This review, in an expanded form, is part of Trent Schroyer, Beyond Western Economics: Remembering other Economic Cultures (London: Routledge, 2009 forthcoming).

1 Illich defines `vernacular' as an old term that can be used `to denote autonomous non-market related actions through which people satisfy everyday needs . . . (in a way) that they give specific shape', See Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (Boston, MA: Marion Boyers, 1981), p. 38. In this sense the oldest forms of penance tended to be public; see Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 68 ff.

2 Gerhard Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004).

3 Hans von Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).

4 Illich cites Theodor Litt, Les Corps celestes dans l'univers de saint Thomas d'Aguin (Paris: Lowen, 1963) to document the elimination of angels as the instrumentalis for dealing with heavenly bodies by Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson. Illich here is trying to show that Aquinas ultimately held a radical contingency view despite his theology also reinforcing that of the Franciscans (Bonaventure, Duns Scotus and Francis) whose views stressed God's freedom and more directly created the voluntarism.

5 Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Disdascalicon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

6 Here Illich continues to assume Aquinas' idea of revelation as a `special illumination of the intellect in which the imaginative interpretation of external signs, the recognition of these signs as revelatory, and the inner transformations of the soul were all one single indivisible occurrence'. See John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds) Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5.

7 See Illich, Shadow Work, especially ch. 3, `The War Against Subsistence' and a later Illich-inspired collection edited by Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary (London: Zed Books, 1992), which contains the beginnings of this `history of scarcity' project. Or Veronika Bennhodt-Thomsen and Maria Mies, The Subsistence Perspective (London: Zed Books, 1999) also picks up the same subsistence perspective logic and cites Illich.

8 See Illich, Shadow Work , ch. 1.

9 See Trent Schroyer and Thomas Golodik (eds) Creating a Sustainable World: Past Experiences, Future Struggles (New York, Apex Press, 2006) for a survey of these issues consistent with Illich's views.

Review essay: The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich,as told to David Cayley,foreword by Charles Taylor (Toronto: Anansi Press,2004),252 pp

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