Latour, Bruno (1947—)
French sociologist of science and technology. One of the most influential thinkers of the new century, and certainly the most influential social analyst of science of the past fifty years. His model of analysis known as actor network theory or ANT is very widely used in the social sciences and humanities. Citations of his work number in the tens of thousands. He studied theology and philosophy as an undergraduate and wrote his PhD on Charles Péguy. He did military service in Africa in the early 1970s, where, under the guidance of Augé, Marc, he wrote a study of industrial relations in Côte d’Ivoire. In 1975, thanks to a Fulbright fellowship, he was given the opportunity to undertake an ethnography (working in collaboration with British sociologist Steve Woolgar) of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. The results of this research were published as The Laboratory of Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979). It revolutionized the way science is perceived. By closely observing actual practice in the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar showed that science is not a purely objective search for immutable facts, and that what we consider facts are themselves social constructions. Latour developed this theme further in two follow-up works: Science in Action (1987) and The Pasteurization of France (1988), both of which offer historical reconstructions of scientific discoveries---of DNA and microbes respectively---as a way of understanding the production of scientific knowledge. Latour’s argument in this trilogy of works on science is that science and society are co-creations: neither could be what it is without the agencies of the other. This means, as Latour argues in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), that the idea of progress is untenable because it implies that the one---science---spurs the development of the other---society---or the other way round, but either way it presupposes the interdependence of the two. If progress is untenable as an idea, then so must modernity be: hence the title of the book. Ultimately, one might say Latour’s main project is not so much to change how we understand science as it is to deconstruct the ideas that we have about the constitution of society. At the heart of this deconstruction of the notion of society is the model of thinking known as ANT, which turns on the idea that agency is not just the province of humans, but can be found in non-humans as well (which includes both the animate and the inanimate) and is distributed across an entire network. In this way Latour is able to show that machines in a laboratory, for example, have just as much influence in decision-making as humans do, although they exert their influence differently. In 2013 Latour attempted to pull together all his thinking about the constitution of society into a quasi-manifesto, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. In so doing he attempts to transform sociology into metaphysics. Further Reading: G. de Vries Bruno Latour (2016). G. Harman Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (2014).