He wrote a dissertation focusing on the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and would return to that subject in his later years.
In 1961, Illich founded the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC, or Intercultural Documentation Center) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, ostensibly a research center offering language courses to missionaries from North America and volunteers of the Alliance for Progress program[REF] initiated by John F. Kennedy.