Introduction: Ellul returns
Many nineteenth century thinkers, convinced of the Enlightenment premise that both nature and society were intelligible, and carried away by the growing prestige of the sciences, saw progress as a natural human development and believed that rational criteria guided societal choices. Biological evolution also appeared to provide a model for change applicable to history. An associated triumphalism in modernity dominated European popular culture until the outbreak of World War I and the post-war rise of dictatorial regimes. Yet even then a positive view of science remained largely intact. Even after World War II, the Shoah, saturation bombings of civilians, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the industrialization of science proceeded at an ever faster pace, assisted by an increasing involvement of state power. The United States science adviser Vannevar Bush (1945) went so far as to present post-World War II science as an “endless frontier” and font of social benefits in healthcare, economic development, and military defense.
La technique, ou, L'enjeu du siècle
In The technological society, Ellul delivers an extensive analysis of modern technique: he says what it is, what it induces and he issues the dark prophecy of its great triumph. The volume is the first section of a trilogy that also includes The Technological Society, issued in 1977, and The Technological Bluff, issued in 1988 – a trilogy to which one may add the 1962 and 1965 essays, Propaganda and The Political Illusion, which dive into the heart of a State’s technical mechanisms.
Vannevar Bush and the differential analyzer: the text and context of an early computer
One day in 1942, the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer was dedicated to winning the war. For the next several years this large mathematical machine, the centerpiece of MIT's Center of Analysis, labored over the calculation of firing tables and the profiles of radar antennas.' Weighing almost a hundred tons and comprising some two thousand vacuum tubes, several thousand relays, a hundred and fifty motors, and automated input units, the analyzer was the most important computer in existence in the United States at the end of the war.2 (See fig. 1.) Wartime security prohibited its public announcement until