barb howe’s Reviews > The Technological Society > Status Update

Locke was one of the first modern thinkers (the modern period begins in the 1500s with Machiavelli). He argued that philosophers should stop trying to do things like working out rational proofs for the existence of God (or of one’s self as in Descartes’ case) because those things aren’t knowable and just focus on this world that we live in which we can know.

It’s non-philosophy that he’s criticizing here. Empiricism. The belief (too-familiar to us today, like the “water” that fish swim in) that knowledge of the world that comes to us through the senses (maybe combined with a little rationality). We can blame Locke for this (says me, not Ellul).

What Ellul is really talking about in The Technological Society is modernism, or, more specifically, modern epistemology. Modernism = a belief in knowledge for utilitarian purposes, purposeful knowledge to achieve some political goal.