Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul (Bordeaux, 1912 – Pessac, 1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist and lay theologian, best known as a Christian anarchist and as one of the most influential critics of technological society. A professor of the history and sociology of institutions at the University of Bordeaux, he combined empirical social analysis with theological reflection and political engagement. His thought draws on Marxist critique, personalism and the dialectical theology of Karl Barth.

Born in Bordeaux into a Protestant family, he first wanted to join the navy as a teenager, but his father steered him toward law. He was educated in Bordeaux and Paris, and during the Second World War he took part in the French resistance, for which he was later honoured by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. Early on he read Marx and Kierkegaard, whom he regarded as his greatest influences, and in 1932 he converted to Christianity after an experience he later described as sudden and brutal. His close friendship with Bernard Charbonneau shaped his early work: in 1935 the two argued that modern society was driven by concentration of production, the state, population and capital.

Ellul came to hold that technology was no longer a set of means serving human ends, but an autonomous environment that imposes its own logic. His best-known book, The Technological Society, describes a technical system governed by efficiency that displaces other dimensions of human life, such as the poetic, the symbolic and the religious. His answer was an ethic of non-power: not impotence, but the refusal to collaborate with the system, summed up in the idea that one can, but does not want to.

Ellul is usually remembered as a sociologist, yet he saw himself first as a theologian, and his writings on the kingdom of God and on the relation between faith and politics were central to his output. His influence reaches into political ecology, degrowth and the critique of technology. After his death in 1994, his work continued to be debated in France and the English-speaking world, and in 2000 the International Jacques Ellul Society was founded to carry his legacy forward.