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Bruno Latour (1947–2022)

Latour argued that the modern settlement — the sharp division between nature (objective, given, discovered by science) and society (subjective, constructed, negotiated by politics) — is a fiction. In practice, the world is populated by hybrids: entities that are simultaneously natural and social, simultaneously discovered and constructed. Climate change is a scientific fact and a political controversy and an economic force and a cultural narrative — all at once. The attempt to sort these hybrids into “nature” or “society” is the modernist error that Latour spent his career diagnosing. We Have Never Been Modern (1991) names the diagnosis; actor-network theory provides the method (follow the actors, whether human or non-human, and describe the networks they form); and the later work — Politics of Nature (2004), An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012), and the Gaia lectures — develops the constructive alternative: a “composition” of the common world in which non-human actors (microbes, glaciers, CO₂ molecules, legal documents, technical instruments) have standing alongside humans.

Life

Born 22 June 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, France. His family were wine merchants. Studied philosophy; agrégation in philosophy and theology. Early fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire (1973–75) studying industrialisation and religion. PhD at the University of Tours.

The turn to science studies came with Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979, with Steve Woolgar), an ethnographic study of Roger Guillemin’s neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute. Latour and Woolgar observed scientists as anthropologists observe any community — tracking how facts are produced through inscription devices, negotiations, and institutional practices. The subtitle provoked: “social construction” implied that scientific facts are made, not found. Latour later distanced himself from the strong social-constructionist reading, arguing that the point was not that facts are merely social but that the division between “the natural” and “the social” is itself what needs to be questioned.

Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI) at the École des Mines de Paris (1982–2006), then at Sciences Po (2006–17), where he founded the médialab — a digital methods laboratory. Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. His later career was increasingly devoted to ecological politics and to the Gaia framework — the Earth as a system of entangled agencies, not a backdrop for human action. Died 9 October 2022 in Paris.

Actor-network theory

Actor-network theory (ANT) — developed by Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law from the early 1980s — is a method and an ontological commitment.

The method: follow the actors. Do not begin with a distinction between the natural and the social, between human and non-human, between the macro and the micro. Instead, trace the associations: what is connected to what, how entities are enrolled in networks, how alliances are built, maintained, and broken. A scientific fact is not discovered by a lone mind contemplating nature; it is produced by a network of instruments, inscriptions, colleagues, funding bodies, publications, and natural phenomena — all of which are “actants” in the network.

The ontological commitment: non-humans are actors. A microbe, a door-closer, a speed bump, a legal contract — each does something, each transforms the network it is part of, each has a form of agency. The symmetry principle: explain successes and failures, natural and social entities, humans and non-humans, with the same analytical vocabulary. Do not reserve “agency” for humans and “causation” for things.

Science in Action (1987) applies ANT to the history and sociology of science. The Pasteurization of France (1988) is the paradigm case: Pasteur did not singlehandedly discover microbes; he enrolled them — along with hygienists, farmers, military physicians, and laboratory instruments — into a network that transformed French public health. The microbe is an actor in the network, not a passive object discovered by a human subject.

We Have Never Been Modern

Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (1991) — Latour’s most influential theoretical statement. The argument:

The modern settlement divides the world into two ontological zones: Nature (the domain of non-human entities, studied by natural science, governed by objective laws) and Society (the domain of human relations, studied by social science, governed by norms and power). The division is maintained by a “Constitution” — an implicit agreement that the two zones are separate and that each has its own procedures for producing knowledge.

Latour argues that the division has never held. In practice, modernity produces hybrids — entities that are simultaneously natural and social — at an accelerating rate (climate change, genetically modified organisms, the internet, pandemics). The “purification” that the Constitution demands (sorting hybrids into nature or society) cannot keep up with the “translation” that actually happens (the proliferation of hybrids). The modern settlement is performative, not descriptive: it claims to separate nature from society while actually mixing them more thoroughly than any pre-modern society.

The conclusion: “we have never been modern” — the modern settlement has never accurately described how knowledge is produced or how the world is constituted. The alternative is not pre-modernity but a “nonmodern” framework that acknowledges hybrids, refuses the nature/society divide, and develops a politics that can accommodate non-human actors.

Where Latour stops

The symmetry principle — treat humans and non-humans with the same analytical vocabulary — has been the most criticised element of ANT. Critics from both science studies and philosophy have argued that the symmetry flattens genuine differences: a microbe and a scientist are both “actants,” but they do not act in the same way, and treating them symmetrically risks obscuring the distinctive character of human intentionality, moral responsibility, and political agency. David Bloor and the Edinburgh Strong Programme — from whom Latour partly drew the symmetry principle — argued that Latour’s extension of symmetry to non-humans goes beyond what the original programme intended. Whether the symmetry is a productive analytical move (it prevents us from assuming in advance what is “really” human and what is “really” natural) or an ontological confusion (it denies distinctions that matter) is the central debate in ANT’s reception.

The later ecological work — the Gaia lectures, Facing Gaia (2017), Down to Earth (2018) — stakes a political claim: that the ecological crisis requires a new politics in which the Earth is not a resource for human use but an entangled system of agencies that constrains and enables human action. The framework is suggestive, but its political implications are underdeveloped. What institutional form should a “Parliament of Things” take? How are conflicts between human and non-human interests adjudicated? Latour’s answers are programmatic — compositions to be built, not blueprints to be implemented — and the distance between the philosophical programme and practical politics has been noted by sympathetic readers (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway) as well as critical ones.

The relationship between Latour and Stengers — both use “cosmopolitics,” both draw on Whitehead, both challenge the modern settlement — is one of deep overlap and substantive disagreement. Latour affirms a universal common world to be composed; Stengers rejects universality and stays with situated practice. The divergence runs through their respective cosmopolitics and has not been resolved. Whether their projects are complementary (different emphases within a shared framework) or genuinely rival (different commitments about universality) is debated within the science-studies and process-philosophy communities.

Key works

See also: Stengers · Whitehead · Connolly · Cosmopolitics · Process philosophy · Philosophy of organism