Bruno Latour 1947 – 2022

Bruno Latour was a French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science, and one of the principal architects of actor-network theory and the field of science and technology studies. After early fieldwork at the Salk Institute he developed in Laboratory Life and Science in Action an account of how scientific facts are stabilized through the alignment of human and non-human actors. We Have Never Been Modern questioned the modern separation of nature from society, while Reassembling the Social proposed a method of tracing associations rather than appealing to a hidden social context. In his later Down to Earth and Facing Gaia he turned his attention to climate, politics, and the new climatic regime.

Bruno Latour was born in Beaune in Burgundy in June 1947 into a family of well-known wine-makers. He took the agrégation in philosophy in 1972 and his doctorate at Tours in 1975 with a thesis on the New Testament theologian Rudolf Bultmann. After two years of fieldwork at the Salk Institute in California (1975–1977) he returned to France, and from 1982 to 2006 directed the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the École des Mines de Paris before moving to Sciences Po, where he founded the master's programme in political arts (SPEAP).

His major works include Laboratory Life (1979, with Steve Woolgar), The Pasteurization of France (1984), Science in Action (1987), We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1992), Pandora's Hope (1999), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005), An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012), Facing Gaia (2015), and Down to Earth (Où atterrir?, 2017). He received the Holberg Prize in 2013 and the Kyoto Prize in 2021.

Latour combined ethnographic fieldwork on laboratories with a thoroughgoing reformulation of social theory in which humans and non-humans alike are 'actants' in heterogeneous networks; his thesis that 'we have never been modern' argued that the modern constitution separating nature from society had always been a fiction, and his late writings made the climate crisis the central political question of our time. He died in Paris in October 2022.