Jacques Ellul

Based on Wikipedia: Jacques Ellul

One summer afternoon in 1929, a seventeen-year-old boy sat alone in a house in Blanquefort, a small commune just north of Bordeaux. He was translating Goethe's Faust from German—the story of a scholar who trades his soul to the devil for knowledge and worldly pleasure. Suddenly, without warning, without seeing or hearing anything, the boy knew he was in the presence of something overwhelming. It entered the very center of his being. Terrified, he jumped on a bicycle and fled.

That boy was Jacques Ellul, and he would spend the next sixty-five years wrestling with what he'd encountered. He concluded it was God. But unlike most people who have religious experiences, Ellul didn't become a comfortable believer. He became one of the twentieth century's most unsettling prophets—a man who saw that modern humanity had found something else to worship, something far more seductive than any golden calf: technology itself.

The Making of a Contrarian

Ellul was born in Bordeaux on January 6, 1912, into a household that was, in miniature, a collision of cultures. His mother was a French-Portuguese Protestant. His father, born in Malta to an Italian-Maltese father and a Serbian mother, had started as an Eastern Orthodox Christian before becoming what Ellul called a "Voltairian deist"—essentially, someone who believed in a distant clockmaker God who wound up the universe and then stepped back.

The young Jacques wanted to be a naval officer. His father made him study law instead.

This wasn't the last time Ellul would find himself pushed in directions he didn't choose. But something remarkable happened along the way: he discovered that the detours contained treasures. Studying law led him to economics, which led him to a lecture course where he first encountered the ideas of Karl Marx. Around the same time, he stumbled upon the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, who'd written a century earlier about the impossibility of truly being a Christian in a society that claimed to be Christian.

Marx and Kierkegaard became the twin poles of Ellul's thinking. He read both of them completely—every book, every essay, every fragment. This is more impressive than it sounds. Marx alone left behind thousands of pages of dense economic and philosophical argument. Kierkegaard wrote in a deliberately difficult, indirect style, using pseudonyms and paradoxes. To master both required a mind willing to hold contradictions in tension.

And that's exactly what Ellul did. He never tried to synthesize Marx and Kierkegaard into some comfortable middle ground. He let them argue with each other, let the friction generate light.

The Resistance and the Righteous

When World War II broke out, Ellul was teaching at the University of Bordeaux. France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, and the country was divided—the north under direct German occupation, the south under the puppet Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis.

Ellul joined the French Resistance.

For many intellectuals, resistance was a matter of writing pamphlets or attending secret meetings. For Ellul, it meant something more dangerous: helping Jews escape the Holocaust. In 2001, seven years after his death, the Israeli memorial organization Yad Vashem awarded him the title "Righteous Among the Nations"—an honor reserved for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Nazi genocide.

This wasn't an abstract moral stance for Ellul. It was a concrete choice, made again and again, knowing that discovery meant arrest, torture, and death. When you understand this about him, his later writings about technique and technology take on a different weight. He wasn't a comfortable academic warning about theoretical dangers. He had seen where systems of efficiency and control could lead. He had watched ordinary bureaucrats become accomplices to murder by simply following procedures.

What Is Technique?

After the war, Ellul returned to teaching and began the work that would make him famous—or infamous, depending on whom you asked. In 1954, he published La Technique: L'enjeu du siècle, which appeared in English a decade later as The Technological Society. The title of the French original is revealing: it translates literally as "The Stake of the Century." This wasn't an academic treatise. This was a warning.

But here's where Ellul's thinking gets subtle, and where many people misunderstand him. When he wrote about "technique," he wasn't just talking about machines or gadgets or computers. He meant something broader and more insidious.

Technique, in Ellul's sense, is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. It's the mindset that asks, for every human endeavor: "What is the most efficient way to do this?" It's the transformation of means into ends—where how we do something becomes more important than why we do it or whether we should do it at all.

Consider a simple example. A hospital's purpose is to heal sick people. But once you start measuring efficiency—how many patients can we process per hour? how can we reduce average length of stay? how do we maximize billing?—the measurements start to drive behavior. Doctors spend more time on paperwork than patients. Nurses become data entry clerks. The technique of hospital management becomes more important than the actual healing of human beings.

This isn't a conspiracy. No one decided to make hospitals worse. The logic of technique simply took over, step by step, each step rational and defensible, until the whole system served the technique rather than the humans it was supposed to help.

The Seven Characteristics of Technique

Ellul identified seven features that make modern technique different from the simple tools humans have always used.

First, rationality. Every process gets broken down into logical steps, measured, optimized. This sounds good—who's against rationality?—but it squeezes out everything that can't be measured. How do you quantify wisdom? Compassion? The value of an afternoon spent doing nothing with a friend?

Second, artificiality. Technique creates an artificial environment that "eliminates or subordinates the natural world." We live increasingly in built spaces, lit by electric lights, breathing filtered air, interacting through screens. The natural rhythms of day and night, season and weather, become background noise to be engineered away.

Third, automatism of technical choice. When a more efficient method exists, we don't really choose to adopt it. The choice makes itself. What executive can refuse a technology that cuts costs by 30%? What country can decline weapons that its rivals are developing? The technique spreads automatically, like a virus.

Fourth, self-augmentation. Technique grows on its own, each advancement creating the conditions for further advancement. The invention of the transistor made computers possible, which made the internet possible, which made smartphones possible, which made social media possible, which made algorithmic content recommendation possible. Each step followed inevitably from the last.

Fifth, monism. Technique is indivisible. You can't adopt some techniques while rejecting others. The logic of efficiency is totalizing. Once you've optimized your factory, you need to optimize your supply chain. Once you've optimized your supply chain, you need to optimize your workforce. Once you've optimized your workforce, you need to optimize their education, their health, their very thoughts.

Sixth, universalism. Technique knows no borders, respects no cultures. The same algorithms drive social media in Kansas and Karachi. The same management theories are taught in business schools from São Paulo to Singapore. Local traditions, indigenous knowledge, particular ways of being human—all become obstacles to be overcome.

Seventh, and most troubling: autonomy. Technique is no longer a tool that humans use. It has become the environment within which humans exist. Instead of technology serving humanity, "human beings have to adapt to it, and accept total change."

The New Sacred

Here's where Ellul's analysis takes an unexpected turn. As a Christian theologian, he was deeply interested in how humans relate to the sacred—to that which inspires both hope and fear, both fascination and dread.

For most of human history, nature played this role. The forces of weather and season, of fertility and death, were overwhelming powers upon which human survival depended. People worshipped rivers and mountains, prayed for rain, made sacrifices to appease forces they couldn't control.

Then came the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Nature was demystified, explained by science, conquered by engineering. But the human need for the sacred didn't disappear. It simply migrated.

We now worship technique.

Think about how we talk about technology. We speak of its "power" with awe. We have "faith" that it will solve our problems—climate change, disease, poverty, loneliness. We are "fascinated" by the latest gadgets while also feeling a vague "dread" about artificial intelligence or genetic engineering. We have created a priestly class of technologists and disruptors whose pronouncements we await with anxious attention.

When something goes wrong, when a plane crashes or a bridge collapses, our response is telling. We don't question technique itself. We assume there was a flaw in the execution—human error, insufficient engineering, inadequate safety protocols. The solution is always more technique, better technique, purer technique. This is how believers respond to failures of faith: not by questioning the faith, but by seeking to purify it.

The Education of the Efficient

Ellul saw the fingerprints of technique everywhere, but he was particularly concerned about education. Watch, he said, how we increasingly question the value of learning things that don't produce immediate economic results.

Why study ancient languages? What's the point of reading Homer or Dante? How does knowing history help you get a job?

These questions, which seem so practical and sensible, reveal how deeply technique has colonized our thinking. Education becomes training. The goal is to produce workers who can function within the technical system—who can work with computers, follow procedures, optimize processes. The humanities, which might teach you to question the system itself, become luxuries we can no longer afford.

The focus in schools is to prepare young people to enter the world of information, to be able to work with computers but knowing only their reasoning, their language, their combinations, and the connections between them. This movement is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience.

"And also that of conscience." That last phrase is the knife. It's not just that we're teaching students to use computers instead of reading Plato. It's that we're reshaping their very capacity for moral reasoning, training them to think in the logical, procedural, value-neutral mode that technique requires.

The Problem with God-Is-Dead Theology

In the 1960s, a movement arose in Protestant theology called "death of God" theology. Thinkers like Harvey Cox argued that the traditional Christian conception of God was outdated, a relic of primitive consciousness that modern, civilized people had outgrown. They wanted to keep the ethical teachings of Jesus while discarding the supernatural claims.

You might think Ellul, the Christian anarchist who criticized church authority, would have sympathized. He didn't. He attacked this movement ferociously.

His objection wasn't that they were being insufficiently orthodox. It was that they were being insufficiently honest about human nature. The death-of-God theologians assumed that once you removed traditional religion, people would become rational, ethical beings. They would follow Jesus's moral teachings because those teachings were wise, not because of any fear of God or hope of heaven.

Ellul thought this was dangerously naive. Humans, he argued, are incurably religious. They will worship something. If they don't worship the God of Abraham, they'll worship idols—rulers, nations, ideologies, and most seductively in the modern age, technology itself.

The ultimate purpose of the whole death-of-God system is to justify a certain kind of behavior on the part of Christians in relation to society—a kind of behavior that is dictated by conformism to the modern world. So a justificatory formula is manufactured; and alas, it often turns out that theology merely amounts to a justification of the behavior of pretend-Christians.

This is a brutal accusation. Ellul is saying that death-of-God theology isn't really theology at all. It's a rationalization—a way for people who want to go along with the technical society to pretend they're still Christian while abandoning everything that might put them at odds with the prevailing order.

The God Who Escapes

Against the domesticated deity of liberal theology and the rule-bound God of fundamentalism, Ellul proposed something more disturbing: a God who refuses to be managed.

In the Bible, we find a God who escapes us totally, whom we absolutely cannot influence, or dominate, much less punish; a God who reveals Himself when He wants to reveal Himself, a God who is very often in a place where He is not expected, a God who is truly beyond our grasp. Thus, the human religious feeling is not at all satisfied by this situation... God descends to humanity and joins us where we are.

This passage reveals why Ellul found technique so threatening. Technique is about control. It promises a world where everything can be predicted, measured, optimized, managed. Nothing escapes. Every variable can be accounted for.

But the God Ellul encountered in that house in Blanquefort was precisely what cannot be accounted for—a presence that burst in unbidden, that couldn't be predicted or controlled, that filled him with terror and fled from as fast as his bicycle would carry him. This God is the opposite of technique. This God is freedom itself.

Christian Anarchism and the Grass Roots

Given Ellul's suspicion of technique and institutions, it's not surprising that he became a Christian anarchist. But his anarchism wasn't about throwing bombs or overthrowing governments. It was about building alternatives from the ground up.

He found his model in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the nineteenth-century French philosopher who famously declared that "property is theft." Proudhon envisioned a society organized not by states or corporations but by voluntary federations of workers' cooperatives. The key was to create new institutions from the grass roots level—to build the new world within the shell of the old.

Ellul also believed that Jesus himself was not merely a socialist but an anarchist. This is a provocative claim that most Christian theologians would reject. But Ellul argued that Jesus's kingdom was not of this world precisely because it refused the logic of worldly power—the logic of domination, hierarchy, and technique. "Anarchism," he wrote, "is the fullest and most serious form of socialism."

What would this look like in practice? Ellul imagined a gradual transformation—"a Proudhonian socialism... by transforming the press, the media, and the economic structures... by means of a federative cooperative approach." He wasn't calling for revolution. He was calling for patient, persistent construction of alternatives to the technical society.

The Scandal of Universal Salvation

Late in his career, Ellul dropped what many considered a theological bombshell. In his book What I Believe, he declared himself a Christian Universalist—someone who believes that all people, from the beginning of time, are saved by God through Jesus Christ.

This shocked his readers. Universalism—the belief that everyone eventually goes to heaven, that hell is empty—is traditionally associated with liberal theology, with people who've softened the hard edges of Christian doctrine. But Ellul wasn't a liberal. He had no sympathy for sentimental ideas about human goodness.

His universalism came from a different place entirely. It came from his extreme emphasis on God's freedom and sovereignty. If God is truly free, truly transcendent, truly beyond our control, then who are we to say whom God can and cannot save? Our human standards of righteousness and justice, Ellul argued, are hopelessly corrupted by sin. Any attempt to limit God's saving power—to say "God will save these people but not those"—is itself a form of idolatry, of putting ourselves in God's place.

This created an unusual theological position: total pessimism about human capabilities combined with total hope in divine grace. We are all sinners, utterly incapable of saving ourselves. And we are all saved, because God's love is larger than our sin. Critics accused Ellul of antinomianism—the belief that moral law doesn't apply to Christians since they're saved by grace alone. Ellul essentially shrugged. He was more interested in what God does than in what humans should do.

Think Globally, Act Locally

Ellul has been credited with coining one of the most famous slogans of the environmental movement: "Think globally, act locally." Whether he actually invented the phrase is disputed, but it certainly captures his approach.

He was profoundly aware of global systems—of how technique operates across borders, of how capitalism and communism were both expressions of the same underlying technical rationality. But he didn't believe in grand solutions, in revolutions or political programs that would somehow fix everything at once.

Change had to come from the ground up. It had to come from people building cooperatives and alternative institutions, from communities choosing to live differently, from individuals refusing to let technique colonize their inner lives. "I was born in Bordeaux by chance," he often said, "but it was by choice that I spent almost all my academic career there." He didn't need to be in Paris, didn't need to be at the center of power. The work could be done anywhere, with whoever was willing to do it.

The Stakes of the Century

Ellul died in 1994, just as the internet was beginning to reshape human society. He didn't live to see smartphones or social media, didn't witness the rise of algorithmic content curation or artificial intelligence. But reading him today is an uncanny experience. It's like he was describing our world before it existed.

What is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant.

This was written in the 1960s. The half-century Ellul warned about is now behind us. And the choices he described—between what to keep and what to lose, between humanization and dehumanization—have largely been made by default. We didn't really choose social media; it chose us, spreading by the automatism of technical adoption. We didn't really choose to spend hours a day staring at glowing rectangles; the technique made that choice for us, one optimized notification at a time.

But Ellul would insist that it's not too late. Technique is powerful, but it's not omnipotent. The human capacity for freedom—for encountering the God who escapes all systems—remains. The task is to stop worshipping the machine and remember what it was built to serve.

A Friendship Worth Mentioning

One footnote to Ellul's life deserves attention. His best friend was Bernard Charbonneau, another writer from the Aquitaine region who shared Ellul's concerns about technology and its impact on human freedom. They met through the Protestant Student Federation in 1929-1930—the same period when Ellul was discovering Marx and Kierkegaard, the same summer he had his terrifying encounter with the divine.

Both men acknowledged how profoundly they influenced each other. Charbonneau developed his own critique of what he called "the feeling of nature"—how modern people had lost their direct connection to the natural world and replaced it with a sentimentalized, touristic relationship. Together, they were pioneers of what would later be called environmentalism, though neither would have used that word.

Their friendship lasted until Ellul's death. It's a reminder that even the most radical critics of modern society don't have to be lonely. The alternatives to technique can be built in partnership, in community, in the slow work of decades-long friendship. Think globally, act locally—and find someone to walk with you.

The Presence and the Flight

Let's return to that summer afternoon in 1929. A boy translating Faust—the story of a man who sold his soul for power and knowledge—suddenly encounters something overwhelming and flees on his bicycle.

Ellul spent his life exploring what he fled from. The presence in that house was everything technique cannot capture: unpredictable, uncontrollable, utterly free. It demanded a response that efficiency could never provide. You can't optimize an encounter with the divine. You can only be transformed by it.

When Yvette Ellul died on April 16, 1991, after fifty-four years of marriage, Jacques fell into a deep grief. He outlived her by three years, dying on May 19, 1994, in Pessac, a suburb of the Bordeaux he had loved and chosen.

In 2000, a group of his former students founded the International Jacques Ellul Society to continue his work. They are scholars from many disciplines—sociology, theology, philosophy, media studies—united by the conviction that Ellul's questions matter more than ever. What happens to our humanity when technique takes over? What do we want to keep, and what are we ready to lose? What would it mean to choose God over the machine?

The stakes of the century remain what they've always been: not this or that particular technology, but the shape of human freedom itself.