Nisbet, Robert A. "The Grand Illusion: An Appreciation of Jacques." Commentary Magazine. 1970.

Abstract:

Jacques Ellul is a deeply respected lay theologian in the (Protestant) Reformed Church of France, and also professor of law and history at the University of Bordeaux. He was born in Bordeaux in 1912, attended first the University there, then the University of Paris where he took his doctorate in law. During World War II, he was, along with Camus, Malraux, and Sartre, a leader in the French Resistance. No contemplative, he has served as Deputy Mayor of Bordeaux and is today active in a score of religious and civic enterprises in France. Along the way, beginning in 1946, he has published some of the finest books to come out of Europe in the sphere of politics and sociology during the last half century.1 His reputation in this country, which in some circles is substantial, is based, as far as I can make out, on a crucial misunderstanding of his essential position. This is a subject to which I shall wish to return.

In order to begin to understand Ellul’s work one must recognize from the outset that his is a profoundly religious mind. It was, indeed, in theology that his writings of the last quarter of a century began. His latest volume, Violence, is, like his first two, primarily devoted to the relation of religion to the social order. In between are studies preeminently concerned with the nature of the political process, and above all with what Ellul calls, in the title of one of his best books, the political illusion.

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