Recently, I finished reading Jacques Ellul’s The Political Illusion (L'illusion politique, 1965). Despite its age, I think it is a must-read for anyone interested in politics and society. Ellul asks a number of difficult questions that are either ignored or excused in polite company today. Doubtless they were either ignored or excused in his day as well. But that is precisely why they must be confronted.
Ellul begins with a quote from Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767-94), a French revolutionary and leader of the Club des Jacobins. In principle, Saint-Just was committed to liberté, égalité, and fraternité. But Ellul highlights a quote that indicates the dark side of the French Revolution and its democratic pretensions: “The people will fancy an appearance of freedom,” Saint-Just writes, “illusion will be their native land.” For nearly 300 pages, Ellul endeavors to show that Saint-Just’s statement is not only a matter of history but an ongoing reality. Written in the wake of two world wars, Ellul’s thesis does indeed clash with modern sensibilities. The liberal-republican regimes of the West, so the thinking goes, have overcome the authoritarian and totalitarian impulses that formerly threatened the global order. However, Ellul is as skeptical as he is apprehensive. The more people assume that politics is the answer to our social ills, the more they fall into a “trance,” captured by “myths” of legislative and juridical progress. If, as Nietzsche proclaimed, God is dead, then Ellul believes that politics has usurped his place. We are attached “to these works of man” precisely because we need them to give meaning to our lives.
Ellul presses his case across eight chapters, in addition to an Introduction and an Appendix. Those who know his work would not be surprised that a major feature of his argument is the role of technology in modern life. Building on his seminal volume La Technique ou L’enjeu du Siècle (1954, later published in English as The Technological Society), Ellul understands modern society in hierarchical terms: just as the general populace “think[s] of everything as political” and “place[s] everything in the hands of the state,” so do governmental leaders answer to a higher power—namely, an ever-increasing global order that, in actuality, is not run by politicians but by technicians. For example, in the same way that we all must accept the latest broadband cellular network (from 4G to 5G), so must statesmen operate within a framework predetermined by arbiters of efficiency. “Necessity subordinates political decisions to technical evaluations,” notes Ellul. That is why the policy decisions of legislators are not as disparate as their rhetoric would otherwise suggest. The “illusion” is that politicians—and those who elect them—are active agents on the world stage when, in reality, they are but cogs in the machine.
The Political Illusion is replete with examples of this tendency. Many of these are now ostensibly dated—the Algerian Revolution, for instance—but on many occasions there is an eerie and almost prescient overlap with contemporary issues. Late in the book, Ellul takes on the subject of economic planning. As citizens, we ask that our politicians promote fiscal stability and, ultimately, prosperity. But this is misleading. Rare is the politician who can be counted as a “specialist” in these areas. On the contrary, politicians depend on short-term and middle-term technicians who, in turn, are working within the constraints of a longterm agenda set out by prior specialists. Thus policies can be subtly adjusted but only within a rigid overarching system. Yet, if this is true, what is the role of the political leader? Ellul, naturally, views him as an illusionist, who deftly employs photo-ops, sound bites, speeches, and (today) social media to beguile audiences. The politician’s deception is twofold—first, that she is responsible for genuine social change and, second, that we too are important agents in this process. In truth, there is only so much anyone can do in the face of a global techno-scientific order that underpins even apparently contrasting forms of government (say, the United States and China).
To be sure, it’s not hard to find contemporary examples of this phenomenon. Since the Russo-Ukrainian War resumed earlier this year, the Biden administration has sought to end American reliance on crude oil from Russia. This would seem to be an obvious case of policy shift, inasmuch as the previous Trump administration had relied heavily on Russian oil imports. But Ellul would no doubt call this a ruse. After all, the Biden administration has certain non-negotiable political directives. Just yesterday, President Biden released a statement praising current rates of “consumer spending, business investment, and residential investment,” showing that the “American economy…continues to be resilient in the face of historic challenges.” Like any presidential administration, then, the Biden team is seeking to promote economic growth (or, in technical terms, GDP). This economic absolute precedes and dictates smaller policy changes, particularly when things aren’t going according to plan. Hence, in cutting off ties to Russian oil, President Biden has recently reached out to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro for possible help with crude oil supplies—a seemingly contradictory move, given the Biden administration’s professed commitment to progressive environmental policies and the Maduro regime’s own “catastrophic” environmental record. As Ellul would surely point out, a politician such as Biden (or Trump or whomever) can choose which dictator to rely on—such decisions are part of the illusionary “performance”—but the overall economic program will always receive priority.
For many, Ellul’s standpoint will seem cynical at best, defeatist at worst. In truth, however, he views himself as a realist, whose task is to demythologize the “politization” of Western culture. As he emphasizes, “I have never claimed that man is by nature as I have tried to describe.” For him, in other words, this is very much a socio-cultural situation, and it has to be identified as such: “We should stop pretending and attributing to ourselves values and virtues (freedom, for example) that do not exist even in appearance.” In this sense, and for this book at least, Ellul is essentially an apophatic thinker. Elsewhere it becomes clear that he believes that only grassroots local communities, rooted in a respect for the sacred, can hold out against l’illusion politique.
You write: "For many, Ellul’s standpoint will seem cynical at best, defeatist at worst. In truth, however, he views himself as a realist, whose task is to demythologize the “politization” of Western culture. ... “We should stop pretending and attributing to ourselves values and virtues (freedom, for example) that do not exist even in appearance.” ... Ellul is essentially an apophatic thinker."
That last paragraph really does bring together the thought of the post as a whole. I was struggling to follow at the outset the quotation from Saint-Just that the people believe in freedom, but freedom is illusionary, because the point wasn't illustrated with anything specific, but the rest of the post describing the massive gap between the appearance of political agency of elected officials and the actual complexity of the technical apparatus constraining their actions does make compelling sense: the emotional and spiritual investment in politics as a
means of liberation is disproportionate to what it can ever actually achieve.
It's interesting to think of Ellul as an apophatic thinker, and helpful. To say that any and all political *action,* any working-together as citizens on any level, is already dead in the water seems cynical. To say that what we need to do is think harder about what we can hope from political action, so that we would be less deluded, is actually a hopeful, if unpopular, approach. Hopeful because there is hope for an increase in truthfulness, which in and of itself is worth taking a rigorous and unpopular path.
Yes, think he’s more hopeful in “the individual” than in the collective, however.