We Have Never Been Modern

Overview

We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English 1993) is Bruno Latour's philosophical diagnosis of modernity. Its thesis is contained in its title: modernity's self-image — the division of the world into nature and society, science and politics, subject and object — was never true. The moderns believed they were different from the premoderns because they separated nature from culture and let science speak for the first while politics negotiated the second. But in practice, Latour argues, modernity has always been busy manufacturing the very mixtures it denies: the ozone hole, global warming, genetic engineering — "hybrids" that are simultaneously natural, social, and discursive.

The book is a compact, brilliant, and at times aphoristic essay. It analyzes what Latour calls the "Modern Constitution," explains how the practice of "purification" (separating nature and society) coexists with the practice of "translation" (multiplying hybrids), and concludes that the constitution was never actually observed. Because we have never been modern, Latour argues, we are free — and obliged — to think beyond modernity's categories.

Core Ideas

The Modern Constitution

Latour's central concept is the "Modern Constitution": the set of unacknowledged rules by which modernity organizes its knowledge and its politics. The constitution has three guarantees. First, nature is "out there": it is objective, transcendent, and beyond human construction — the domain of science. Second, society is "in here": it is immanent, constructed by us — the domain of politics. Third, the two are absolutely separate: science speaks about nature, politics speaks about society, and never the twain shall meet. This constitution makes possible the modern division of intellectual labor — and, Latour insists, it also makes possible the moderns' power over others, who are defined as the people who fail to make the separation.

Purification and Translation

Modernity, Latour argues, runs on two contradictory practices. The first is purification: the official work of separating nature from society, facts from values, science from politics. The second is translation: the actual work of creating hybrids — networks that mix the human and the non-human. Climate change is a hybrid: it is atmospheric chemistry (nature), economic policy (society), and discourse (language) all at once. Genetic engineering, the AIDS virus, the smartphone — every object of modern life is a hybrid. The constitution's trick is to deny the hybrids while multiplying them: the more purification succeeds, the more translation proliferates, and the two processes feed each other. Modernity is this double movement, and its official ideology is the denial of the second half.

The Great Divide

The Modern Constitution also licenses a "Great Divide" between the moderns and everyone else. The moderns claim that their science gives them access to universal nature, while "premoderns" remain trapped in culture, myth, and the confusion of the human and the non-human. Latour inverts the claim: the premoderns, by refusing the purification, were actually better equipped to deal with hybrids, which they managed through complex systems of negotiation — religion, ritual, taboo. The moderns' claim to have crossed the Great Divide is itself a modern myth, and it has justified colonization, extraction, and the suppression of alternative ways of knowing. "The moderns," Latour writes, "have the peculiar property of being able to be the only ones who know that they are not in the world, because they have made the world."

The Nonmodern Alternative

Because the constitution was never actually observed, Latour argues, we are not condemned to modernity's frame. He proposes a "nonmodern" alternative: a political and intellectual practice that takes hybrids seriously, that refuses the division of labor between science and politics, and that represents the human and the non-human together in a common "collective." Instead of a nature that is out there and a society that is in here, the nonmodern imagines a single "parliament of things" in which facts and values, humans and non-humans, are composed together. This is not a return to premodernity but a step beyond the modern illusion — a way of thinking adequate to the age of ecological crisis, in which nature has returned with a vengeance and can no longer be purified away.

The Quarrel of the Moderns and the Others

The book's final movement examines what Latour calls "the quarrel of the moderns and the others" — the Great Divide between the West and everyone else. The moderns claimed that their science gave them access to universal nature, while "premoderns" remained trapped in their local cultures; this claim licensed centuries of conquest, extraction, and the suppression of other ways of knowing. Latour argues that the Great Divide was never a real difference in cognitive capacity but an effect of the Modern Constitution itself: the moderns could afford to be "modern" only because their hybrids were being managed by the very networks they refused to see. The environmental crisis has made this structure untenable: the "others" of modernity are now its teachers, and the nonmodern constitution — which takes hybrids seriously — is no longer an option but a necessity.

Historical Context

The book appeared in 1991, at the end of the Cold War and at the height of the "science wars," in which Latour was a central (and frequently caricatured) figure. It belongs to his movement from the anthropology of science — the study of how scientific facts are constructed in laboratories — to the philosophy of modernity as a whole. The book also appeared just as the environmental crisis was becoming a global political fact: the ozone hole and global warming were the era's defining hybrids, and Latour's analysis of purification and translation reads today as an uncannily accurate description of climate denial and the "nature" debates.

Legacy

We Have Never Been Modern is one of the most influential works in science and technology studies and a canonical text for the social construction of technology tradition. Its concepts — the Modern Constitution, purification and translation, the Great Divide, the parliament of things — have become standard tools for thinking about science, politics, and the environment, and its critique of modernity's self-image has shaped fields from geography and anthropology to media studies and the environmental humanities.

Critics have complained that the book's argument is more suggestive than systematic, and defenders of scientific realism have accused Latour of relativism — an accusation he spent the rest of his career refuting. The book's response to the climate crisis, developed in his later work, is the strongest proof of its power: the hybrid that modernity most denied — the planet itself — has returned to undo the constitution. We Have Never Been Modern remains the essential statement of the claim that our categories are the problem, and that thinking beyond them is the task of our age.

In an age of climate crisis, pandemics, and planetary-scale technologies, the book's claim that we have never been modern has become almost self-evident: the hybrids are everywhere, and the separation of nature and society is no longer sustainable even as an ideal. The nonmodern alternative it proposed has become the common horizon of ecological thought.

Sources

• Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Latour, Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
• Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.