Jacques Ellul

French philosopher Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a sociologist, legal scholar, and lay Protestant theologian. As a young man in the 1930s, he was influenced by the philosophy of Marx. However his encounters with Communists, and the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, led to his disenchantment with Marxism. He did retain, nevertheless, Marx's dialectical method. Ellul was also converted to Christianity in the 1930s. This faith became "the centre of my life" (Ellul, 1981, p. 14). The Bible and spirituality formed one pole of Ellul's dialectical thought, as Marx and material concerns formed the other. During World War II, Ellul was fired from his university post for criticizing the Vichy government which collaborated with the Nazi occupation. He moved to a remote farm, joined the French Resistance, and helped Jews escape the Nazi regime. After the war, he became Deputy Mayor of Boudreaux. He and his Resistance friends had high hopes for complete social reform but his experience in government convinced him that "the politician is powerless against government bureaucracy" (Ellul, 1981, p. 23).

Ellul spent the rest of his working life as a professor of law and history at the University of Bordeaux. He was active in both French politics and in the French Protestant church. He fought for preserving the ecology of the Atlantic coastline against excessive development, endorsing the motto "Think globally, act locally" (Ellul, 1981). He also founded a project to work with delinquent youth. He wrote forty three books and many articles. Ellul is best known in this country as a critic of technology and is often criticized, perhaps unfairly, as a technological determinist and pessimist. His oft-reprinted article "The Technological Order" appeared in the United States in 1963 (Ellul 196371985a) and brought his first American recognition. This publication was followed by The Technological Society (Ellul, 1964) and Propaganda (Ellul, 1965) (dates are of American publication). The Technological Society was first published in France in 1954 under the title of La Technique, or The Wager of the Century. The wager was that technique could completely control the environment, produce affluence and happiness, and solve the problems of the world. This wager was common in the routine pronouncements of scientists and technicians, but Ellul found grounds for doubt. Ellul continued his theme of technique as a wager through two more books: The Technological System (Ellul, 1980) and The Technological Bluff (Ellul, 1990). His experience of trying to protect the environment convinced Ellul that the techniques in different parts of society had coalesced into a system (see Ellul, 1980, 1981). This system produced many absurdities, experienced failures and breakdowns, and lacked sensitivity to feedback. As a result, a discourse defending technique had grown up, which Ellul, in 1990, characterized as a gigantic bluff. Ellul also wrote many books explicitly from a Protestant Christian perspective, including The Ethics of Freedom (Ellul, 1976), and The Subversion of Christianity (Ellul, 1986). He combined religious and sociological strands in his most explicit treatment of media, The Humiliation of the Word (Ellul, ...