Sociology

Jacques Ellul Jacques Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France, on 6 January 1912, and died in Pessac, in the Bordeaux metropolitan area, on 19 May 1994. Trained in law, history, and sociology, he spent decades as professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the Faculty of Law and Economic Science of the University of Bordeaux. In 1932 he underwent what he described as a “very brutal, very sudden” religious conversion, an episode that led him to join the Reformed Church of France and to sustain, throughout his life, a body of work he insisted must be read dialectically as two poles of a single thought: the sociological analysis of modern technique and Christian theological reflection. During the Second World War he took part in the French Resistance; in 2001, seven years after his death, he was recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” for having helped Jews escape Nazi persecution. ...