Bruno Latour

Latour died from pancreatic cancer on 9 October 2022, at the age of 75.

On 13 March 2013, he was announced as the winner of the 2013 Holberg Prize. The prize committee stated that "Bruno Latour has undertaken an ambitious analysis and reinterpretation of modernity, and has challenged fundamental concepts such as the distinction between modern and pre-modern, nature and society, human and non-human." The committee states that "the impact of Latour's work is evident internationally and far beyond studies of the history of science, art history, history, philosophy, anthropology, geography, theology, literature and law."

A 2013 article in Aftenposten by Jon Elster criticised the conferment to Latour, by saying "The question is, does he deserve the prize. ... If the statutes [of the award] had used new knowledge as a main criteria, instead of one of several, then he would be completely unqualified in my opinion."

On 22 May 2008, Latour was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Montréal on the occasion of an organizational communication conference held in honor of the work of James R. Taylor, on whom Latour has had an important influence. He held several other honorary doctorates, as well as France's Légion d'Honneur (2012). The Dutch "International Spinozaprijs Foundation" awarded the "Spinozalens 2020" to Bruno Latour on 24 November 2020. In 2021 he received the Kyoto Prize in the category "Thought and Ethics".

In Reassembling the Social (2005), Latour continues a reappraisal of his work, developing what he calls a "practical metaphysics", which calls "real" anything that an actor (one whom we are studying) claims as a source of motivation for action. So if someone says, "I was inspired by God to be charitable to my neighbors" we are obliged to recognize the "ontological weight" of their claim, rather than attempting to replace their belief in God's presence with "social stuff", like class, gender, imperialism, etc. Latour's nuanced metaphysics demands the existence of a plurality of worlds, and the willingness of the researcher to chart ever more. He argues that researchers must give up the hope of fitting their actors into a structure or framework, but Latour believes the benefits of this sacrifice far outweigh the downsides: "Their complex metaphysics would at least be respected, their recalcitrance recognized, their objections deployed, their multiplicity accepted."

In a 2004 article, Latour questioned the fundamental premises on which he had based most of his career, asking, "Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?" He undertakes a trenchant critique of his own field of study and, more generally, of social criticism in contemporary academia. He suggests that critique, as currently practiced, is bordering on irrelevancy. To maintain any vitality, Latour argues that social critiques require a drastic reappraisal: "our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget." (p. 231) To regain focus and credibility, Latour argues that social critiques must embrace empiricism, to insist on the "cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude – to speak like William James". (p. 233)

Pandora's Hope (1999) marks a return to the themes Latour explored in Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern. It uses independent but thematically linked essays and case studies to question the authority and reliability of scientific knowledge. Latour uses a narrative, anecdotal approach in a number of the essays, describing his work with pedologists in the Amazon rainforest, the development of the pasteurization process, and the research of French atomic scientists at the outbreak of the Second World War. Latour states that this specific, anecdotal approach to science studies is essential to gaining a full understanding of the discipline: "The only way to understand the reality of science studies is to follow what science studies do best, that is, paying close attention to the details of scientific practice" (p. 24). Some authors have criticized Latour's methodology, including Katherine Pandora, a history of science professor at the University of Oklahoma. In her review of Pandora's Hope, Katherine Pandora states:

In 1998, historian of science Margaret C. Jacob argued that Latour's politicized account of the development of modernism in the 17th century is "a fanciful escape from modern Western history".

Alan Sokal, in his Fashionable Nonsense, criticized Latour's relativism by referring to an article written by Latour in La Recherche in 1998. In his reaction to research showing that the pharaoh Ramses II probably died of tuberculosis, Latour thought "How could he pass away due to a bacillus discovered by Koch in 1882? ... Before Koch, the bacillus has no real existence." He says that it is as much of an anachronism as it would be to claim that the pharaoh died of machine-gun fire.

Latour is best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation, 1993), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987). Although his studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist approaches to the philosophy of science, Latour diverged significantly from such approaches. He was best known for withdrawing from the subjective/objective division and re-developing the approach to work in practice. Latour said in 2017 that he is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that some of the authority of science needs to be regained. Along with Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, and John Law, Latour is one of the primary developers of actor–network theory (ANT), a constructionist approach influenced by the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the generative semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, and (more recently) the sociology of Émile Durkheim's rival Gabriel Tarde.

Latour's work Nous n'avons jamais été modernes : Essai d'anthropologie symétrique was first published in French in 1991, and then in English in 1993 as We Have Never Been Modern.

After a research project examining the sociology of primatologists, Latour followed up the themes in Laboratory Life with Les Microbes: guerre et paix (published in English as The Pasteurization of France in 1988). In it, he reviews the life and career of one of France's most famous scientists Louis Pasteur and his discovery of microbes, in the fashion of a political biography. Latour highlights the social forces at work in and around Pasteur's career and the uneven manner in which his theories were accepted. By providing more explicitly ideological explanations for the acceptance of Pasteur's work more easily in some quarters than in others, he seeks to undermine the notion that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is primarily, or even usually, a matter of experiment, evidence or reason.

Latour and Woolgar produced a highly heterodox and controversial picture of the sciences. Drawing on the work of Gaston Bachelard, they advance the notion that the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory—that they cannot be attributed with an existence outside of the instruments that measure them and the minds that interpret them. They view scientific activity as a system of beliefs, oral traditions and culturally specific practices—in short, science is reconstructed not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture. Latour's 1987 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is one of the key texts of the sociology of scientific knowledge in which he famously wrote his Second Principle as follows: "Scientist and engineers speak in the name of new allies that they have shaped and enrolled; representatives among other representatives, they add these unexpected resources to tip the balance of force in their favor."

Aramis, or The Love of Technology focuses on the history of an unsuccessful mass-transit project. Aramis PRT (personal rapid transit), a high tech automated subway, had been developed in France during the 70s and 80s and was supposed to be implemented as a personal rapid transit system in Paris. It combined the flexibility of an automobile with the efficiency of a subway. Aramis was to be an ideal urban transportation system based on private cars in constant motion and the elimination of unnecessary transfers. This new form of transportation was intended to be as secure and inexpensive as collective transportation. The proposed system had custom-designed motors, sensors, controls, digital electronics, software and a major installation in southern Paris. But in the end the project died in 1987. Latour argues that the technology failed not because any particular actor killed it, but because the actors failed to sustain it through negotiation and adaptation to a changing social situation. While investigating Aramis's demise, Latour delineates the tenets of actor-network theory. According to Latour's own description of the book, the work aims "at training readers in the booming field of technology studies and at experimenting in the many new literary forms that are necessary to handle mechanisms and automatisms without using the belief that they are mechanical or automatic."

Latour developed an interest in anthropology, and undertook fieldwork in Ivory Coast (on behalf of ORSTOM) which resulted in a brief monograph on decolonization, race, and industrial relations. After spending more than twenty years (1982–2006) at the Centre de sociologie de l'innovation at the École des Mines in Paris, Latour moved in 2006 to Sciences Po, where he was the first occupant of a chair named for Gabriel Tarde. In recent years he also served as one of the curators of successful art exhibitions at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, including "Iconoclash" (2002) and "Making Things Public" (2005). In 2005 he also held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

After his early career efforts, Latour shifted his research interests to focus on laboratory scientists. Latour rose in importance following the 1979 publication of Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts with co-author Steve Woolgar. In the book, the authors undertake an ethnographic study of a neuroendocrinology research laboratory at the Salk Institute. This early work argued that naïve descriptions of the scientific method, in which theories stand or fall on the outcome of a single experiment, are inconsistent with actual laboratory practice.

As a student, Latour originally focused on philosophy. In 1971–1972, he ranked second and then first (reçu second, premier) in the French national competitive exam (agrégation/CAPES de philosophies). He was deeply influenced by Michel Serres. Latour went on to earn his PhD degree in philosophical theology at the University of Tours in 1975. His thesis title was Exégèse et ontologie: une analyse des textes de resurrection (Exegesis and Ontology: An Analysis of the Texts of Resurrection).

Bruno Latour (French: [latuʁ]; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist. He was especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS). After teaching at the École des Mines de Paris (Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation) from 1982 to 2006, he became professor at Sciences Po Paris (2006–2017), where he was the scientific director of the Sciences Po Medialab. He retired from several university activities in 2017. He was also a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.