Jacques Ellul: The Man Who Predicted the World We Live In. Nobody Listened

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Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, sociologist, and theologian who diagnosed the technological society decades before the rest of the world caught up to him. This documentary tells the complete life story of Jacques Ellul, from his childhood on the docks of Bordeaux to his sudden religious conversion, his work forging papers for the French Resistance, and the publication of The Technological Society, the book that quietly reshaped how a generation understood technology, propaganda, and power.

Ellul spent his career warning that modern life had become governed not by human choice but by technique, the relentless pursuit of efficiency for its own sake. He was largely ignored in France, found a devoted readership in America, and, in one of history's strangest ironies, was read closely by a reader who took his diagnosis somewhere Ellul never intended. This is the story of a philosopher who was right, and the cost of being heard by halves.

Further reading:
???? Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Vintage Books, 1964.
???? Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Vintage Books, 1973.
???? Ellul, Jacques. The Political Illusion. Vintage Books, 1972.
???? Ellul, Jacques. Anarchy and Christianity. Eerdmans, 1991.
???? Yad Vashem, Righteous Among the Nations database, Jacques Ellul recognition, 2001.

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Chapters:
00:00:00 The World He Foresaw
00:03:42 The Port City
00:07:07 The Family's Ruin
00:10:17 Marx and the Explanation
00:14:25 The Sudden Conversion
00:18:50 Charbonneau and the Countryside
00:22:06 The Personalist Manifesto
00:26:13 The Young Professor
00:29:58 Dismissed by Vichy
00:33:28 Sheltering the Hunted
00:37:31 Lessons of the Occupation
00:40:56 The Retreat from Politics
00:44:33 Two Vocations
00:48:19 Technique
00:52:43 The Man at His Desk
00:56:06 The Technological Society
01:00:42 Propaganda
01:04:55 The Political Illusion
01:08:36 Ignored in France
01:13:09 Hope in Abandonment
01:16:45 The Christian Anarchist
01:20:51 The Subversion of Christianity
01:24:32 The Reader in the Woods
01:28:31 The Manifesto
01:32:44 The Last Years
01:36:14 Death in Pessac
01:39:45 Righteous and Reviled
01:43:45 The World Catches Up
01:47:28 The Half That Was Heard
01:51:25 The Unfinished Warning

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