My Marxist professor seemed genuinely surprised.
Young David Gregory, a newly minted Ph.D. from Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, was teaching “Twentieth-Century European Intellectual History” to a dozen or so of us History majors in the late 1970s. A fiery Englishman devoted (he said) to Marxism, he sported a bushy beard the blond equivalent of Marx’s own.
His reading list for the year-long seminar brought us through first-, second-, and even third-rate thinkers all in social and political thought. It was my one and only exposure to the likes of Fourier, Luxemburg, Kautsky, and the like.
When I mildly asked, late in the year, why no theologians were on the list, nor any philosophers, he equally mildly replied that he had thought all religious questions to have been asked and answered in the nineteenth century. He really was a Marxist.
When it came time to write my main paper for the second term, I asked if I could write on the social criticism of Jacques Ellul, and particularly on his big book known in English translation as The Technological Society (1964)—although the original French version, La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, came out a decade earlier. (That makes this year the 70th anniversary of the book’s original issue, and the 30th anniversary of Ellul’s death.)
Dr. Gregory recognized the book, so he gladly signed off on the assignment. When he returned my paper to me some weeks later, it was apparent that he approved of my efforts. But he made a note as a postscript to his other, evaluative, comments. He said that he was taken aback that Ellul, as I had made clear in the paper, was, of all things, a Christian.
When I came to his office the following week to discuss the paper a little more, I took with me as a gift to him a copy of the book that had brought Ellul to my attention: Os Guinness’s The Dust of Death (1973). A month later, at the end of the year, I happened to visit with Dr. Gregory again, and I was gratified to see the resplendent white book spine of The Dust of Death, published by IVP, beaming out from his bookcase, sitting on top of (and I’m not making this up) Dr. Gregory’s cloth edition of Das Kapital.
Jacques Ellul was a sociologist, born in Bordeaux.After his education was completed in Paris, he returned to his birthplace and served as a professor of sociology at the University of Bordeaux for his entire career. (Formally, he was “Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions in the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences.”)
His greatest work, by all accounts, is the hefty La Technique—well over 400 pages of sustained argument around a single theme. (I will refer to it by its French title because the English title is positively misleading, as we will soon see. Not a few are the books that have suffered by infelicitous titles in translation. I think immediately of Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship that in the original German does not focus on “cost” but simply on discipleship—in fact, Nachfolge, the actual title, means, powerfully, just Following.)
Ellul’s thesis is simple. In a preliminary “Note to the Reader,” Ellul defines technique:
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for obtaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. [Emphasis in original]
Technique is the impetus toward rational efficiency. What can be done (better—that is, more efficiently) can be done, must be done, and shall be done. Ellul sums it up under seven qualities: rationality, artificiality, automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy.
Technique is rational—what makes sense to the analytical part of the brain, the mentality of the Enlightenment, the “scientific/technological” outlook. It is artificial, bent on making things the way they ought to be. It proceeds by automatism of technical choice: the most efficient option is necessarily and invariably selected. It constantly expands by self-augmentation. It seeks to dominate completely any domain it enters, producing monism. It seeks to dominate every domain, producing universalism. And it operates without regard for any other value or virtue, with utter autonomy.
In the 2020s, two generations later, we might well think of la technique in terms of a virus, both biological and virtual. It seeks to take over everything and make it run according to its own principles. It has its own logic—why wouldn’t one want things to be rationally efficient?—and only strong value-systems maintained and applied by strong human communities will have a hope of standing against its rule.
Curiously, Ellul’s book doesn’t so much as mention the earlier sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), whose dark musings on the “iron cage” of rationality remind many of us of Ellul’s concerns. In turn, however, Ellul anticipated and in some cases inspired many later thinkers, from the secularization theory of sociologist Steve Bruce to the wide-ranging social and political philosophy of Charles Taylor.
Speaking of Taylor, a devoted Roman Catholic, Ellul was indeed himself a Christian, although of the Reformed Protestant variety. Ellul was particularly devoted to the Danish Lutheran gadfly Søren Kierkegaard and the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Considering those two along with Ellul’s comprehensive knowledge of and regard for Karl Marx, one would expect many more “either/ors” in Ellul than “both/ands,” and that’s what one finds.
I myself turned quickly to some of his theological works, and then almost as quickly turned away. I found his argument for universalism to be disappointingly bereft of solid exegetical grounds—proceeding (as, indeed, most arguments for universalism seem to do) from a few first principles (God wants everyone to be saved; God has infinite resources to bring people to salvation) to this conclusion. (Not surprisingly, Barth’s thought similarly leans hard in this direction.)
I also couldn’t remain content with his general pessimism (shared by Barth) toward the prospects of Christians cooperating with others to pursue a measure of shalom in our life together, with justice and even love being realizable even before the Lord Jesus returns—if only partially and, often, disappointingly.
Ellul’s The Meaning of the City posits the eschatological cities of Ezekiel and John as simply stark, glorious alternatives to “the detestable, gangrenous suburb I have to walk through, the workers’ shacks with their peeling paint and permanent layers of dirt, the tool sheds sinking into the sewers and streams that reek of washings and toilets, and the corrugated iron that constitutes man’s choicest building material.” Not much incentive here to work daily to increase shalom in society.
His political alternative to our apparently hopeless state was a form of anarcho-syndicalism (per Proudhon). This political view aimed at a reformation of the economy and government by trade union governance fostered by grass-roots cooperation on a society-wide scale. It constituted a vision I found so unlikely as to be left on the shelf.
In fact, I found Ellul deeply paradoxical—perhaps not surprising in a Christian who had read and valued all of Marx and whose favourite writers were Kierkegaard and Barth. A professor of sociology in a faculty of law and economics, one might think, would see his God-given vocation as contributing to his academic field, yes, and perhaps also branching out, in the worthy European tradition of the intellectual, to offer hard-headed and practical opinions also on the law, politics, and economics of the day.
Yet, as one of his main American expositors makes clear,
Ellul . . . proposes that the Christian find his vocation outside of his occupation—as Amos did his prophesying and Paul his apostleship. “On his own time” and in the situation where the Christian can exercise a bit of freedom, let him find activities that truly can witness to the age that is coming, that truly can be done in response to the call of God, that truly can be seen as a free service in behalf of God and the neighbor. Ellul cites his own volunteer work in a club for juvenile delinquents as an example of such vocation; his writing of Christian books would qualify as well. [Vernard Eller]
Ellul strongly pressed for freedom as a key marker of Christian life. So everything that was not free was compromised and therefore, well, not so much the Christian life. And, since most of life is like that—then, one wonders, what do we make of most of our lives? I found more helpful ethical guidance elsewhere.
Still, as the long career of American evangelical ethicist and Ellul champion David Gill makes clear—David just retired as the longtime president of the international Ellul Society—there is much here for evangelical Christians to ponder. Let me conclude with a few weighty “take-aways” that have always inspired me about Jacques Ellul.
First, Ellul painted on a very large canvas—the very nature of modern life!—and did so convincingly, out of wide scholarship and deep reflection.
Second, Ellul did so in a way that communicated clearly and, often, convincingly with non-Christians.
Third, Ellul was a lifelong churchgoer who nonetheless championed the value of reading Karl Marx. This openness to wisdom wherever one finds it prepared me to encounter Christian philosophers willing to champion all sorts of unlikely people, from Charles Taylor commending G. W. F. Hegel, to John Hare recovering the theology of Immanuel Kant, to Merold Westphal telling us that deconstruction was worthy of Christian attention. (Steve Evans’s lifelong devotion to Kierkegaard—a radical move in his younger days among Wheaton College types!—seems almost conventional by comparison.)
Fourth, much as I find Ellul’s politics uncongenial and unrealistic, I celebrate his willingness to consider seriously political options not even recognized by most North Americans, options that might yet spur some lively discussion in the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the New Democratic Party in Canada.
Finally, and in summation, Jacques Ellul stretched for me—and dramatically—the possibilities of a Christian mind fully engaging the world of contemporary culture. Imagine: a Calvinist Christian influenced by Marx and Kierkegaard teaching sociology in a secular university and advocating radical politics while teaching the Bible and serving the poor of his city in his private hours.
Encountering Jacques Ellul, therefore, was surprising indeed for a teenager recently graduated from a small Plymouth Brethren Bible school on the Canadian prairies.
It was also surprising, as it turned out, for his Marxist professor.
