History, Method, Fracture

Summary

Throughout the Euro-American world, the middle decades of the twentieth century were crowded with books anxiously pondering the growing role of technology in society. The French sociologist, philosopher, and theologian Jacques Ellul’s widely read The Technological Society (1964), which had appeared in French a decade earlier under the title La technique, was one of the books that captured the Zeitgeist. “Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means,” Ellul declared. “[I]n the reality of modern life, the means … are more important than the ends.”¹ However, in contrast to John Dewey’s sunny optimism about placing means on the same level as (or perhaps even over) ends, when Ellul diagnosed a comparable tendency in his own day, he lamented it.