The Elucidation of the Modern World in the Thought of Jacques Ellul

Abstract

Looking specifically into criticism of technical modernity, the article endeavors to follow and reveal the anti-conformist reflections of one of the French authors and academics best known abroad. Indeed, Jacques Ellul developed a long-term intellectual system adopting a singular dialectic that allows him to be multidisciplinary and to make multiple entries in sociological, philosophical, legal, historical, and theological fields. He has developed an approach that went far beyond the simple consideration of the technical tool as a potential means of alienating man, to offer his readers an authentic technical system as well as of all its implications. Basically, Jacques Ellul masterfully explained the mechanism according to which the modern man, in order to escape his tragic destiny by an attempt to eclipse the sacred, will paradoxically strive to become the creator of a space totally mastered by the techno-sphere, which has gained autonomy, notably through imposition of an ideology of its own. Modernity has inaugurated a process of autonomy from which the bourgeois project benefited even before technological governance came about, to exonerate itself from the presence of man. Ellul’s objective is to draw the reader to the consideration of the real loss of individual freedom in such an environment, which encompasses both the public space and those issues that are most intimate to man. This task of awakening to the very topical issue will be enhanced with methodological considerations involving, in particular, current propaganda issues and political illusions.