1971, priest, theologian, and philosopher Ivan Illich wrote Deschooling Society, a plea to liberate education from schooling and to separate schooling from the state. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Ivan Illich Fifty Years Later looks at the theological roots of Illich’s thought and the intellectual and ideological strands that contributed to his ideas. Guided by the central question of how Illich reached the point of writing Deschooling Society, the book sheds light on how Illich produced a critique of schooling that can be defined by its eclecticism. Bruno-Jofré and Igelmo Zaldívar explore how this controversial book was framed by Illich’s early neo-scholastic and anti-modern foundation, his discovery of St. Thomas through Jacques Maritain, and the existential turning points that influenced his public life and intellectual direction in moving from a critique of the Church as institution to a critique of schooling. Drawing from the interpretative theories of Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck, and William H. Sewell and from concepts such as educationalization, transnationality, and configuration, among other heuristic tools, the authors provide an original and cross-disciplinary analysis of Deschooling Society and its place in Illich’s journey.

Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservative Gandhian ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice and rendering the pursuit of self-sacrifice legible as the practice of an exclusionary varnashramadharma. At a considerable remove from Gandhi’s religious conservatism, successive generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate Gandhian finitude from Gandhi’s own exclusions. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies, and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.