Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. xi + 214, £37.99, hb.
reading of Illich’s work, even in its supposedly secular phase, as driven by an impassioned critique of a Church that he fundamentally adored. This is the Illich Code. For ultimately, it is argued, behind Illich’s denunciation of the various institutions – such as the school or the hospital – that (he asserts) plague modern society is a plea to return to the essential virtues of the pre-modern Church. In so far as teaching and instruction, labours of love incumbent on all of us, have been farmed out to professional educators and packaged as compulsory schooling for the young, and in so far as ‘hospitals [have] totally replaced hospitality’, the effect in each case is that ‘an institution excuse[s] Christians from the call to serve the stranger and the suffering’ (pp. –). In short, the problem with missionaries was less their sense of mission than the notion that theirs was a specialised task devolved to a privileged few from the developed world. This is an abdication of the Church’s message, rather than its fulfilment. And here, Illich believed he saw a centuries-old pattern. Everywhere he looked, he sensed that ‘the essential features of modernity were direct outgrowths of Christianity that had been distorted and disfigured into caricatures of Christian virtues and that accomplished the opposite of their original purposes’ (p. ). Illich is railing against a denial of the Incarnation, against the dehumanising effects of institutionalisation as it depersonalises ways of being and forms of interaction that should be fundamentally embodied, a matter of flesh and blood rather than statistics and measurements. Is this defence of Illich convincing? Not really, not least because ironically this book is throughout too much a history of Illich’s institutions and too little an account of Illich the man and the thinker. Whenever Illich leaves those institutions – whether on his periodic retreats, or when the CIDOC is finally closed down, for instance – Hartch falls silent. Or maybe it would be better to say that Hartch’s final championing of Illich as ‘perhaps the most trenchant theological critic of the West in the late twentieth century’ (p. ) is itself somewhat prophetic, in that it comes from almost nowhere, like a voice from the desert that is the dry detailing of bureaucratic power games. As such, Hartch’s book does not (yet) convince, but it provokes and inspires us to rediscover Illich’s life and work, to seek to understand it in new ways.