Perpetuating the Technological Ideology: An Ellulian Critique of Feenberg’s Democratized Rationalization

Andrew Feenberg, in his book Questioning Technology, offers his theory of “democratized rationalization” as a critical alternative to Jacques Ellul’s essentialist perspective. Feenberg argues that Ellul has confused the tendency toward efficiency in technological discourse with the essence of technology, thereby disallowing for a “positive program” of technological change. This article suggests that Feenberg’s “critical theory of technology” does not accurately portray Ellul’s ideas about technology, which were crafted over 40 books and hundreds of articles, and that a reading of Feenberg from an Ellulian perspective reveals Questioning Technology to be: (a) a trend that Ellul predicted in technological scholarship, (b) an unfavorable trend that does not answer the problems posed by Ellul, and (c) an actual furthering of the “technological ideology” that Ellul carefully described in detail over several decades of research. This article concludes that the current trends toward praising democratization should be revisited in light of this Ellulian analysis.