The Technological Society

by Jacques Ellul

Sometime in 1961, Robert M. Hutchins and Scott Buchanan told Aldous Huxley of the Center’s interest in technology and asked his opinion about contemporary European works on the subject. Huxley recommended above all Ellul’s La Technique, which had been published in Paris by Armand Colin in 1954 without having attracted much attention.

In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul formulates a comprehensive and forceful social philosophy of our technical civilization. Less penetrating than Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, it nevertheless widens the scope of inquiry into the consequences of having a society pervaded by technicians.

In short, whatever its occasional deficiencies, The Technological Society requires us to examine anew what the author describes as the essential tragedy of a civilization increasingly dominated by technique.

By technique, for example, he means far more than machine technology. Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. Thus, it converts spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized. The Technical Man is fascinated by results, by the immediate consequences of setting standardized devices into motion. He cannot help admiring the spectacular effectiveness of nuclear weapons of war. Above all, he is committed to the never-ending search for “the one best way” to achieve any designated objective.

Ours is a progressively technical civilization: by this Ellul means that the ever-expanding and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life. It is a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends. Indeed, technique transforms ends into means. What was once prized in its own right now becomes worthwhile only if it helps achieve something else. And, conversely, technique turns means into ends. “Know-how” takes on an ultimate value.

The intellectual discipline of economics itself becomes technicized. Technical economic analysis is substituted for the older political economy included in which was a major concern with the moral structure of economic activity. Thus doctrine is converted into procedure. In this sphere as in others, the technicians form a closed fraternity with their own esoteric vocabulary. Moreover, they are concerned only with what is, as distinct from what ought to be.

Political doctrine revolves around what is useful rather than what is good. Purposes drop out of sight and efficiency becomes the central concern.

In Ellul’s conception, then, life is not happy in a civilization dominated by technique. Even the outward show of happiness is bought at the price of total acquiescence. The technological society requires men to be content with what they are required to like; for those who are not content, it provides distractions—escape into absorption with technically dominated media of popular culture and communication. And the process is a natural one: every part of a technical civilization responds to the social needs generated by technique itself. Progress then consists in progressive de-humanization—a busy, pointless, and, in the end, suicidal submission to technique. The essential point, according to Ellul, is that technique produces all this without plan; no one wills it or arranges that it be so. Our technical civilization does not result from a Machiavellian scheme. It is a response to the “laws of development” of technique.

Ernst Jünger once wrote that technology is the real metaphysics of the twentieth century. The irreversible collectivist tendencies of technology, whether it calls itself democratic or authoritarian, were already apparent to him, at the end of World War I. It is this society, in all its forms, which Jacques Ellul, of the Faculty of Law of Bordeaux, seeks to analyze.

Technique, as the universal and autonomous technical fact, is revealed as the technological society itself in which man is but a single tightly integrated and articulated component.

The Technological Society is a description of the way in which an autonomous technology is in process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all nontechnological difference and variety is mere appearance.

Individuals such as Aldous Huxley, Paul Tillich, and Erich Fromm, who have raised their voices in protest, are of European origin and received their education in Europe.

Technolaters such as Professors B. F. Skinner of Harvard and most other American professors represent the familiar type of the American intellectual caught in an ecstatic technical vertigo and seldom proceeding beyond certain vague meditations on isolated problem areas such as the “population explosion,” if indeed he considers the real problems posed by technology at all. Ellul holds the Americans to be the most conformist people in the world, but in fairness it must be objected that, in his own analysis, the Soviets seem better to deserve this dubious honor

Since the religious object is that which is uncritically worshipped, technology tends more and more to become the new god.

Even clearer is the similarity of the book to Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, the last work of Western philosophy with which, in the translator’s opinion, the present work bears comparison. The Technological Society is not a “phenomenology of mind” but rather a “phenomenology of the technical state of mind.” Like Hegel’s book, it is intensely histrionic; and like it, it shows, without offering causal mechanisms, how its subject in its lowest stage (technique as machine technique) develops dialectically through the various higher stages to become at last the fully evolved phenomenon (the technical phenomenon identical with the technical society).

In dialectical logic, every change of quantity is simultaneously a change of quality; and the discernment of a “threshold” quantity is partly a psychological fact of awareness, and partly an illicit attempt to try to import back into a dialectical logic some of the unequivocalness of the ordinary either/or logic. Now, Ellul’s explanation of the technical takeover is based fundamentally on the fact that the material (that is, technical) substratum of human existence, which was traditionally not allowed to be a legitimate end of human action, has become so “enormous,” so “immense,” that men are no longer able to cope with it as means, so that it has become an end-in-itself, to which men must adapt themselves.

Engel’s law must never be taken to imply a one-way transition of quantity into quality. In dialectical logic the transformation of quality into quantity is a necessary concomitant of the reversible transformation of quantity into quality. It is, in fact, the essence of technique to compel the qualitative to become quantitative, and in this way to force every stage of human activity and man himself to submit to its mathematical calculations. Ellul gives examples of this at every level. Thus, technique forces all sociological phenomena to submit to the clock, for Ellul the most characteristic of all modern technical instruments. The substitution of the tempus mortuum of the mechanical clock for the biological and psychological time “natural” to man is in itself sufficient to suppress all the traditional rhythms of human life in favor of the mechanical. Again, genuine human communities are suppressed by the technological society to form collectivities of “mass men” incapable of obeying any other law than the statistical “law of large numbers.” All the technical devices of education, propaganda, amusement, sport, and religion are mobilized to persuade the human being to be satisfied with his condition of mechanical, mindless “mass man,” and ruthlessly to exterminate the deviant and the idiosyncratic.

The denizen of the technological state of the future will have everything his heart ever desired, except, of course, his freedom.

Admittedly, modern man, forced by technique to become in reality and without residue the imaginary producer-consumer of the classical economists, shows disconcertingly little regard for his lost freedom; but, according to Ellul, there are ominous signs that human spontaneity, which in the rational and ordered technical society has no expression except madness, is only too capable of outbreaks of irrational suicidal destructiveness.

Ellul does not specifically say so, but it seems that he must hold that the technological society, like everything else, bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

It must not be imagined that the autonomous technique envisioned by Ellul is a kind of “technological determinism,” to use a phrase of Veblen.

Technique, to Ellul, is a “blind” force, but one which unfortunately seems to be more perspicacious than the best discernible human intelligences. There are other ways out, Ellul maintains, but nobody wants any part of them.

Nuclear explosions and population explosions capture the public’s imagination; but I have argued that Ellul’s analysis demands that all indices of modern technological culture are exploding, too, and are potentially just as dangerous to the continued well-being of society, if by well-being we understand social equilibrium.

Ellul must conclude that from among the data of science technique legislates those which it deems most efficient and rejects the rest Economic and social “model builders,” those assiduous technocratic apes, may seek to soften the violence of this description by pointing out that all sciences “specify a universe of discourse.” It remains unfortunately true, however, that such “specification” proceeds by way of elimination of the human. Ellul is no machinoclast like the partisans of the weak-minded Ludd seeking to wreck the stocking frames. He has no doctrinal delusions at all, a fortiori none like those of Rousseau and certain of his disciples, who imagined that man would be happy in a state of nature.

The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining 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. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.

Technique is not an isolated fact in society (as the term technology would lead us to believe) but is related to every factor in the life of modern man; it affects social facts as well as all others. Thus technique itself is a sociological phenomenon, and it is in this light that we shall study it.

I ask only that the reader place himself on the factual level and address himself to these questions: “Are the facts analyzed here false?” “Is the analysis inaccurate?” “Are the conclusions unwarranted?” “Are there substantial gaps and omissions?” It will not do for him to challenge factual analysis on the basis of his own ethical or metaphysical presuppositions.

I should explain that I have tried to perform a work of sociological reflection, involving analysis of large groups of people and of major trends, but not of individual actions. I do not deny the existence of individual action or of some inner sphere of freedom. I merely hold that these are not discernible at the most general level of analysis, and that the individual’s acts or ideas do not here and now exert any influence on social, political, or economic mechanisms.

To me the sociological does not consist of the addition and combination of individual actions. I believe that there is a collective sociological reality, which is independent of the individual. As I see it, individual decisions are always made within the framework of this sociological reality, itself pre-existent and more or less determinative. I have simply endeavored to describe technique as a sociological reality.

If I do refer to the past, it is only to emphasize that present determinants did not exist in the past, and men did not have to grapple with them then. The men of classical antiquity could not have found a solution to our present determinisms, and it is useless to look into the works of Plato or Aristotle for an answer to the problem of freedom.

Keeping in mind that sociological mechanisms are always significant determinants—of more or less significance—for the individual, I would maintain that we have moved from one set of determinants to another. The pressure of these mechanisms is today very great; they operate in increasingly wide areas and penetrate more and more deeply into human existence. Therein lies the specifically modern problem.

This determinism has, however, another aspect. There will be a temptation to use the word fatalism in connection with the phenomena described in this book. The reader may be inclined to say that, if everything happens as stated in the book, man is entirely helpless—helpless either to preserve his personal freedom or to change the course of events. Once again, I think the question is badly put. I would reverse the terms and say: if man—if each one of us—abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consid...

I would say that it lies in social, economic, and political phenomena, and in certain chains of events and sequences. If we may not speak of laws, we may, at any rate, speak of repetitions. If we may not speak of mechanisms in the strict sense of the word, we may speak of interdependencies. There is a certain logic (though not a formal logic) in economic phenomena which makes certain forecasts possible. This is true of sociology and, to a lesser degree, of politics. There is a certain logic in the evolution of institutions which is easily discernible. It is possible, without resorting to imagination or science fiction, to describe the path that a social body or institutional complex will follow. An extrapolation is perfectly proper and scientific when it is made with care. Such an extrapolation is what we have attempted. But it never represents more than a probability, and may be proved false by events.

At the beginning of this foreword I stated that this book has a purpose. That purpose is to arouse the reader to an awareness of technological necessity and what it means. It is a call to the sleeper to awake.

Technique has now become almost completely independent of the machine, which has lagged far behind its offspring.

technique has taken over all of man’s activities, not just his productive activity.

For, wherever a technical factor exists, it results, almost inevitably, in mechanization: technique transforms everything it touches into a machine.

Technique integrates the machine into society. It constructs the kind of world the machine needs and introduces order where the incoherent banging of machinery heaped up ruins. It clarifies, arranges, and rationalizes; it does in the domain of the abstract what the machine did in the domain of labor. It is efficient and brings efficiency to everything.

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 anxiety aroused in man by the turbulence of the machine is soothed by the consoling hum of a unified society.

when technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance. It is no longer face to face with man but is integrated with him, and it progressively absorbs him. In this respect, technique is radically different from the machine. This transformation, so obvious in modern society, is the result of the fact that technique has become autonomous.

When I state that technique leads to mechanization, I am not referring to the simple fact of human adaptation to the machine. Of course, such a process of adaptation exists, but it is caused by the action of the machine. What we are concerned with here, however, is a kind of mechanization in itself. If we may ascribe to the machine a superior form of “know-how,” the mechanization which results from technique is the application of this higher form to all domains hitherto foreign to the machine; we can even say that technique is characteristic of precisely that realm in which the machine itself can play no role. It is a radical error to think of technique and machine as interchangeable; from the very beginning we must be on guard against this misconception.

The scientist might act more prudently; he might even be afraid to launch his carefully calculated laboratory findings into the world. But how can he resist the pressure of the facts? How can he resist the pressure of money? How is he to resist success, publicity, public acclaim? Or the general state of mind which makes technical application the last word? How is he to resist the desire to pursue his research? Such is the dilemma of the researcher today. Either he allows his findings to be technologically applied or he is forced to break off his research.

I shall often use the term technique in place of the more commonly used term science, and designate as techniques work that is usually termed scientific. This is due to the close association of technique and science which I have pointed out and which I shall discuss more fully later on.

In reality, what Toynbee calls organization, and Burnham calls managerial action, is technique applied to social, economic, or administrative life. What but technique is the “organization” defined in the following? “Organization is the process which consists in assigning appropriate tasks to individuals or to groups so as to attain, in an efficient and economic way, and by the coordination and combination of all their activities, the objectives agreed upon” (Sheldon).

It is not a matter of leaving it to inspiration, ingenuity, nor even intelligence to find a solution at the moment some difficulty arises; it is rather in some way to anticipate both the difficulty and its resolution. From then on, standardization creates impersonality, in the sense that organization relies more on methods and instructions than on individuals.” We thus have all the marks of a technique. Organization is a technique—and Andre L. A. Vincent had good reason to write: “To approach the optimum combination of factors, or the optimum dimension is…to accomplish technical progress in the form of a better organization.”

the most important feature of techniques today is that they do not depend on manual labor but on organization and on the arrangement of machines.

H. D. Lasswell’s definition of technique as “the ensemble of practices by which one uses available resources in order to achieve certain valued ends” also seems to follow the conventions cited above, and to embrace only industrial technique. Here it might be contested whether technique does indeed permit the realization of values. However, to judge from Lasswell’s examples, he conceives the terms of his definition in an extremely broad manner. He gives a list of values and the corresponding techniques. As values, for example, he lists riches, power, well-being, affection; and as techniques, the techniques of government, production, medicine, the family, and so on. Lasswell’s conception of value may seem somewhat strange; the term is obviously not apt. But what he has to say indicates that he gives techniques their full scope. Moreover, he makes it quite clear that it is necessary to show the effects of technique not only on inanimate objects but also on people. I am, therefore, in substantial agreement with this conception.

The technical operation includes every operation carried out in accordance with a certain method in order to attain a particular end. It can be as rudimentary as splintering a flint or as complicated as programming an electronic brain. In every case, it is the method which characterizes the operation.

what characterizes technical action within a particular activity is the search for greater efficiency. Completely natural and spontaneous effort is replaced by a complex of acts designed to improve, say, the yield. It is this which prompts the creation of technical forms, starting from simple forms of activity. These technical forms are not necessarily more complicated than the spontaneous ones, but they are more efficient and better adapted. Thus, technique creates means, but the technical operation still occurs on the same level as that of the worker who does the work. The skilled worker, like the primitive huntsman, remains a technical operator; their attitudes differ only to a small degree. But two factors enter into the extensive field of technical operation: consciousness and judgment This double intervention produces what I call the technical phenomenon. What characterizes this double intervention? Essentially, it takes what was previously tentative, unconscious, and spontaneous and brings it into the realm of clear, voluntary, and reasoned concepts.

there is the intervention of consciousness. Consciousness shows clearly, and to everybody, the advantages of technique and what it can accomplish. The technician takes stock of alternative possibilities. The immediate result is that he seeks to apply the new methods in fields which traditionally had been left to chance, pragmatism, and instinct The intervention of consciousness causes a rapid and far-flung extension of technique. The twofold intervention of reason and consciousness in the technical world, which produces the technical phenomenon, can be described as the quest of the one best means in every field. And this “one best means” is, in fact, the technical means. It is the aggregate of these means that produces technical civilization.