The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
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The Technological Society

Author: Jacques Ellul, John Wilkinson, Robert K. Merton

Narrator: Arthur Morey

Unabridged: 21 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/23/2021

Synopsis

As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in France in 1954, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed.Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book.

About Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) was a French philosopher and Christian anarchist. He served for many years as professor of history and the sociology of institutions at the University of Bordeaux. Although he was trained as a sociologist, he is considered a philosopher with a particular interest in technology and the possibility of technological tyranny. He is said to have coined the phrase “Think globally, act locally.” Among his books are Propaganda, The Political Illusion, The Theological Foundation of Law, The Meaning of the City, and many others.

About Arthur Morey

Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Brian

This book is another truly remarkable exposition of the relation between technology and society, along with Mumford's, Pentagon of Power. This book, as with the latter, goes far beyond a mere criticism of technologies. It examines the nature of Technique, which is the collective organization of a so......more

Goodreads review by loafingcactus

This book blew my mind- I'll never see the world the same way again. I'll never appeal to "efficiency" as if it were a moral end (and error I was absolutely making). Absolutely one of the most important things I have read in my life.......more

Goodreads review by David

Ellul wrote this book over half a century ago, talking about how technique is taking over our society. Technique is not technology, though that is part of it. Instead, as Ellul defines it right at the beginning, it is the "totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency." Ma......more

Quotes

“A magnificent book…He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process.” Harper’s

“The Technological Society is one of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself—unless we take the necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that ‘technique’ is creating to meet its own needs.” The Nation

“The effect is a contained intellectual explosion, a heated recognition of a tragic complication that has overtaken contemporary society.” George Washington Law Review

“A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the 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 non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance.” Los Angeles Free Press

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