* Bruno Latour - On the Social Construction of Science (19 books)
BRUNO LATOUR (1947–2022) was a French philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist known for his innovative and iconoclastic work in the study of science and technology in society. His once-controversial theories about the social construction of science and the interconnectedness of people, things, and ideas have proved prescient in an era of global climate change, conspiracy theories and "alternative facts".
His groundbreaking books offered new insight into, as he put it, "both the history of humans' involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human history". In LABORATORY LIFE (1979), written with Steven Woolgar, a sociologist, scientific knowledge was presented not as a rational and largely asocial process capable of uncovering universally valid truths regarding the natural world, but instead as an artificial product of various social, political, and economic interactions, most of them competitive.
Latour further expanded on these ideas in such books as THE PASTEURIZATION OF FRANCE (1984), SCIENCE IN ACTION (1987), WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MODERN (1991), and PANDORA'S HOPE (1999), a series of essays and case studies questioning the authority and reliability of scientific knowledge. In his writings, Latour often likened the scientific community to a battlefield: new theories, facts, techniques, and technologies succeeded by marshalling enough users and supporters to overwhelm any alternatives, thus immunizing themselves against future challenges. It was by winning this fight for dominance that scientific facts came to be true; Latour dismissed questions about the universal validity of scientific facts as both unanswerable and irrelevant to his concerns.
Another distinguishing aspect of Latour's work was its focus on the complex and heterogeneous relationships between both human and nonhuman agents. He argued that the production of scientific knowledge could be understood only by tracing networks of relationships between entities as disparate as lab animals, existing scientific texts, human researchers, experimental subjects, established technologies, and social movements, among others. This approach became known as actor-network theory, and its influence soon spread beyond Latour's field of science and technology studies.
His ideas were profoundly influenced by the Gaia theory of the maverick British scientist James Lovelock, wherein the Earth is a self-regulating organism. His work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency (FACING GAIA , 2015) won praise and attention around the world. The author Richard Powers has commented on the way Latour encouraged him to "think of all living systems – technological, social and biological – as interdependent, reciprocal and additive processes."
Latour was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2013, which is given for outstanding achievement in the arts, humanities, social sciences, law, and theology. The award recognized Latour for his influential ethnographic and theoretical studies of science and technology in society, hailed for a spirit that was "creative, imaginative, playful, humorous and – unpredictable".
Among Latour's many other books were THE POLITICS OF NATURE (1999), an examination of the connections between nature, science, and politics; ON THE MODERN CULT OF THE FACTISH GODS (2009), which draws connections between religious and scientific belief systems; and AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE (2012).
Bruno Latour died from pancreatic cancer on 9 October 2022, at the age of 75.
In addition to 100+ papers and other contributions (see file list), the following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as indicated:
* After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis (Polity, 2021) – ePUB * An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Harvard, 2013) – PDF * Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time [with M. Serres] (Michigan, 1995) – PDF * Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018) – ePUB * Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime (Polity, 2017) – ePUB + PDF * Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts [with S. Woolgar] (Princeton, 2013) – ePUB + PDF * The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d'Etat (Polity, 2010) – PDF * On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke, 2010) – PDF * Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Harvard, 1999) – PDF * The Pasteurization of France (Harvard, 1993) – PDF * Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Harvard, 2004) – PDF * The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE (Zero, 2011) – ePUB * Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005) – ePUB + PDF * Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech (Polity, 2013) – ePUB + PDF * Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Harvard, 1987) – PDF * Science of Passionate Interests [with V.A. Lépinay] (Prickly Paradigm, 2009) – PDF * War of the Worlds: What about Peace (Prickly Paradigm, 2002) – PDF * We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard, 1993) – ePUB + PDF
== EDITOR ==
* Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (MIT, 2005) – PDF
