The Technological Society

The Technological Society

By: Jacques Ellul  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Publisher: Vintage Books

Release Date: 1967-10-12

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
All-embracing technique is in fact the consciousness of the mechanized world. - This book is a highly significant and most important treatise on the cold, hard demonic presence that constitutes the role of technique in our world, and how it birthed "The Technological Society."
I would refrain from using such an easily miscontrued and loaded term as "demonic presence" to attempt to encapsulate what Ellul delineates in this book with consumate skill and near faultless powers of reason; but I think it pretty much fits the bill.
I would recommend Ellul's "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" to accompany this book as they dovetail superbly. Perhaps The Technological Society first as it paves the way for Propaganda; one can't exist without the other. And Robert Merton's translation of the former seemed to be more fluid and easier to digest then Kellen & Learner's version of Propaganda. It also introduces key concepts towards an understanding of Ellul's complex analysis of how men's attitudes are "formed."

The Technological Society is a book of immense insight, clarity of thought and mesmerising, profound passages on reality as it is shaped by technique. He presents a world inhabited by the "mass man," in a massified societal complex, which of necessity dictates techniques devoid of humanity to manage it effectively. Technique constitutes a kind of perfect intelligence, whose only point of reference is itself and whose focus is on the efficient integration of the soft, warm, and weak creatures that are mankind. Too wilful, chaotic and numerous are we that techniques of management; organization; regulation; health; information; etc, are inevitable to achieve a universal "best practice" for our own benefit. Or really for the interests of that thing known as society. This phenomenon even births techniques to soothe and placate the soul of man lacerated by the cold, efficient scalpel of the technical apparatus.

It is both the poison and the antidote.

These two quotes from the book will suggest something of Ellul's thought here:

Definition of technique-

"In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given state of development) in every field of human activity."


Machine and Technique-

"All-embracing technique is in fact the consciousness of the mechanized world.
Technique integrates everything. It avoids shock and sensational events. Man is not adapted to a world of steel , technique adapts him to it. It changes the arrangement of this blind world so that man can be a part of it without colliding with its rough edges, without the anguish of being delivered up to the inhuman. Technique thus provides a model, it specifies attitudes that are valid once and for all. The anixiety aroused in man is soothed by the consoling hum of a unified society."


The Characterology of Technique-

"Technique worships nothing, respects nothing. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means. More than science, which limits itself to to explaining the 'how,' technique desacrilizes because it demonstrates (by evidence and not by reason, through use and not through books) that mystery does not exist. Science brings to the light of day everything that man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of everything and enslaves it. The sacred cannot resist. Science penetrates to the great depths of the sea to photograph the unknown fish of the deep. Technique captures them, hauls them up to see if they are edible - but before they arrive on deck they burst. And why should technique not act thus? It is autonomous and recognises as barriers only the temporary limits of its action. In its eyes, this terrain, which is for the moment unknown but not mysterious, must be attacked. Far from being restrained by any scruples of anything sacred, technique constantly assails it. Everything which is not yet technique becomes so. It is driven onward by itself, by its character of self-augmentation. Technique denies mystery a priori. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized."

As has been noted by many, and addressed by Ellul in the forward to the book, his views seem essentially fatalistic, pessimistic, with no potential for escape from the virtual prison he presents here.
I view it far more as an essentially honest and unflinching record of his gaze at the world we live in, perhaps even more relevent now than when it was first published in 1954.
And it is also a challenge: what can we do to counter this presentation of a world encircled by an almost otherworldy phenomena that cares not for humankind?

What is technique? Why has it birthed a world of machines, of technology?
I believe that this book has a huge piece of the puzzle to answer those questions. Technique may seem a boon to our current state of civilization, a saviour of humanity even; this book may reveal that it has a secret undiagnosed pathology that results in it being mightily inimical to man.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
profound, challenging, disheartening - Read this book, but be prepared as it is very challenging, slow going at times in the extreme , and ultimately potentially disheartening...
It surely IS one of the most important works of the 20th C.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Jacques Ellul NOT a Catholic layman - The reviewer of a theologian's work shouldn't make a mistake of this kind! Ellul was a French Protestant.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Boring. Repetitive. Atrocious. - I had to buy this book for a Building Technology class. Ellul emphasizes and nuances his point of technique far too many times. If you just read the introductions, you pretty much get an idea of what's going on throughout the whole book. Sentences take up entire paragraphs and it's written horribly. Don't buy unless you have to.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Technique - the bedrock of the modern world - Before proceeding with this review, let me just say that no fewer than a hundred pages could be trimmed from its content without diluting its message at all. Many of the examples used in the book are extremely dated; while I think I'm fairly well read, I confess that I'm not really up on the vicissitudes and catfights of French academic sociology in the early 1960's (to give but one example). With that being said, this book is worth well worth the time spent reading its 436 pages.

This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the twentieth century, and if you accept its thesis you won't be able to look at the political milieu in the same way ever again. (If you agree with it and it doesn't change the way you look at things, you haven't grasped its importance.) Most political theorists take ideology to be a central point from which "real world" consequences emanate. In other words, a Communist or libertarian ideology in practical use will produce a particular type society and individual divorced from the actual technical workings of the society. Liberals and conservatives both speak of things in such a manner as if ideology is the prima facie cause of existence - but as Ellul shows in painstaking detail, this is wrong. What almost everyone fails to grasp is the pernicious effect of technique (and its offspring, technology) on modern man.

Technique can loosely be defined as the entire mass of organization and technology that has maximum efficiency as its goal. Ellul shows that technique possesses an impetus all its own and exerts similar effects on human society no matter what the official ideology of the society in question is. Technique, with its never-ending quest for maximum efficiency, tends to slowly drown out human concerns as it progresses towards its ultimate goal. "...the further economic technique develops, the more it makes real the abstract concept of economic man." (p. 219) Technique does not confine itself merely to the realm of technical production, but infiltrates every aspect of human existence, and has no time for "inefficiencies" caused by loyalties to family, religion, race, or culture; a society of dumbed-down consumers is absolutely essential to the technological society, which must contain predictable "demographics" in order to ensure the necessary financial returns. "The only thing that matters technically is yield, production. This is the law of technique; this yield can only be obtained by the total mobilization of human beings, body and soul, and this implies the exploitation of all human psychic forces." (p. 324).

Ellul thoroughly shows that much of the difference in ideology between libertarians and socialists becomes largely irrelevant in the technological society (this is not to say that ideology is unimportant, but rather that technique proceeds with the same goals and effects.) This will doubtlessly please no one; liberals want to believe that they can have privacy and freedom despite a high degree of central planning, and libertarians want to believe that a society free of most regulation and control is possible in an advanced technological society. Libertarian fantasies seem especially irrelevant given the exigencies of a technological society; as Ellul notes, as technique progresses it simply cannot function without a high degree of complexity and regulation. "The modern state could no more be a state without techniques than a businessman could be a businessman without the telephone or the automobile... not only does it need techniques, but techniques need it. It is not a matter of chance, nor a matter of conscious will; rather, it is an urgency..." (p. 253-254). Can anyone really doubt Ellul here, especially seeing as how twenty-plus years of conservative promises to downsize government still result in more regulation and bureaucracy with every passing year? Planning, socialism, regulation, and control are the natural consequences of technique; an increasingly incestuous relationship between industry and the State is inevitable. "The state and technique - increasingly interrelated - are becoming the most important forces in the modern world; they buttress and reinforce each other in their aim to produce an apparently indestructible, total civilization." (p. 318).

This is not an optimistic book. Given that the nature of technique is one of a universal leveling of human cultures, needs, and desires (replacing real needs with false ones and the neighborhood restaurant with McDonalds), Ellul is certainly pessimistic. He does not propose any remedies for the Skinnerist nightmares of technique somehow leading to a Golden Age of humanity, where people will enjoy maximal freedom coupled with minimal want: "...we are struck by the incredible naivete of these scientists... they claim they will be in a position to develop certain collective desires, to constitute certain homogeneous social units out of aggregates of individuals, to forbid men to raise their children, and even to persuade them to renounce having any... at the same time, they speak of assuring the triumph of freedom and of the necessity of avoiding dictatorship... they seem incapable of grasping the contradiction involved, or of understanding that what they are proposing." (p. 434).

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