Jacques Ellul
Uncovering, behind every promise of efficiency, the freedom it confiscates, and searching as a believer for where that freedom can still find a place.
French · 1912 – 1994
A historian of law, professor at Bordeaux from the Liberation until 1980, he pursued two bodies of work in counterpoint: a critical sociology of technology and a Protestant theology shaped by and Karl Barth. A member of the Resistance, recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, he described in (1954), then (1977) and (1988), a technology grown autonomous, which expands of itself and substitutes an artificial milieu for the natural one. With his friend , he counts among the forerunners of political ecology in France, and in the 1970s campaigned to defend the Aquitaine coast. He called himself a Christian anarchist (, 1988).
Justification
In , distinguishes hope (espérance) from mere expectation (espoir). Expectation is the confidence that things will work out, that progress or technology will solve our ills: he holds it to be an illusion. Hope, by contrast, arises where there is nothing left to expect, in a time when God seems silent, and it translates into action and refusal: it sustains action without resting on a favourable forecast.
Hope in Time of Abandonment (1972)
Justification
declares himself an anarchist: all power corrupts, and the modern state, having become the instrument of technology, tends to absorb everything (). In , he reads the Bible as a constant critique of political power and argues that non-violent anarchism is the political stance closest to faith. He does not believe a stateless society will soon be realized: anarchy is a demand for contestation, not a programme.
The Political Illusion (1965) · Anarchy and Christianity (1988)
Justification
For , technique is not the machine: it is the ensemble of rational methods that seek, in every field, the maximal efficiency available, a logic that takes over the economy, administration, propaganda and the human being itself. It has become autonomous: it expands of itself, through the automatic choice of the most efficient means, and political, economic and moral institutions tend to conform to its demands, which reduces their capacity for control. He rejects the idea of a neutral technology in which everything would depend on use: its good and bad effects are inseparable. He does not preach the destruction of machines: he asks that we desacralize technology, the condition of a freedom that remains possible.
The Technological Society (1954) · The Technological System (1977) · The Technological Bluff (1988)
Justification
Converted to Protestantism in his youth, devoted half of his work to theology, in the line of Karl Barth: a God who reveals himself in the Word, not a God one proves. His faith nourishes his search for a freedom irreducible to the necessities of the system; his sociology does not require the reader to share it in order to recognize the diagnosis.
The Ethics of Freedom (1973-1984) · What I Believe (1987)
Justification
Reading Genesis, refuses to find in it a mandate for exploitation: man is called to represent God within creation, and so to exercise his "dominion" as God exercises it, not for power but "as the representative of God's love". Adam does not subdue the animals, he names them. His sociology gives the other side: in seeking to master nature, man has shut himself into a technical milieu more constraining than the one he was fleeing, the .
"Le rapport de l'homme à la création selon la Bible" (Man's relation to creation according to the Bible) · The Technological System (1977), part I
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- ContinuesKierkegaardEllul counted Kierkegaard among his masters: he owes him dialectical thinking, the primacy of the individual before God against the crowd, and distrust of an established Christendom.Read
- ReinterpretsMarxA reader of Marx from his youth and for many years a teacher of his thought, Ellul keeps his method, looking for the determining factor of a society, but shifts it: in the twentieth century, it is no longer capital, i…Read
- ContinuesCharbonneauFriends since their youth in Bordeaux, Charbonneau and Ellul co-wrote in 1935 "Directives for a Personalist Manifesto", which already denounced the grip of technology.Read