Jacques Ellul

"Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means." — The Technological Society (1954)

Why he matters

Ellul makes one decisive conceptual move and almost every later serious critique of technological civilization depends on it. The move is to refuse the word technology and to insist instead on la technique — the total complex of rational, efficiency-oriented methods that organizes modern life, of which machines are only the most visible part. Bureaucracy is technique. Propaganda is technique. Marketing is technique. Scientific management of labor is technique. Modern medicine, modern warfare, modern education, modern political administration are all forms of technique. Once you see this, the question “is technology good or bad?” becomes obviously the wrong question, and the real question becomes: what happens to a civilization in which efficiency itself has become sacred?

He is also the rare twentieth-century figure whose sociology and theology are not two parallel careers but a single argument with two registers.

Who he was

Ellul was born in Bordeaux in 1912 and spent most of his life there, teaching law and the history of institutions at the university while writing prolifically across sociology, theology, biblical exegesis, and social criticism. He was a leader in the French Resistance during the war and a lifelong active member of the Reformed Church. He published more than fifty books, refused most of the professional appointments that would have raised his profile in Paris, and died in 1994. His work falls into two interwoven streams: a sociological diagnosis of modern civilization (The Technological Society, Propaganda, The Political Illusion) and a biblical-theological countervision (The Presence of the Kingdom, The Ethics of Freedom, The Subversion of Christianity).

The position

Ellul’s argument has three moves.

First, technique is autonomous. The defining feature of modern technique is not its power but its dynamic of self-augmentation: every technical solution generates new technical problems that require new technical solutions, and the system as a whole moves according to its own logic regardless of any individual or institutional intention. Politicians do not control it. Corporations do not control it. Engineers do not control it. They serve it.

Second, technique sacralizes itself. A civilization that organizes itself around efficiency stops asking what efficiency is for. The means become ends. Categories that were once theological — necessity, salvation, peace, security — get redistributed to the technical order. Ellul’s recurring word for this is sacred. Modern people experience technique with the kind of awe and demand that pre-modern people experienced toward the holy, and they react with the kind of rage to technical failure that pre-modern people reserved for blasphemy.

Third, the Christian response is freedom, not refusal. Ellul is consistently misread as a Luddite. He is not. His positive program is desacralization: the refusal to treat technical necessity as a final authority, the cultivation of practices that interrupt the totalizing logic of technique, the witness of communities that live as if the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of efficiency, were the deepest fact. The Presence of the Kingdom and the later ethical writings are not romantic withdrawal. They are an argument that Christian freedom is the only force that can name the sacred quality of technique without being captured by it.

Where he sits on the maps

On preserve-limits versus accelerate-transformation, Ellul is well to the limits side — but the framing is itself one he would resist, because the question of “how fast to accelerate” assumes a kind of choice that he thinks moderns no longer have. The technical order, he would say, is not waiting for our permission. The Christian task is not to lobby for slower acceleration but to live the freedom that refuses the system’s claim to be ultimate.

On idolatry concern, he is at the top of the canon. Technique-as-idol is, for Ellul, the defining religious situation of the modern West.

The best case against him

The standard critique of Ellul is that he is too pessimistic, too sweeping, and too deterministic — that he treats technique as an almost personal agent and leaves no room for the differentiated, reformable practices that actually constitute working technological societies. There is real force to this. The Technological Society is exhausting to read in part because it allows no exception; almost every chapter ends in the closing of a trap.

But the steelman of Ellul is that this is a deliberate rhetorical choice, not a metaphysical claim. He is trying to break the reader’s confidence that “we just need to use technology well” is a sufficient response, because in his diagnosis the we has already been reorganized by the very thing it imagines itself using. The pessimism is the argument. Whether one accepts the argument or not, the Christian conversation about technology is sharper after Ellul than before, and the figures who try to soften him often end up sounding evasive in ways he never does.

Primary texts

• The Technological Society (originally La technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, 1954; English translation Vintage, 1964).
• Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962; English translation 1965).
• The Presence of the Kingdom (1948; English translations 1951, 1989).
• The Subversion of Christianity (1984; English translation Eerdmans, 1986).
• The Technological Bluff (1988; English translation Eerdmans, 1990).

Secondary sources

• David W. Gill, ed., Understanding Jacques Ellul (Cascade, 2008).
• Andrew Goddard, Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul (Paternoster, 2002).
• Patrick Troude-Chastenet, conversations and overviews of Ellul’s thought.
• Robin Gill, reassessments of The Presence of the Kingdom.

Related thinkers

• Guardini — Catholic parallel; the diagnostic instinct overlaps, Ellul’s sociology is sharper, Guardini’s pastoral tone is gentler.
• Lewis — Protestant near-contemporary, complementary anthropological register to Ellul’s sociological one.
• Illich — Catholic kindred spirit who supplies an alternative vocabulary (conviviality, radical monopoly) for the same range of concerns.
• Kingsnorth — contemporary Orthodox heir; “the Machine” is, in many respects, la technique in a post-internet ecological register.
• Francis — Catholic institutional inheritor; the technocratic paradigm critique is recognizably Ellulian in shape, though softened in tone.