Bruno Latour

Early Life and Education

Bruno Latour was born on June 22, 1947, in Beaune, Burgundy, France, into a prominent wine-making family. He studied philosophy and theology before turning to the anthropology of science. His fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire and at the Salk Institute in San Diego in the 1970s set the course for his career.

Laboratory Life (1979)

Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979, with Steve Woolgar) was a foundational text of science studies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at Jonas Salk's neuroendocrinology laboratory, the book treated the laboratory as an anthropological site, observing how scientific facts are constructed through the interaction of scientists, instruments, inscriptions, and institutional negotiations. The subtitle was later changed from "Social Construction" to "Construction" in the second edition, reflecting Latour's growing dissatisfaction with the social constructivist label.

Actor-Network Theory

Latour, along with Michel Callon and John Law, developed actor-network theory (ANT) — a framework that treats science and society as constituted by heterogeneous networks of human and nonhuman "actants." In ANT, there is no fundamental distinction between the social and the natural, the human and the technical; all are entangled in networks of associations. A scientific fact, a technology, or an institution is stabilized when it successfully enrolls a sufficiently wide network of allies — both human and nonhuman.

The Pasteurization of France (1984) illustrated ANT through the case of Louis Pasteur, showing how the "discovery" of microbes was simultaneously a reorganization of French society — hospitals, farms, hygiene practices — achieved not by Pasteur alone but by an expanding network of actors including microbes, physicians, politicians, and laboratory instruments.

We Have Never Been Modern (1991)

Latour's most philosophically ambitious work, We Have Never Been Modern (1991), argued that the fundamental premise of modernity — the strict separation of nature and culture, object and subject, science and politics — has never actually been achieved. In practice, modernity proliferates hybrids (ozone holes, frozen embryos, artificial intelligence) that are simultaneously natural and cultural, scientific and political. The "modern constitution" purifies these hybrids into separate domains (nature vs. society) while simultaneously producing more of them.

Later Work: Politics of Nature and Gaia

Politics of Nature (2004) proposed a new political ecology that abandons the modernist separation of nature (represented by scientists) and society (represented by politicians) in favor of a collective process in which humans and nonhumans are assembled into a common world.

Latour's final major project focused on the ecological crisis. Facing Gaia (2017) and Down to Earth (2018) argued that the climate crisis demands a fundamental rethinking of politics, science, and the human relationship to the Earth. Drawing on James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Latour proposed that we understand the Earth not as a passive backdrop but as an active agent — Gaia — whose reactions to human action can no longer be ignored.

Latour taught at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the Mines ParisTech and later at Sciences Po Paris. He died on October 9, 2022, in Paris.