# Editorial note It was in a modest apartment in Fiesole which over looks the city of Florence, nestled in the valley below that, in early June 2001, a few friends, a generation younger than Ivan Illich, were discussing, in his presence, what might consti tute the key words to his thought. Unsurprisingly, he did not have much to say. But as the conversation proceeded, it be came increasingly clear to us that a more sustained effort was needed to both see the building blocks and to uncover the foundations of his thought. It was in the context of that lon ger term project that I first heard the phrase ‘Thinking after Illich’ pronounced by Silja Samerski. She noted that the Ger man nach has the same two senses that ‘after’ has in English. Nach not only means positional or temporal succession, as in B which comes after A or tomorrow which follows today. It also means to follow in the footsteps of, to mimic the style of, to think in the wake of. The wake of a ship is formed when its hull cuts through the water. The turbulent waters that spread away from the ship in the shape of an inverted V circumscribe the calm waters of the wake. The concepts Illich forged are honed to razor-sharpness and anchored in enduring felt real ities. They cut cleanly through the muddle of confused cate gories and are immune to faddish scientific abstractions. An example or two may suffice. Illich argues that ‘transport’ is as different from ‘transit’ as cars and trains are from pedes trians and cyclists. To think that private cars are categorical ly different from public buses is to imagine that a difference in the method of financing a technology alters its capacity *Sajay Samuel*