This revised edition is not a continuous treatise composed in a single undertaking. Its core comes from four interviews prepared for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio series, broadcast in 1979 and again in 1980. Willem H. Vanderburg planned the programs, interviewed Jacques Ellul, and helped turn the material into scripts. After the broadcasts, Ellul assisted in converting the transcripts into a manuscript and expanded several points. The four chapters therefore present a retrospective voice organized around his life, technique, the future, and faith. The prefaces and the two appendices added for the 2004 edition are Vanderburg’s framing and interpretation, not further interview testimony from Ellul.

Ellul begins with experiences that made certain questions impossible to avoid. As a child, he knew the wharves, sailors, and longshoremen of Bordeaux better than any cultivated literary circle. With no family library, he mastered the lycée curriculum but had to buy every book he owned. The crash of 1929 entered his home when his father lost his job. Ellul encountered unemployment without assistance, illness without money for a doctor, and the baffling injustice of a capable man being rejected everywhere. Reading Capital at seventeen or eighteen suddenly made this suffering, and the working-class conditions he had observed around the port, intelligible. Marx offered him a total analysis of society grounded in concrete experience rather than an academic doctrine.

The discovery did not lead him into the Party. The socialists he met appeared preoccupied with political advancement, while communist activists substituted propaganda and the party line for engagement with Marx’s thought. The Moscow Trials completed his break with Communism, which he recognized as totalitarian, but not with Marx. A second turning point came when social analysis failed to answer questions about death, love, and existence. A sudden, personal conversion compelled him to identify as a Christian in 1932. He then refused to assign Marx to a material realm and the Bible to a spiritual one. Their conflict became the dialectical matrix of his work, a tension to be sustained and examined rather than eliminated through a facile synthesis.

That method was tested through engagement. Ellul joined antifascist mobilizations, was dismissed from university employment under Vichy because of hostile remarks and his father’s foreign birth, and later worked among Protestant farmers marked by a quiet spirit of resistance. After the war, he organized study groups that joined critical reflection to a different manner of living, spent fifteen years trying to change the French Reformed Church, worked in juvenile delinquency prevention, and became active in ecology. These efforts taught him that institutions readily absorb reform projects and that official categories can reverse a problem, as when society labels young people maladjusted without asking whether society itself is maladjusted. The connection between his biography and his analysis lies here: civilization must be understood at the largest scale, but honest action occurs through close relationships and concrete local conflicts.

The second movement begins with a revision of Marx. Several predictions about capitalism had not materialized, the bourgeoisie had changed, and Soviet and capitalist societies displayed similarities concealed by their rival ideologies. A factory or automobile answered to much the same technical requirements on either side. With Bernard Charbonneau, Ellul gradually came to regard technique as the decisive factor of the twentieth century, though capital had not disappeared. The analogy does not claim that capital and technique perform identical functions. It means that power, organization, and the reproduction of the social order increasingly depend on technical requirements rather than on ownership considered in isolation.

The vocabulary is crucial. Technique means neither machinery alone nor technology understood as an industrial sector. It comprises the totality of rationally developed methods that seek the most efficient performance available at a given stage in every field of activity. It extends into administration, law, organization, communication, education, and human relations. Nor does science produce it through a simple one-way sequence. Science enables techniques, technical instruments enable science in return, and innovations often arise by combining existing techniques. Industrialization is consequently one expression of a wider transformation sustained by rationality, efficiency, the long maturation of practical methods, altered social structures, and accumulated capital.

As these methods become interdependent, they constitute first a milieu and then a system. The technical milieu stands between individuals, society, and nature; it shapes values, habits, and even the criteria by which people claim to judge it. The system follows its own logic, tends toward self-augmentation, and possesses little negative feedback. When a technique causes harm, the usual response is not to return to its source and alter it, but to devise another technique that repairs the damage. The remedy adds further requirements, dependencies, and effects. Autonomy therefore does not mean that machines mysteriously make decisions. It means that human choices, formed within this milieu and constrained by its interconnections, routinely reproduce its demands.

This totality makes it misleading to isolate one device and calculate its effects. Television, for example, does not confront an entirely free viewer. It belongs to a repetitive working day whose tensions it relieves, to consumer society, to the social pressure to know what others will discuss, and to a world that privileges images. The same interdependence explains technical ambivalence. Civil nuclear energy cannot be neatly separated from nuclear danger; medicines, fertilizers, and chemicals combine known benefits with delayed secondary effects. Technical advance thus increases capacities and risks together. Because the system lacks self-regulation and its consequences interact, Ellul rejects confident scientific forecasts of its future. The outcome is neither complete order nor pure chaos. It is a technical order extending its rationality amid growing disorder in human groups, societies, and nature.

The deepest consequences concern the subject and meaning. A technical operation requires conduct that conforms to its procedure regardless of the individual performing it. Distant contacts multiply while voice, bodily presence, and reciprocity lose ground. At the same time, an increase in means does not answer the question of ends. The state possesses unprecedented instruments of administration, information, control, and territorial planning, yet the politician has less command over the machinery ostensibly directed. Law itself can become a management device, sometimes created after an administrative action merely to legitimize what has already occurred, rather than serving as a prior rule oriented toward justice. Greater institutional capacity can therefore coexist with declining personal agency.

Technique also produces the compensations required by the world it has made. Abstract and constraining work calls forth entertainment that releases its accumulated tension. Art may imitate machine formalization instead of expressing a subject. Intense religiosity may provide an escape from a frustrating material order without challenging it. These pressures do not abolish every initiative. The events of 1968 and the persistence of religious life in the Soviet Union led Ellul to revise earlier judgments that had made conditioning appear too complete. A living being never adapts perfectly to its milieu. It also resists, becomes maladapted, and responds unpredictably. This leaves room for freedom, while ruling out both fatalism and confidence in an automatic solution.

Ellul does not expect the decisive break to come from actors appointed by older theories. The European proletariat appears largely integrated into industrial objectives through unions and political parties. Third World societies are disrupted by imported techniques, while elites and poor populations alike may see technical power as the road to improvement. Ellul distinguishes quantitative growth, directed toward more production and power, from qualitative development, which seeks balance and minimizes harm. He finds more promise in groups that raise a direct question of social choice: antinuclear and ecological movements, consumer and neighborhood associations, youth movements, and women’s movements. In the language of the interviews, he associates the latter with a recovery of sensitivity, spontaneity, and intuition against a technical order shaped by values he describes as masculine.

The practical response is neither centralized seizure of control nor a return to a pretechnical past. In ecological work in Aquitaine, Ellul tried to bring scientists, lawyers, and administrators together so they would examine both the visible results and the less visible consequences of the means they employed. Technical knowledge is not to be discarded, but its unconscious use and unlimited expansion must be resisted. Education concentrates the difficulty. Children must be equipped to live in the technical milieu or they will be defenseless within it, yet they must also learn to live against its certainties. Ellul imagines parallel, collective settings in which parents and children could test other forms of life and judgment alongside ordinary schooling. His practical maxim binds the levels of his work together: think globally to perceive the system, act locally to preserve genuine relationships, decisions, and responsibility.

Criticism requires a reference point not supplied by the object under criticism. Neither an allegedly permanent human nature nor history, which can sustain opposing interpretations, gives Ellul an adequate standard for judging the technical system. Here his sociological analysis meets his Christian faith. He distinguishes religion, a human creation that provides a group with cohesion, explanation, and security, from biblical Revelation. Religion moves upward from human need toward the sacred; Revelation, as Ellul understands it, moves downward toward humanity, centered on the Incarnation and a God who liberates. Faith therefore does not automatically confirm social values. It calls them into question, including when they have assumed an ecclesiastical form.

This distinction explains Ellul’s descriptions of Christianity as antireligion and antimorality. Morality is a catalogue of predetermined rules; ethics is an orientation of life requiring discernment and responsibility. Technique, by contrast, pressures Christianity into a harmless inward spirituality, turns biblical study into an objectifying procedure, and attracts admiration, trust, and hope to itself. It becomes a secular sacred. Faith must respond through critical acceptance, not antitechnicism. From the promised end represented by the Kingdom of God, it evaluates means, rejects their unlimited growth, strips technical power of its sacred status, and permits free action within conditioning. Hope is not a forecast that tomorrow will improve. It supplies the courage to act precisely when ordinary grounds for optimism have disappeared.

Vanderburg’s appendices extend this architecture but are not Ellul’s direct speech. The first contrasts a cultural approach, which embeds practices and institutions in situated symbolic relationships, with a technical approach that abstracts one fragment of reality, reduces it to inputs, outputs, and a model, then reorganizes it according to an efficiency ratio. This method achieves remarkable results while excluding social and natural contexts from its calculations. Vanderburg illustrates the pattern through time-saving devices that leave people with less time, communications that do not end loneliness, transportation that homogenizes places, pollution controls that move contaminants rather than eliminate them, and agricultural or biological innovations that disregard ecological integrity. The second appendix connects the two halves of Ellul’s work more explicitly: sociological analysis identifies powers that alienate, while theological interpretation considers freedom from cultural idols.

Vanderburg describes myths, the sacred, and hierarchies of value as an implicit architecture of experience, at points comparing it to cultural DNA. In contemporary societies, technique and the nation-state occupy a place once held by other absolutes. Ellul’s iconoclasm makes these commitments visible so they no longer dictate judgment silently. The volume’s force finally rests on this double center. The 1979 interviews offer a situated life story and diagnosis; the 2004 prefaces and appendices supply the editor’s interpretation and later examples. Translation also introduces a recurring hazard by sometimes rendering technique as technology. The book provides neither a complete political program nor a certain forecast. It establishes three connected demands: examine interdependencies before judging an isolated tool, subordinate means to ends they did not create, and seek freedom through local practices capable of resisting their own technicization.