Gender Book

An attempt (amazingly successful, I think) to critique the entire modern system of human relations without employing concepts that presume such relations. Only a medievalist who feels marooned in the contemporary era would conceive such a project, or have any hope of bringing it off. He works his huge bibliography into the text in the form of super-footnotes, that you read alternately with the text, itself. He says this is a takeoff from the way they did it back in the old days, by which he means the 13th century.
. . . . The book focuses on the peculiarity of scarcity as a central issue/influence in forming the "economy". Asserts that: 1)previous to this society/global civilization, there was no such thing as an "economy". 2) The relations between men and women in this culture are unprecedented in annihilating "gendered" differences in all aspects of life, which existed in all previous societies 3)that sexism and the oppression of women is an unavoidable consequence of the denial of "gendered" difference 4) so many other ideas, all really thought-provoking even if you don't accept them, that I'll stop here. . . . Illich draws on a background in early medieval European history, huge erudition, and privileged access to a broad range of brilliant people's conversation, and a humongous reading background, particularly people around Karl Polanyi, who produced Trade and Market in the Early Empires. In addition to his own knowledge of classical and medieval society, Polanyi's work is a major prop of his thesis. I've thumbed through Polanyi's book, and it does seem to back up Illich.