constraint on relativistic instrumental value. Jacques Ellul Jacques Ellul made scholarly contributions to many fields, but his American reputation grew out of his criticism of the autonomous authority of instrumental value, the criterion that John Dewey and J. Fagg Foster found to be the core of human rationality. He specifically criticized the valuations central to Dewey's and Foster's thesis: evolving instrumental technology. His principal work, published in 1954, bore the French title La technique and tackles the problem that Dewey addressed in 1929: a culture in which the authority of evolving technology destroys traditional valuations without creating legitimate new ones. Both men agree that conditionally-efficient valuations ("what is") become irrational when viewed as unconditionally efficient in themselves ("what ought to be"). However, while Dewey argues that contaminated instrumental valuations can be self-correcting, Ellul concludes that technology has become intrinsically destructive. The only escape from this evil is to restore authority to unconditional sacred valuations: The English edition of La technique was published in 1964, titled The Technological Society, and quickly entered ongoing disputes in the United States over the responsibility of instrumental value for destructive social consequences. The translator of Technological Society summarizes Ellul's thesis: Ellul opens The Technological Society by asserting that instrumental efficiency is no longer a conditional criterion. It has become autonomous and absolute: He blames instrumental valuations for destroying intrinsic meanings of human life: "Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature. Life in such an environment has no meaning." While Weber had labeled the discrediting of intrinsic valuations as disenchantment, Ellul came to label it as "terrorism." He dates its domination to the 1800s, when centuries-old handicraft techniques were massively eliminated by inhuman industry.When, in the 19th century, society began to elaborate an exclusively rational technique which acknowledged only considerations of efficiency, it was felt that not only the traditions but the deepest instincts of humankind had been violated. Culture is necessarily humanistic or it does not exist at all.… [I]t answers questions about the meaning of life, the possibility of reunion with ultimate being, the attempt to overcome human finitude, and all other questions that they have to ask and handle. But technique cannot deal with such things.… Culture exists only if it raises the question of meaning and values [valuations].… Technique is not at all concerned about the meaning of life, and it rejects any relation