Jacques Ellul- Prophetic or Apocalyptic Theologian of Technology?*

220 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
McDonald Cornford's Before and After Socrates, 12 places the human
consequences for man as the proper starting point in assessing
science and technology, thus introducing politics as properly in control
of technē in its application. Though Ellul raises many important
issues, questions, and problems, his definitions, because they merge
concept and theory, remove what the Western tradition has treated
as the proper means for resolving these very issues, questions, and
problems. The important distinction between technicians and politicians,
recognized in Robert K. Merton's foreword to The
Technological Society, 13
provides the key to Ellul's lock. The only
means of controlling modern technology, with its seemingly
autonomous laws of growth, is politics; but then, that was also true
of pre-modern technique as well.
The distinction between `technology' and `technique' is more difficult
to draw in English and German than in French because in the
former `technology' is often used to mean "technique" as well as
" technology", just as the German word `Technik' can mean either
English term." Roughly following the Greek distinction, `technique'
is the "means for action," while `technology' is the "science or theory
of techniques. As Ellul relates:
Originally . . . 'technique' ... consistent with its etymology, meant a certain
manner of doing something, a process or ensemble of processes. Diderot thus
speaks of the "technique proper to each painter." But rapidly, as machine and
its industrial application came to dominate, `technique' (and then `technology'
in English) began to designate the processes of constructing and exploiting
machines. People now more frequently employ the plural. These were then
studied by a science called technologie.. . . This science consists in describing
and analyzing these techniques, . . . in tracing their history and investigating
ways of improving them. 15
This distinction permits Ellul to isolate common features of
technology and he specifies the "overriding feature since its origin:
efficiency. People could now say that technology was the ensemble
12. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932).
13. Technological Society, 10.
14. See translator's note, 106, of Weber. The etymological roots of the terms apparently
are not reversed from the Greek in Romanian usages, but are in specialized
usage in the field of technology assessment: see Daniela Rusa, "Terminology for
Technology Assessment," paper at the 1982 I.P.S.A. Congress, Rio de Janeiro, where
"Tekhnikos, tekhne = art, skill, mental and practical ability "
"Tekhnologia = treatise or discourse on the arts" are defined.
15. Technological System, 24.
and