Find more information about:OCLC Number:614671543Reproduction Notes:Electronic reproduction. S.l.: HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDLDescription:1 online resource (xxi, 258 pages)Details:Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002.Contents:Introduction: Politization -The necessary and the ephemeral. The necessary; The ephemeral -THe autonomy of politics. The monopoly of force; Objections -Politics in the world of images.
Political facts; The psychopolitical universe and political problems; Political action -The political illusion: control of the state. The bureaucracy; Administration and men -The political illusion: participation -The political illusion: 'political solutions'.
Politics as general solution; Politics as attainment of values -Depolitization and tensions. Depolitize?; Tension -Man and democracy. The unprecedented nature of the problem; Democratic man -Appendix: The democratization of economic planning.Other Titles:Illusion politique.Responsibility:Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen.More information:.
Both as title and as organizing concept, The Political Illusion is the phrase that best epitomizes the direction of Ellul’s exploration of the secular order. For Ellul there is a kind of violence involved in the seizure of the religious mind by politics in the contemporary world. In his most recent book, Violence, where he addresses himself solely to Christians, and particularly to the younger and militant clergy who believe that there is such a thing as Christian violence, Ellul is chiefly concerned with emancipating the Christian mind from what he sees as the invading tyranny of politics: of converting all questions of good and evil into political questions. In The Political Illusion, however, as in Propaganda, and in A Critique of the New Commonplaces, Ellul addresses himself to all in our age, not merely to Christians. It is important for all to become emancipated from the political illusion, the illusion that moral, social, aesthetic, and other values must be conceived and dealt with in the language of politics, chiefly the language of Plato and of Rousseau. “In the 17th century we could have written of the comic illusion. In our day the illusion has become tragic.
It is political.”The two foremost realities of the contemporary age, Ellul writes, are, first, the triumph of the political state as sovereign structure in all areas of our life and, second, the degree of politicization that has occurred, in the name of democracy and freedom, whereby the political relationship among men has become the dominant relationship, and political values have become the supreme values. We talk endlessly of politics, Ellul suggests, in an unconscious effort to hide the void in our actual situation. Modern writing is filled with political disillusionment: disillusionment with the consequences of this or that piece of bureaucracy created to meet a problem; disillusionment with the consequences of this or that overall political system—socialism, communism, fascism, managerialism in its many forms; disillusionment, in short, with the multifold consequences of politics. But hope defined politically springs eternal in modern man’s breast. Cisco vpn rapidshare. Politics, as we have seen, is for Ellul the very essence of modernity. And almost always disillusionment with the consequences of politics, of the political habit of mind, is the source of some new form of political illusion.
The Political Illusion Jacques Ellul Pdf Book
That new illusion may be something called essential democracy, concerned democracy, juridical democracy, or a similar variant on the common theme. It is worthwhile listing them immediately (the bracketed date refers to the original publication in France): The Theological Foundation of Law (1946), The Presence of the Kingdom (1948), The Technological Society (1954), Propaganda (1962), The Political Illusion (1965), A Critique of the New Commonplaces (1966), and Violence (1969). The first two and the last are published in this country by the Seabury Press; the others by Alfred A. I do not offer this as a necessarily complete list of Ellul’s books.I have written about this extraordinary figure, the true founder of social or liberal Catholicism, in an essay first published in 1948 and reprinted in my Tradition and Revolt. Several books on Lamennais have recently appeared; I predict more.What I mean here may best be illustrated by the almost reverential treatment accorded Theodore J. Lowi’s The End of Liberalism, published a year ago.
Jacques Ellul The Political Illusion Pdf
Following 296 pages of all too familiar indictment of the consequences of “new feudalism,” capitalism, urbanism, technology—and also, be it noted well, of governmental efforts to deal with these—we are given exactly seventeen pages of brief in behalf of something called Juridical Democracy (Professor Lowi’s capitals). Juridical Democracy succeeds the General Will and Lenin’s revolutionary democracy as the liberative hope of the masses presently oppressed not by feudalism or by capitalism but by what Professor Lowi calls “Interest-Group Liberalism.” One can only look, half in wonder, half in despair, at the concept of Juridical Democracy, at least as elaborated in seventeen out of 314 pages. As presented, it bears about as much relation to any known actualities of modern political government as Kant’s ding an sich does to a pregnant skunk. Such, however, is the utter bankruptcy of political theory in this country that the book has been reviewed in terms that might have been reserved for the real successor of Rousseau and Lenin.