We Have Never Been Modern [Paperback]

Bruno Latour (Author), Catherine Porter (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1993

With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.

What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour's analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming--and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture--and so, between our culture and others, past and present.

Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape. We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility.

Editorial Reviews

Review

If you like the kind of antidualist philosophizing that keeps trying to break down the distinctions between subject and object, mind and body, language and fact, and so on, you'll love Latour...He does the best job so far of breaking down the distinctions between making and finding, between nature and history, and between the "premodern," "the modern" and "the postmodern."
--Richard Rorty (Common Knowledge )

[Latour] stakes out an original and important position in current debates about modernity, antimodernity, postmodernity, and so on. These debates can only be enriched by Latour's attention to the practical coupling of the human and the nonhuman, and they can only be enlivened by the thumbnail critiques offered along the way of thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Bachelard, Habermas, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Heidegger.
--Andrew Pickering (Modernism )

An interesting and deeply thought-out presentation of the large scale problems of our world seen in relation to the idea of 'modernism.' The book focuses on the interrelationships between three large-scale domains: science and technology, politics and government, language and semiotic studies...Latour examines the premodernists, postmodernists, antimodernists, and so-called modernists and concludes that we really never were modern and now need to pursue a form of modernism (which he describes) purged of its counterproductive features. (Choice )

The present book is essentially a work of metaphysics, a kind of political ontology. Latour's goal is to break down traditional philosophical categories of nature, power and language...Latour's insights are abundant, from his advocacy of multinaturalism (versus multiculturalism) to his call for social theorists to recognize the historicity of objects...This is a wonderful book to disagree with--a refreshing break from the straight-jacketed sycophancy that defines so much of the history and philosophy of science. It is not an easy book, but the reward for the philosophically minded is well worth the wrestle.
--Robert N. Proctor (American Scientist )

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 15, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674948394
• ISBN-13: 978-0674948396
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #72 in Books > Professional & Technical > Transportation

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202 of 208 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a great, new work; serious social theory for scientists too, December 16, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Nicholas F. Daum, Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: We Have Never Been Modern (Paperback)

For this reader, Bruno Latour's book is one of the most ambitious, original, and important reformulations of social theory since 1989. It is getting lots of attention among scholars, and deserves a wider public. The press reviews here don't do this book justice.

Latour, for those of you who don't know him, has been at the forefront of the emerging field of "science studies", the history and sociology of science, for the past 15 years. He's also a rather bizarre fellow. His "Aramis" is a book of real sociology that is told in the form of a novel, in which the metro car of a failed Parisian public transportation project becomes one of a series of narrators. In "We Have Never Been Modern," he conscisely summarizes the theoretical basis of his work, and stakes out ground that is genuinely new. The book should excite humanisitic academics, scientists, and intellectually adventurous people from all walks of life with a taste for theory.

The thesis -- the basis for the "we have never been modern" part -- is that the "great divide" between nature and human, subject and object, science and society, was never real. Instead, he says, this subject/object divide was the great dirty fiction of the "modern" world.

To give you the gist of the argument as briefly as possible: the separation of nature and human, that has marked Western intellectual life since the 17th century, allowed both science and the humanities to make their own claims for absolute truth. This divide was the basis for our image of "modern western man."

But these claims hid the fact that "hybrids" were springing up all the while. Modernity also spawned technological "quasi-objects" that blur the line between the natural and the human. The tremendous multiplication of these "quasi-objects" (Latour's neologism)in our times has finally forced us to the point where we are at a startling conclusion: the divorce of man from nature never really took place.

What we thought of as scientific Western man was never real. Latour wants us, the generation left with the consequences of this revelation, to exhume this past of hybridity, and seek out a new relationship between nature and culture. In short, he wants to both humanize science and render the humanities more scientific.

This brief bastardization does not do justice to the work. Latour elegantly and convincingly lays out his thesis, and the results are dazzling and compelling. He's also sharp and witty, and fans of the like of Baudrillard and Derrida will see their idols tossed about a bit.

On the other hand, the book is immensely ambitious in its theoretical claims, and has a tendency to pretend that complex and difficult ideas are obvious truth. One wonders at times if he is practicing the French intellectual's habit of making our heads spin for the sheer thrill of watching the confusion. But he's not, and most readers, I think, will finish the book that Latour is ultimately both a sensible man and a humane one.

As a graduate student in the humanities, I know that this book is getting a growing audience in academia. I hope that some non-academic visitors to amazon.com (especially science buffs who enjoy the likes of Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennet) will treat themselves to this intellectual adventure. It's a truly original book, not much over 100 pages, reasonably priced, and well worth the experience.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The philosophy of coexistence, November 30, 2008

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Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: We Have Never Been Modern (Paperback)

"We Have Never Been Modern" by Bruno Latour is a brilliant interdisciplinary work that profoundly challenges our assumptions about the world we live in. Mr. Latour views the Enlightenment from an anthropological perspective to reveal how its multiple and contradictory ideals have conspired to lead humanity towards ever greater social and environmental crises. Mr. Latour's breakthrough analysis provides a philosophical road map towards a sustainable 'nonmodern' world wherein nature and society are more harmoniously joined together for the greater good.

Mr. Latour traces our modern confusion to a series of debates between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century which led to divergences in the study of nature or ideologies on the one hand and science or facts on the other; modernity became defined by the knowing of what was previously unknown. Mr. Latour contends that the 'purification' or incontestability of scientific facts and ideologies has failed to account for the 'hybrid' ways in which society and nature actually respond to change. Indeed, the interjection of science into the real world has created a multiplicity of what Mr. Latour calls 'quasi-objects', or phenomena that are located in the midpoint between science and nature; examples of quasi-objects include global warming, genetic engineering, the AIDS epidemic, and so on. Mr. Latour believes that we are ill-equipped to address these problems inasmuch as the institutions built around Enlightenment ideals have failed to account for the nonseparation of social practices from nature.

In this light, Mr. Latour rejects the idea that humanity has ever really broken away from its premodern past. To begin with, Mr. Latour suggests that the premoderns' assignment of transcendence to inanimate objects is similar in kind to the transcendent powers assigned by moderns to sciences and ideologies. Mr. Latour goes on to contend that the modern experience is simply larger in scale than the premodern, with ever-more sophisticated but conflicting explanations about the meaning of the extended networks that bind our lived experiences undergoing constant flux. Mr. Latour states that 'morphism' better explains the nonmodern world we inhabit in which humans must continuously adapt themselves to changing sociological and natural conditions.

Mr. Latour argues that once we refute the idea that we have ever been modern, we can reclaim our sense of being ordinary and thereby express our solidarity with all peoples and the planet; at that point, we will be able to focus on the collective challenge of addressing the critical problems that confront us. Crucially, this task requires that our conception of politics enlarges; the discourse must encompass the multitude of human and non-human subjects or 'things' alike if we wish to solve the problems that the quasi-objects present to us. For example, Mr. Latour suggests that in the case of ozone depletion such a debate might be enjoined by representatives speaking on behalf of chemical companies, workers, the ozone hole itself, Antarctica, and so on.

Originally written in 1991, Mr. Latour's pathbreaking thought has proven to be highly influential, with many of his arguments in essence being echoed and enlarged by more and more similarly-minded progressive writers. To cite just a few: Robyn Eckersley's The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty articulates the juridical basis for the representation of non-human life forms in our democracy; Vandana Shiva's Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace provides a moral argument for human rights and environmentally justice; and Steven Wise' Drawing the Line makes a compelling case for animal rights. Together, works such as these suggest that a new kind of Enlightenment may be forming: a philosophy that recognizes the future of humanity is dependent upon, and not estranged from, the other life forms that coexist with us on planet earth.

This challenging but deeply rewarding book is highly recommended for all philosophically-minded and hopeful readers.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging discussion of our views of culture and nature, December 5, 2007

By 

mjp (Kristiansand, Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: We Have Never Been Modern (Paperback)

For those readers familiar with Science in Action, Bruno Latour may not at first strike one as the ideal candidate to sort out the most pressing philosophical issues about human cultures. But that is exactly what this slim, easy to follow volume does: it sorts them out. Latour posits that our "modern" society (and this is taken as Western and/or industrialized society) is based upon a series of paradoxes whereby both nature and society are "constructed" (by humans) and at the same time "transcendent." This contradiction enables us to, among other things, appropriate huge chunks of the natural into the social without giving it so much as a thought because the "modern constitution" of our thought effectively prevents it. Nature can both intervene in society (e.g. by being transformed into manufactured items) and remain distinct, pristinely "natural." Through a series of carefully argued comparisons and contrasts between the "modern consistution," the "non-modern constitution," and (of course) the "postmodern constitution" Latour offers a way for Western society to achieve a responsible relationship to nature and society through a reconsideration of the affects of, for example, the implementation of a new technology on both the natural and the social. The many graphic illustrations and charts serve to provide visual explanations for his argument. I never would have ventured into this text without them. Regardless of your background or ideological leanings, be prepared to be challenged by We Have Never Been Modern in two areas. First, Latour is not shy about employing specific terms where he deems necessary, and that is absolutely everywhere. Many of the neologisms I have found quite helpful, but the reader's attention must never waver when they are trotted out. Furthermore, you should be prepared to follow Latour wherever he may list, in particular into the history of the vacuum pump. The second major area of challenge is in the nature of his solution to the modern quandary, what he terms "The parliament of things." This arrangement of otherwise distinct and dispersed voices from and about the same "quasi-object" will require major compromises all around. It is hard enough to give a voice to indigenous populations, Latour wishes to enlist others (even scientists!) to speak on behalf of the trees. The price is hefty, but well worth the money, the wait and the effort of what, in the main, is an exhilirating read.