A new politics on three axes

I came across this account of Ivan Illich’s idea on a different kind of politics in “Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey” by David Cayley. Illich invokes three axes that we should consider when taking difficult political decisions—for example, on how we should care for the sick, run the economy, regulate AI, or help children learn. At the moment we make decisions on only one axis. Illich’s proposal makes much more sense to me than, for example, taking decisions on the grounds of what would maximise “happiness” however measured rather than GDP. In an essay from the later 1970s called “Three Dimensions of Public Choice,” which builds on his work in Tools for Conviviality, Illich suggests than even a rudimentary projection of the field of political decision ought to mark out not one but three dimensions. Imagining these dimensions as Cartesian coordinates, Illich speaks of x-, y-, and z-axes. The first, or x-axis, would be the conventional one covering “issues related to social…

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