ANSO 16
Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society Winter 2020

This is not the current course catalog

The work of the late French historian and sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) suffers from nothing less than a tragic paradox. On the one side, there is arguably no one whose sociohistorical analyses have done more to explicate the relationship between technology and the most pressing issues of our day. On the other side, despite the profundity and contemporary relevance of Ellul’s work, it has been widely misinterpreted, dismissed as both “pessimistic” and “technologically deterministic.” This course invites students to carry out a close reading of Ellul’s most (in)famous study–The Technological Society (1964). We will situate this text relative to the circumstances in which Ellul lived and worked, and in relation to his two principle influences: Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard. Together, we will then work our way through the text’s key themes: Ellul’s distinction between technology and technique and the latter’s distinctly modern characteristics; technique and economy; technique and the state; and finally, human techniques (e.g. therapy, medicine, management, education, propaganda, sport). In the course of proceeding as such, students will be asked to consider, critique, and elaborate Ellul’s ideas in light of contemporary technological developments.