Por researchers of my generation, historians or sociologists investigating science and technology, reading Bruno Latour was a trigger. Laboratory life (Sage, 1979; The Discovery, 1988) et Pasteur : microbe war and peace (Editions Métailié, 1984) offered an extraordinarily refreshing description of scientific work. Far from epistemological abstractions – think of the work of Karl Popper (1902-1994) all centered on theories – Latour’s originality was to study not “science” but scientific practices, not the finished product , but the work of proof, not a few great scholars, but the scientific community and its institutions, and to use the ethnographic method for this: to describe and describe again, ever more finely, the gestures, the instrumental work, the patient stabilization of phenomena, their inscription in material traces and the transposition of this work into the particular form of the scientific article.
Bruno Latour was also a formidable populariser: Science in action (La Découverte, 1989) remains an unequaled synthesis of work in the history and sociology of science and technology, a field in which Latour was one of the tutelary figures. It is this Latour, ethnographer of science and technology, who has become the international “star” that we know. This early Latour was also radically empirical and materialistic. His positions were close to those of Marxist historians of science, in particular Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin: We were never modern (La Découverte, 1991) presented itself as an exegesis of their Leviathan and the air pump (Princeton University Press, 1985).
The choice of idealism
The paradox is that, in the second part of his career, that of public ecology intellectual, Latour suddenly abandoned this method. Belatedly taking an interest in the climate and environmental question, he approached it as a philosopher and historian of ideas. Nature policies (La Découverte, 1999) started from the observation – historically false – that, since the environmental question was radically new, politics had to be entirely refounded. Following Michel Serres and his Natural contract (Francois Bourin, 1990), Latour therefore composed a new « Constitution » to welcome the “non-humans” in our “collectives”.
In France, in the 1990s, ecology seemed to offer a playground for budding Rousseaus, a clean slate philosophical, a good pretext also to get rid of “old social sciences” who would have neglected the environment. This was intellectually very exciting, much more probably than the study of production and its consequences. The result was also abstract and somewhat utopian: nowhere was there any question of matter and production, consumption and economy, companies and machines, capital or lobbies.
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