anarchy

city

technological milieu

technology

nationality

French

religion

Christianity

occupation / innovator as

philosopher

sociologist

theologian

innovator in the field of

philosophy

sociology

theology

intellectual movement

degrowth

anarchism

French Resistance fighter

university teacher

is, above all, grounded in an absolute rejection of violence.

There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must, first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence.

is an enormous man-eater. It devours men. Its very character is to receive from the outside... to consume, and to produce things usable only inside the city and to her gain.

Like a vampire, it preys on the true living creation . . . .We cannot repeat too often that the city is an enormous man-eater . . . . The city devours men. Its very character is to receive from the outside... to consume, and to produce things usable only inside the city and to her gain There is something magical about her attractiveness, and it is impossible to explain men's passion for the city . . . . The irresistible current flowing in long unconscious waves to pull men toward her dead asphalt, without giving a thought for her force, her seductive power. Ibid. ELLUL, Jacques (1912 ) . The Meaning of the City

is a place outside of which the intellectual life cannot exist. We cannot conceive of Plato without Athens, or Racine without Paris.

It is maddening perhaps, but we cannot conceive of Plato without Athens, or Racine without Paris. I am not trying to set the city up as an invariable conditioning factor, but we must recognize that the intellectual life cannot exist outside the city. It is true that Montaigne withdrew to the country to write his Essays but it cannot be denied that their substance was taken from his life in Bordeaux. The Meaning of the City ELLUL, Jacques (1912 )

is a milieu in which humans are now embedded, independent of human intervention and self-determining. It the neither benign nor evil realm within which such matters as human freedom must be addressed.

Jacques Ellul, one of the leading exponents of this view, goes so far as to argue that humans are now embedded in a technological milieu (something he terms 'technique') rather than a natural milieu (Ellul 1963). This milieu is internally consistent, like nature, and is self-determining in the sense that it is independent of human intervention. Social phenomena exist within this context, not in separate-but-equivalent domains of human behaviour. The technological milieu is value-neutral, neither necessarily benign nor necessarily evil. Nevertheless, it is the essential context within which such matters as human freedom must be addressed.' (Wynn in Ingold 141) Wynn, Thomas. Tools and Tool Behavior.

is not machinery, but an instrumental-rational practice.

Ellul defines technology (la technique) not as machinery but as instrumental-rational practice. 'In our technological society,' he writes, 'technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity' (The technological society,

Jacques EllulThinkers

Jacques Ellul