Preface

The evidence that socio-cultural evolution pushes us toward enlarged and centralized organizations is overwhelming. These structural organizations are patterning the lives of the increasing number of people subjected to their rule. Although many macro-social theorists recognize this, most fail to appreciate its full significance. It is the master trend of social evolution. It has been picking up momentum since the dawn of civilization, and since about 1500 it has been rapidly changing what it means to be human.

The dominant formal organizations in modern societies are governmental and capitalist. These public and private organizations are well suited to achieving their goals, but their entanglement with one another makes them formidable indeed. Furthermore, the recent past has seen many other types of organizations’ creation, proliferation, and enlargement. Examples include non-governmental organizations such as international charities like the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief and Save the Children; research institutes, churches, community-based organizations, lobby groups, and professional associations; and international agencies such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Finally, there are social movement organizations such as Greenpeace and the National Association of Colored People. Many of the latter organizations are concerned with similar issues, such as environmentalism or social justice, and they make common causes and work together to effect reform or to stop social change.

Study after study has remarked on the proliferation of formal organizations, a process that has accelerated since the 19th century (Caiden, 1985). Coyne (2008, p. 11) also comments on the increasing reliance on formal organizations because of “their efficiency in achieving complex activities.” In discussing the bureaucratization of the US judiciary, Fiss (1983, p. 1442) begins by briefly reviewing the history of bureaucracy in American life: “The history of the twentieth century is largely the history of increasing bureaucratization. Almost every phase of American life has come to be dominated by large-scale, complex organizations—the corporation, the labor union, the university, the public hospital, and even our national political agencies.” As Meyer and Bromley (2013, p. 366) remark, “a striking feature of societies around the world in recent decades has been the rapid growth of formal organizations in all social sectors. In state, market, and public good arenas alike, new forms arise, and older forms—traditional bureaucracies, family firms, professional and charitable associations—are transformed into managed and agentic [empowered to act] formal organizations.” They argue that this expansion is the result of “widespread rationalization.”

Riggs (1997) explores the impact of modernity on administrative states. He notes that industrialization has expanded governmental tasks and resources, necessitating efficient and humane public administration. “The need for complex and highly technical public services has been vastly increased by industrialization, as has the capacity of appointed officials to organize and arm themselves for collective action” (p. 348). This opinion agrees with Wilson’s (1975, p. 78) observation on the administrative state: “The number of administrative agencies and employees grew slowly but steadily during the 19th and early 20th centuries and then increased explosively on the occasion of World War I, the Depression, and World War II.” Since the end of the Second World War (1945), the growth of public and private bureaucracies has been even more explosive. Such organizations have multiplied, and digital technologies have allowed them to become enlarged, centralized, and allied with organizations with similar goals. This growth has broadened and deepened their reach into the daily lives of individuals, severely affecting our natural and social environments.

Rarely, however, do social scientists venture to discuss the more serious consequences of what Max Weber called the rationalization process. In brief, Weber asserted that four motivating forces drive human behaviour. Action can be driven by tradition or habit, such as the customs and norms of society. Habits such as exercise, eating healthy food, and going to school every weekday morning are examples of traditional motivating factors. Behaviour can also be motivated by values, such as those internalized by individuals from parents, peer groups, religion, or philosophy. Examples include being kind to strangers, making charitable contributions, and voting. Emotional actions are triggered by feelings such as greed, anger, and pleasure—states of mind derived from one’s genetics and triggered by one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. Finally, Weber asserted, there are actions specifically formulated to reach goals, such as establishing oneself in a career, seeking companionship, or amassing wealth.

Of course, Weber recognized that human behaviour is often motivated by a combination of these four factors or what he called “substantive rationality.” For example, in America today, surveys consistently find that the main motivating factors of individuals pursuing higher education are oriented toward career goals: to improve employment opportunities, to get better jobs, or to make more money. Nevertheless, many first-year students also indicate that they are undertaking higher education because they value learning more about their interests, gaining general knowledge about their societies, or satisfying their parents’ wishes. As with these students, most human actions have several motivating factors behind them involving some combination and relative strength of these four basic motivators.

However, Weber was not simply concerned with classifying human motivations. He also posited that goal-oriented action was becoming a more dominant motivating factor in modern life, brought about by changes in the social structures of modernizing societies. He called such action “formal rationality.” Bureaucratic organization—that is, organization specifically designed to achieve organizational goals efficiently—was replacing more traditional organizations based on kinship, tradition, religious or philosophical values, or community. Although Weber recognized many of the benefits of bureaucracy, such as efficiency and predictability, he also noted its potential for unintended and irrational outcomes.

Structured along lines of formal rationality, these organizations promote hierarchical layers of authority and task specialization of offices; selection and promotion of careerists based on qualifications and performance; written rules of operations and procedures; and impersonality in treating employees and the public whom they serve. This impersonality is a feature, not a bug, and it is supposed to promote the standard that everyone should be treated in the same way. Personal relationships and feelings (emotional motivation) should not factor in organizational decision making. Naturally, being human means that these bureaucratic ideals are often violated. Nevertheless, they are guides for behaviour, and there are often sanctions for violating these standards.

The specific goals of bureaucratic organizations vary, such as manufacturing goods, providing social services, collecting taxes, educating the young, or healing the sick. Regardless of the specific goal, bureaucracies are organized to attain their goals in the most efficient manner possible—meaning that organizations should do so with minimum cost, thus maximizing profits for private corporations (the highest goal of all capitalist enterprise) and budgetary discipline for governmental and other not-for-profit organizations. (Whether this efficiency is aimed at the short term or long term can make a significant difference regarding an organization’s impact on social life, the environment, and its own sustainability.)

Formal rational organizations also promote the rational goal-oriented behaviour of their employees and those whom they serve through their rules, examples, messages (education, advertising, public relations), and continued success. The social order, Weber (1958/1904, p. 181) reasoned, is now tied to the economic order—the development of ever more powerful technologies of production, specialized labour, expansion of markets, and ever more mass consumption. It is the economic order that regulates “the lives of all individuals” born into this system. Weber emphasized that it is not that the modern economic system affects all directly involved in producing goods and services but that it affects all.

In the past, according to Weber (1958/1904), most people only slightly emphasized external goods and placed far more emphasis and value on religion, family, and community. The value placed on external goods could be thrown aside “like a light cloak” at a moment’s notice. “But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage” (pp. 181–182). By this, Weber meant that our economic-political system—with its need for profit, economies of scale, social order, and mass production—has led to mass consumption that cannot be lightly abandoned. Hundreds of highly centralized and enlarged bureaucratic entities dominate social life with their laws, rules, plans, and agreements.

Rationalization theory has received some attention from sociologists. C. Wright Mills, for example, employed it extensively in his analysis of white-collar workers (1973/1951), the rising power of elites in modern industrial societies (1970/1956), and as a force within the social sciences (1959). George Ritzer (1993) popularized a version that he called “McDonaldization” by describing the rationalization of the fast-food industry and many other areas of modern life. Rationalization, either explicitly or implicitly, is also an important part of many analyses of modern societies. Sociologists such as Gerhard Lenski and Norbert Elias have employed the concept. However, Jacques Ellul (pronounced a-lool) is the only modern-day sociologist who has analyzed rationalization’s three principal components (physical technology, organization, and mindset), their interrelations, and their evolutionary trajectory.

In his most famous work, The Technological Society (1964), Ellul first defines technique in its various forms, consistent with Weber’s rationalization theory, and then explores its evolutionary development in the formal organizations that increasingly dominate modern societies. Perhaps most strikingly, he details the growing use and effectiveness of “human techniques” such as public relations, education, training, advertising, and propaganda aimed at controlling the beliefs and actions of individuals. Ellul sees propaganda and other human techniques as tools developed by formal organizations to motivate people to act consistently with the organizations’ goals—manipulating emotions, values, and beliefs to buy, vote, contribute, demonstrate, cheer, or hate. Propaganda is informed and refined through social science and experience. Propaganda is arguably the most serious threat to personal autonomy and democratic governance that we face today.

Google Scholar reviews the number of citations of articles and books by year in most of the major peer-reviewed journals. Such journals evaluate manuscripts by experts in the field before their publication, thus assuring quality and original work. Ellul’s citation history of two of his significant works, which Google Scholar reviewed, is fascinating. Beginning with one citation in 1964 when The Technological Society was published, it gradually increased to double-digit citations through 1989 (98). Then it increased to 116 in 1992, maintained an almost steady increase through 2020 (352), and plateaued through 2024 (321). Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (Ellul, 1965) shows a similar pattern, reaching a high point in 2018 (209) and plateauing around 200 since then. Neither The Technological System (1980) nor The Technological Bluff (1990) shows such a citation pattern, the first being moderately cited over the years, the second hardly cited at all. (Both books rehash much of the ground covered in Ellul’s classic studies, adding more details but few new insights into the technical phenomenon.) However, citation counts alone do not mean much; individual citations could be a passing reference to technological determinism (a standard charge of academics about Ellul’s work) or an in-depth analysis of his theory of technique. However, citation patterns indicate that Ellul’s major works are still considered relevant by an increasing number of researchers, perhaps because of world events consistent with his macro-theoretical perspective.

In this connection, I should also note that there is an International Jacques Ellul Society (https://ellul.org/). Estimates are that there are a few hundred members worldwide, primarily academics and individuals interested in his work on technique and propaganda. The society publishes a journal, the Ellul Forum, twice a year online. “The aim of the Forum is to promote awareness and understanding of Ellul’s life and work and encourage a community of dialogue on these subjects. The Forum publishes work by and about Jacques Ellul and about themes relevant to his life and thought, from historical, contemporary, or creative perspectives. Content is published in English and French” (International Jacques Ellul Society, 2025, para. 7). The society also publishes books and sponsors conferences about Ellul’s life and works. I am not a member, nor is the journal listed on Google Scholar.

Rather than undertaking an extensive review of the secondary literature on Ellul, I focused on his significant books to arrive at a fresh perspective, relatively unencumbered by layers of interpretation. This work aims to detail his macro-sociological theory of technique and explore its predictive accuracy over the past 60 years. Like Weber, Ellul identified the direction of the evolutionary change and wrote about its probable effects on the indefinite future. Although many might see the drift today, fewer conceive of the specific changes as part of an evolutionary process, and fewer still have taken that awareness and projected it into the future.

Ellul has had much to say about the origins of technique (rationalization), its characteristics, typologies, and continuous and almost automatic development. His work on propaganda as a recent development in human technique is relevant given the past 50 years, and particularly the past 10 years, in industrial nations. He has explored the overwhelming evidence for rationalization theory and its consequences for the future of human civilization. The impacts of the rationalization process on individuals, socio-cultural systems, and the natural environment are seriously underestimated even by most macro-social theorists. Rationalization leads to ever more efficient exploitation of the natural environment, workers, consumers, and citizens, often in pursuing organizational rather than human goals. The effects on individuals subject to the techniques of these rational organizations on the formation of character, values, and locus of control are profound.

Nobody has explored the causes and development of rationalization (technique) and its ramifications as thoroughly as Ellul. He is an exceptional social observer and theoretician, unflinching in his analyses. He writes extensively about human techniques such as advertising and other forms of propaganda by which organizations influence the thoughts and behaviours of individuals. As Ellul consistently points out, all of these human techniques are subject to further rationalization and greater improvements in their efficiency and effectiveness. Organizational power becomes overwhelming by combining these human techniques with technological advances in areas such as communications (television, internet, cell phones), monitoring behaviour (surveillance systems, facial recognition, internet tracking, big data), and computational power (supercomputers). These technical advances were developed by and tailored to bureaucratic organizations, and they are best positioned to exploit them fully. Further technical advances on the horizon—such as general artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G—will enhance organizational power and control.

Given the evolutionary trends, are there countervailing forces to the growth of organizational power? To quote Weber, “what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life?” (Quoted in Mayer, 1944, p. 128). I will explore that question as well. Ellul’s iteration of the rationalization process has held up well, and his macro-social theory deserves further exploration by social scientists. Although this book is intended to be a stand-alone overview of his theory, all readers are encouraged to read the original works for a more in-depth view of this remarkable sociologist.