Bruno Latour

Biography

Bruno Latour was born on June 22, 1947, in Beaune, France, into a family of winemakers. He studied philosophy at the University of Dijon and then turned to anthropology, working in the Ivory Coast on questions of race, economics, and culture. His decisive move was to apply the anthropologist's methods — normally reserved for "exotic" societies — to the scientific laboratories of the West. In the mid-1970s, at the Salk Institute in San Diego, he spent two years observing biologists at work, an experience that produced Laboratory Life (1979, with Steve Woolgar), one of the founding texts of science and technology studies.

Latour taught at the École des Mines in Paris, where he built the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation with Michel Callon, and later became professor at Sciences Po Paris, where he helped found the Médialab. His work moved from the study of science to the philosophy of modernity, ecology, politics, and religion, and he became one of the most cited and most controversial thinkers of his generation. He was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2013, was a 2021 Kyoto Prize laureate, and remained an unquiet voice on the climate crisis until his death on October 9, 2022.

Key Ideas

Actor-Network Theory

With Michel Callon and John Law, Latour developed actor-network theory (ANT): the claim that social order is produced by heterogeneous networks of human and non-human "actors." A scientist, a bacterium, a laboratory instrument, a funding agency, a legal text — all are actants whose associations form the networks we call science, technology, and society. ANT refuses the division of the world into subjects and objects, society and nature, and instead follows the actors themselves, tracing how associations are built, stabilized, and dissolved. Its methodological slogan is "follow the actors": do not impose categories on the world; describe how the world assembles itself.

Laboratory Life and the Construction of Scientific Facts

In Laboratory Life, Latour and Woolgar showed that scientific facts are not discovered ready-made but are constructed through material, rhetorical, and social labor: inscriptions, instruments, papers, negotiations. The now-famous claim is not that facts are false or arbitrary but that their certainty is an achievement — a fact is a statement that has been made so robust that no one can contest it. This "social construction" thesis made Latour a central figure in the science wars of the 1990s, though his position was always more subtle than the relativism his critics attributed to him: he insisted that the construction of facts is also the construction of the world they describe.

The Modern Constitution and Hybrids

Latour's most philosophical work, We Have Never Been Modern (1991), diagnoses modernity as a divided constitution. On one side, the "purification" work of modernity separates nature from society, science from politics, the objective from the subjective. On the other side, its "translation" work multiplies hybrids — climate change, genetic engineering, the ozone hole — entities that are simultaneously natural, social, and discursive. Modernity's self-image is false: the more it purified, the more hybrids it produced. Hence the book's title: we have never been modern, because we have always been busy making the mixtures that modernity denies. Latour proposes a "nonmodern" alternative: a politics that takes hybrids seriously, neither reducing nature to society nor society to nature.

Politics of Nature and the Ecological Turn

In his later work, Latour turned his network thinking to ecology and politics. Politics of Nature (1999) argues that "nature" is not a resource for politics but a problem for it: the collective must compose the world, humans and non-humans together, rather than discovering it ready-made. His Gifford Lectures, published as Facing Gaia (2017), engaged climate change as the return of the repressed of modernity, and his last work, Down to Earth (2017), described the "new climatic regime" in which the ground of political life itself has shifted. The ecological crisis, for Latour, is not a topic among others but the frame in which all politics now takes place.

The Parliament of Things

Latour's positive proposal in We Have Never Been Modern is a new political form: the "Parliament of Things." Since hybrids are simultaneously natural and social, neither the scientific forum, which speaks for nature, nor the political assembly, which speaks for society, can represent them alone. What is needed is a collective in which scientists, citizens, and the things themselves — the ozone layer, the virus, the river — are all represented, and in which the separation of facts from values is suspended. This is not a literal legislature of objects but a way of practicing politics that refuses the modern division of labor: a politics in which "nature" is not a resource to be discovered but a matter of common concern to be composed. The proposal has become a touchstone for contemporary ecological thought, which struggles precisely with the question of how to give the non-human a voice in human decisions.

Major Works

Laboratory Life (1979) founded the anthropology of science. Science in Action (1987) set out the method of following scientists and engineers in the making. We Have Never Been Modern (1991) is his philosophical masterwork. Pandora's Hope (1999) deepened his account of scientific practice, and Reassembling the Social (2005) offered a systematic introduction to actor-network theory. Facing Gaia (2017) and Down to Earth (2017) brought his analysis to the climate crisis.

Legacy

Latour changed the study of science and technology. The "science studies" that he helped create — along with his insistence that technology be understood as a social achievement rather than an external force — underlies the social construction of technology tradition, and actor-network theory is now used across sociology, geography, management studies, anthropology, and beyond. His critique of the Modern Constitution remains one of the most powerful philosophical accounts of the environmental and technological condition.

Latour was also one of the most attacked thinkers of his generation, denounced as a relativist by scientists and as a capitulator to science by humanities scholars — usually by people who had read him hastily. His response to the climate crisis, arguing that "construction" and "realism" are allies rather than enemies, proved prescient: the planet is real, and it is also thoroughly entangled with our categories and our institutions. His work remains indispensable for thinking about what modernity was, what it has become, and what comes after.

Sources

• Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
• Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
• Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.