Tools for Conviviality is a 1973 book by Ivan Illich exploring the history of technology and tools. Illich proposes the idea of a 'convivial tool', one which allows its user to exercise their human autonomy and creativity. He draws a contrast between these convivial tools, which extend human capability, and the tools of industrial society, which have gone beyond that original goal and have become destructive to human autonomy and ingenuity.[1] The book introduced Illich's concept of 'conviviality' and of a 'radical monopoly', ideas which have become influential to the discourse around degrowth[2] and appropriate technology.[3]
Concepts
editTwo watersheds
editIllich identifies two thresholds in the development of any tool, which he calls the "two watersheds". New knowledge at the 'first watershed' has great benefits until later at the 'second watershed' the benefits are used to justify manipulation by a professional elite.[1]: 15-16 He uses the example of modern medicine to illustrate his point, identifying the first watershed as occurring around 1913, the point at which a patient visiting a doctor had, for the first time, a better than 50% chance of receiving an effective treatment.[1]: 9 The second watershed, crossed in the middle of the 20th century, is defined by the harm done by the medical system itself[4] in the form of increasing iatrogenesis, medicalization, professionalization of the medical elites, and delegitimization of traditional providers of medical care.
Conviviality
editInfluenced by various meanings of the word 'convivial' and its cognates in Spanish and French, Illich uses the word to describe "responsibly limited tools"[1]: 7 , drawing a contrast with the tools of industrial society:
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 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.[1]: 20
His definition of 'tools' is broad and "include[s] among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce “education”, “health”, “knowledge”, or “decisions”"[1]: 30-31 . He argues that all such tools can become manipulative to their users when 'means' are overtaken by 'ends' - when tools become complicated to the point that humans are used by them rather than using them.[5]
Radical monopoly
editTools for Conviviality also introduced Illich's idea of a 'radical monopoly', which describes a technology or service which becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product. His initial example is the effect of cars on societies, where the car itself shaped cities by its needs, so much so that people without cars become excluded from participation in cities.
Reception
editIllich's vision of tools that would be developed and maintained by a community of users also had a significant influence on the first developers of the personal computer, notably Lee Felsenstein.[6]
Published two years after his previous book Deschooling Society
The book explores the history of technology and argues that the tools of industrial society which were once "means" to an end decided on by the user of the tool have transformed into "ends" in and of themselves. He proposes the idea of a "convivial tool" which is the opposite of this industrial model.
Old Article
editTools for Conviviality is a 1973 book by Ivan Illich about the proper use of technology. It was . In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. He wrote that "[e]lite professional groups ... have come to exert a 'radical monopoly' on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a 'war on subsistence' that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how. The result of much economic development is very often not human flourishing but 'modernized poverty', dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts." Illich proposed that we should "invert the present deep structure of tools" in order to "give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency."
The idea of the 'radical monopoly' is also applied to the effects of cars on the urban form, as "speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce." Ivan Illich contributes to a radical critique of modern urbanism: "this monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man's innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel."
Tools for Conviviality attracted worldwide attention. A résumé of it was published by French social philosopher André Gorz in Les Temps Modernes, under the title "Freeing the Future".[citation needed] The book's vision of tools that would be developed and maintained by a community of users had a significant influence on the first developers of the personal computer, notably Lee Felsenstein.
Cited in
editResearch On Degrowth - 2018
editIllich (113) and Ellul agree that economic growth results from the inversion of tools from means into ends but differ in their responses. Illich advocated technologies that users can control, dismantle, repair, or reconstitute, conceptualized as spaces and tools for conviviality. Think of a bicycle compared to a nuclear power plant. Similarly, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (114) argued for alternative trajectories of technology appropriation that encompass small-scale, decentralized, environmentally sound, and locally autonomous applications.
Using a “matrix of convivial technology” based on five dimensions (relatedness, accessibility, adaptability, bio-interaction, and appropriateness), Vetter (115) ethnographically evaluates the practices of several degrowth-related groups who produce, develop, or adapt different technologies. Grunwald (116) applies a technology assessment to evaluate green technologies that are often promoted in the name of growth, and considers the position of those who expect to overcome ecological crises merely by technological progress morally hazardous, because they ignore the ambivalences of technology and its unavoidable, unintended side effects.
Lizarralde & Tyl (117) develop a practical, convivial approach for directly engaging designers, engineers, and other stakeholders in the development of new products and services. They introduce guidelines for integrating conviviality criteria into the design process with attention to relationships between the life-cycle stages of a product or service and the five main threats to conviviality identified by Illich (113). Criteria and constraints outlined in these recommendations prioritize users’ autonomy and creativity, local production, and the use of simple techniques. The aim of this design for conviviality approach is to enable designers and engineers to embrace complex design processes in the transition toward a degrowth society and to cocreate such a society with stakeholders (117).
Tools for degrowth? - 2016
editThis article revisits Ivan Illich's call for limiting the use of tools and elaborates its implications for degrowth. Illich analyzed growth not as an economic ideology, but - more radically - as the result of a historically unique mindset that turns tools from means into ends. Unlike many advocates of degrowth, he did not propose alternative modes of resource consumption and distribution, but instead tried to defend vernacular subsistence and conviviality against the industrialized satisfaction of needs. Any meaningful limit to growth, Illich insisted, has to be rooted in the defense of a sphere beyond production and consumption. Yet, as he himself realized, in an advanced technological society this distinction between autonomous action and heteronomous need satisfaction is blurred. Modern tools – and especially the computer - not only paralyze innate capabilities, but shape self-perception and subjectivities so as to increase dependencies on technological systems. On the basis of Illich's works, this article will argue first that degrowth requires limits to material as well as immaterial technologies, including political management and professional services; second that these limits have to be based on the appropriate balance between vernacular subsistence and engineered instrumentalities: and, third, that political decisions demand the cultivation of a critical awareness of the symbolic power of modern technologies.
Degrowth: a vocabulary - 2014
edit"Autonomy instead requires convivial tools, i.e. tools which are understandable, manageable and controllable by their users."
The Atlantic - 2012
editWith Tools for Conviviality (1973), Illich extended his analysis of education to a broader critique of the technologies of Western capitalism. The major inflection point in the history of technology, he asserts, is when, in the life of each tool or system, the means overtake the ends. "Tools can rule men sooner than they expect; the plow makes man the lord of the garden but also the refugee from the dust bowl." Often this effect is accompanied by the rise in power of a managerial class of experts; Illich saw technocracy as a step toward fascism. Tools for Conviviality points out the ways in which a helpful tool can evolve into a destructive one, and offers suggestions for how communities can escape the trap.
So what makes a tool "convivial?" For Illich, "tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user." That is, convivial technologies are accessible, flexible, and noncoercive. Many tools are neutral, but some promote conviviality and some choke it off. Hand tools, for Illich, are neutral. Illich offers the telephone as an example of a tool that is "structurally convivial" (remember, this is in the days of the ubiquitous public pay phone): anyone who can afford a coin can use it to say whatever they want. "The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with -- or protect -- the privacy of their exchange."
A "manipulatory" tool, on the other hand, blocks off other choices. The automobile and the highway system it spawned are, for Illich, prime examples of this process. Licensure systems that devalue people who have not received them, such as compulsory schooling, are another example. But these kinds of tools, that is, large-scale industrial production, would not be prohibited in a convivial society. "What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-realization."
To foster convivial tools, Illich proposes a program of research with "two major tasks: to provide guidelines for detecting the incipient stages of murderous logic in a tool; and to devise tools and tool systems that optimize the balance of life, thereby maximizing liberty for all." He also suggests that pioneers of a convivial society work through the legal and political systems and reclaim them for justice. Change is possible, Illich argues. There are decision points. We cannot abdicate our right to self-determination, and to decide how far is far enough. "The crisis I have described," says Illich, "confronts people with a choice between convivial tools and being crushed by machines."
NY Times - 1973
editIt is not a particular political system or ideology that he focuses upon; nor is he concerned with any particular “ruling class” that “owns” the means of production or with any singularly unsavory na tion‐state. He's fascinated instead with what he calls the “industrial mode of production” itself, the “deep structure of tools.”
Tools? It Is an odd subject, certainly, one that could not for long have interested Marx, but Illich finds in the world of bicycles and radios, tape recorders and stethoscopes, automobiles and autoclaves a fascinating dialectic of tools. On the one hand are those tools Illich considers good, tools which are “individually accessible,” which help people, as individuals and together, create and grow. These “convivial” tools — like libraries, printing presses and the Oxford English Dictionary, toothbrushes and birth‐control pills, the ancient system of canals in Thailand, telephones, or the traditions of the Mexican marketplace—are devices which at their best are simple and cheap, open for all to enjoy, impossible really to hoard. Such tools “support the meaningful and responsible needs of fully awake people” and “enable the layman to shape his immediate impinging upon the freedom of other.”
“Certain tools,” though, according to lllich, “are destructive no matter who owns them, whether it be the Mafia, stock holders, a foreign company, the state, or even a workers' commune. Networks of multilane highway's, strip mines, or compulsory school systems are such tools. Destructive tools must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence, exploitation, or impotence.” These tools, which he variously (and not very precisely or satisfactorily) calls “hyperindustrial,” or “overefficient,” or simply “industrial,” appear to Illich to have grown out of man's control, first to become his master, as he puts it, then his executioner. In their development they have passed through their first, optimum range (“within which machines are used to extend human capability”) and entered into another (“the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human function.”) Hyper industrial tools “by their very nature restrict to a very few the liberty to use them in an autonomous way.”
Add
editReferences
edit- ^ a b c d e f Illich, Ivan (1973). Tools for conviviality. London: Calder and Boyars. ISBN 0-7145-0973-6. OCLC 828971.
- ^ Samerski, Silja (2016). "Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich's critique of technology revisited". Degrowth. Journal of Cleaner Production. Retrieved 13 August 2025.
- ^ Mitcham, Carl (Fall 2023). "Tools for Conviviality: Argument, Insight, Influence" (PDF). Thinking With Ivan Illich. Conspiratio. Retrieved 13 August 2025.
- ^ Cayley, David (1 April 2020). "Questions About the Current Pandemic from the Point of View of Ivan Illich". Wild Culture. Retrieved 12 August 2025.
- ^ Samerski, Silja (2016). "Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich's critique of technology revisited". Degrowth. Journal of Cleaner Production. Retrieved 22 August 2025.
- ^ Felsenstein, Lee (1974). "Tom Swift Lives". People's Computer Company.