The Technological Society

by Jacques Ellul

A model is a reproduction in miniature of a certain economic ensemble in the form of mathematical equations. It is impossible, obviously, to put all economic phenomena into a model; a certain arbitrariness is called for. The primary act is therefore a choice, founded on some theoretical decision, of the constants and variables to be put into the model.

Whatever cannot be expressed numerically is to be eliminated from the ensemble, either because it eludes numeration or because it is quantitatively negligible. We have, therefore, a procedure for the elimination of aberrant opinions which is essential to the understanding of the development of this technique.

Then the following question is unavoidable: Will these techniques remain simple techniques of observation, or pure knowledge? We grant that their creators had no ulterior motives. The means are there simply to be of assistance to economic science.

It has been called the reign of the experts, but it is in actual fact the reign of the technicians. Economists today have the means of being technicians near the seat of state power. But even without wishing to take account of this tendency, we know that these means of observation of reality will not remain inert. Like all techniques, they possess specific weights and direction.

Econometrics is only to be understood if it issues in its normal end, the establishment of economic planning. Without this, econometrics is inefficient, and efficiency is the very law of technique. Like a horse chafing at the bit, the techniques of economic science await the signal to intervene more completely than ever before in the reality they have come to understand.

It is almost impossible to conceive of localized norms. If it is asked what the motive force behind this tendency is, once again we must answer: efficiency.

This is what I mean by the logic of norms.

A plan is executed in accordance with two constant principles: efficiency and social need.

It is well-known that “to the standardization of production corresponds a standardization of taste which gives to social life its collective character.” Moreover, mass consumption corresponds spontaneously to mass production. There is no need for repressive measures. The adaptation of the public occurs of itself. The average man becomes the norm in the most liberal system in the world because only the products necessary to the average man are offered on the market. In fact, the problem of understanding social needs is complicated only if planning technique is separated from all the other techniques.

This appears to be a veritable law of economics; planning is inseparably bound up with coercion.

Those who count on the good will of mankind display a delirious, idealistic optimism. Centuries of history, despite the facts, have not been able to convince them of the contrary; reason certainly will not change them. But they are so far removed from reality that their opinion is negligible.

Mere understanding or good intentions can scarcely result in real planning.

This extension of planning does not necessarily bring about a socialist society. Private ownership of the means of production need not be modified in order to have a planned economy. Likewise, planning does not necessarily bring about a dictatorial state. The use of sanctions and propaganda can be accommodated to forms other than dictatorships. But when a technique invades a certain domain, in connection with planning, the technique effects its whole operation with completeness. It is useless to try to set limits to it or to seek some other mode of procedure.

Planning in modern society is the technical method. It does not necessarily represent the best economic solution, but it does represent the best technical solution.

From this point of view, the corporate economy and the planned economy come singularly close together, to the degree that both systems (a) take a firm hold on the economy, (b) manage it on the basis of exact mathematical methods, (c) integrate it into a Promethean society which excludes all chance, (d) centralize it in the frameworks of nation and state (the corporate economy today has no chance of success except as a state system), (e) cause it to assume an aspect of formal democracy to the total exclusion of real democracy, and (f) exploit all possible techniques for controlling men. The kinship of the two systems is obvious in spite of differences in material structure.

The state no longer leaves the economy to itself; but state intervention is flexible enough to allow the entrepreneurs some initiative and grant (controlled) freedom to the market.

The seeds of destruction are in the very conditions proposed for the establishment of the economic form represented by liberal interventionism. Thence the fundamental in stability which renders the attempt to establish such an economic form not a final solution but merely an intermediate stage.

However, as it is said in England, “you get nothing for nothing, and not much for sixpence.”

Modern man never aks himself what he will have to pay for his power. This is the question we ought to be asking.

The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian. For its own centralization, technique requires interrelated economic and political centralization. And we are speaking here of mechanical technique alone, without going into the motives of political technique.

It may be noted in passing (and this confirms our thesis of the unity of the technical phenomenon) that the improvement of statistics makes it necessary for the state to intervene in economic technique: the publication of statistics may be of great utility to the intelligence services of some eventual enemy. Stuart Arthur Rice gives examples of statistics in foreign commerce which contributed to sabotage operations.

We ought, on the whole, to abandon the idea of a ravaging and dictatorial state. Let us think only of the cold and impersonal mechanism that holds all sources of energy in its hands. What is production without energy?

Because of the existence of techniques, we are beyond the problems of ordinary Étatism or of socialism. It is not the simple phenomenon of the growth of power or the struggle against capitalism which is decisive here. We are witnessing the birth of a new organism, the technical state, which makes economic life more secure in proportion as it becomes more technical.

Humble humanitarian motives are no longer important. Technique is too neutral and the state too powerful for either to encumber itself with such things. It is no longer even a question of wealth or distribution; in the technical synthesis, the economy becomes again the servant, when (after Marx) it had been thought the master.

Social equality becomes a myth as a result of the emergence of an aristocracy of technicians; and the proletariat is necessarily extended (to no one’s dissatisfaction), instead of disappearing. Certain elements of socialism continue to exist; for example, social security, the redistribution of the national income, and the suppression of individual profit.

Technique is, therefore, the most important factor in the destruction of capitalism, much more so than the revolt of the masses. Human revolt can only accompany the destruction of capitalism and philosophize about it. As to socialism, the final result is still indiscernible and no prediction, except of a negative nature, is possible.

The simple fact is that liberalism permitted the development of its executioner, exactly as in a healthy tissue a constituent cell may proliferate and give rise to a fatal cancer. The healthy body represented the necessary condition for the cancer. But there was no contradiction between the two. The same relation holds between technique and economic liberalism.

In all sectors of the economy, this tendency is the plague and the destruction of liberalism. It ends either in a straightforward monopoly with no competitive freedom (whether the monopoly is private or of the state, the result of the contest between state control and liberalism is the same), or monopolistic competition, which is no less ruinous than outright monopoly because of the waste it causes.

Technique makes the economy a mass economy, that is to say, the economy taken as a whole to which we give the name macroeconomy. (This hypothesis is necessary in order to account for the free play of economic techniques.) Economic problems must be posed in global terms, in terms of global income, global employment, global demand, and so on.

“statistics can never be dialectics.”

It is not only that everyone is inescapably a consumer and producer and as such participates in economic life. More important, all members of society (not each member) are integrated in the mass into a pre-established system. It is the facts of “all” and “pre-established,” required by the use of technique, which involve the mass.

He remains “free,” but he can no longer escape being a part of the mass. Technical expansion requires the widest possible domain. In the near future not even the whole earth may be sufficient.

Furthermore, technical development follows its own proper laws, not the tastes of the public. It was not the public which demanded air travel and television. Technical progress created these things, and they were technically diffused and imposed on the public. The mechanism of standardization is identical with that of every technique.

“Democracy is the adhesion of each citizen individually to the opinion of the majority. This majority opinion becomes an irrefragable and indisputable line of conduct. The individual is duty bound to look upon the line (economic or political) dictated by the majority as the best for society. The individual becomes democratic in this way….”

Man indeed participates in the economy, but technique causes him to participate not as a man but as a thing.

It is in the realm of economic technique that we experience most clearly the great and dramatic process of modern times, in which both chance and natural laws are transformed into decisions of accountants, rules of planning, and decrees of the state.

Every technique tends, more or less, to constrain nature; accordingly, the artificial is opposed to the natural. There is a struggle, but whether it be expressed in terms of man against nature or in terms of the conflict of systems, the desideratum is a mastery that excludes, eliminates, and replaces the natural. Thus, for example, the directed and planned economy replaces liberalism.

In the conflict between politician and technician, corruption is a much more serious matter.

Maximum yield is yield that exhausts and debases the resources of the state in a short interval of time; optimum yield is yield that attempts to safeguard substance and vitality, the typical example being the TVA.

It knows only two possible solutions: the transformation or the annihilation of the qualitative. It is precisely by way of the former that technique is totalitarian; and when the state becomes technical, it too becomes totalitarian; it has no alternative.

Scruples concerning tradition, principles, judicial affirmations, the maintenance of a façade of public and private morality—all these still exist in the democratic state. It may be going too far to say that scruples concerning human beings also exist in democratic states; the democratic state is preoccupied most of all with a very special type of man: the voter.

All these scruples, in any case, are without force or reality. They are merely verbal smokescreens, and the democracies disregard them every time it is necessary to do so. This façade no longer corresponds in any way to a real community; it represents only vestiges of a community.

For this reason, wars always bring about a prodigious advance in the use of certain techniques in democratic societies. The democracies are, of course, careful to assert that they are using these techniques only because of the state of war. But there are always wars of one kind or another: war preparations, cold war, hot war, new cold war, and so on, ad infinitum.

Marxism is, in fact, nothing but an epiphenomenon of technical development, a phase of the painful marriage of man and technique.

The Guelphs and the Ghibellines made merciless war on each other to decide which party was to exercise world supremacy.

There must be a law for each fact; whence the indefinite proliferation of the legal apparatus.

A legal system which merely establishes principles and lays down general lines of procedure entrusts to the judge the creation of the living law under the maxim praetor viva vox juris civilis.*6 Such a state of affairs is intolerable to the technician, who dreads above all else the arbitrary, the personal, and the fortuitous. The technician is the great enemy of chance; he finds the personal element insupportable.

It has been said that modern man surrounded by techniques is in the same situation as prehistoric man in the midst of nature.

One must employ the maximum means to assure optimal results with the least danger.

It seems impossible therefore that independent research can survive; a system such as Zweckwissenschaft (“practical or purposive science,” which the Nazis applied too soon) will gradually take over. In it there is no longer any question of free research. The state mobilizes all technicians and scientists, and imposes on all a precise and limited technical objective.