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A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology - transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: "Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks." Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old…

Frankenstein's monster was born of human endeavour and 19th-century ignominious end but provided many lessons during his 24 years of plans and prototypes. Aramis, the guided-transportation system intended for Paris, represented a major advance in "personal rapid transit" - a system that combined the efficiency of a subway with the flexibility of the private automobile. But in the end, the system of electronic couplings proved too complex and expensive, the political will failed, and the plans were jettisoned in 1987. The story of Aramis, of its birth and death, is told here by several different parties, none of which is given precedence over any other: an engineer and his professor, who together act as "detectives" to ferret out the reasons for the project's failure; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. Technology has needs and desires, especially a desire to be born, but cannot function without the sustained commitment of those who have created it. Part novel and part sociological study, Bruno Latour has written a tale of a technological dream gone wrong. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis's trail - conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence - perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of "Rasbomon". The reader is eventually led to see the project from the point of view of Aramis, and along the way gains insight into the relationship between human beings and their technological creations.

In this book, Bruno Latour pursues his ethnographic inquiries into the different value systems of modern societies. After science,technology, religion, art, it is now law that is being studied byusing the same comparative ethnographic methods. The case study is the daily practice of one of the French supreme court, the Conseil d’Etat, specialized in administrative law (the equivalent of the Law Lords in Great Britain). Even though the French legal system is vastly different from the Anglo-American tradition, itjust happens that this branch of French law, although created by Napoleon Bonaparte at the same time as the Code-based system, isthe result of a home grown tradition constructed on precedents.Thus, even though highly technical, the cases that forms the matter of this book, are not so exotic for an English speaking audience.
What makes this study an important contribution to the social studies of law is that, because of an unprecedented access to the collective discussions of judges, Latour has been able to reconstruct in details the weaving of legal reasoning : it isclearly not the social that explains the law, but the legal ties that alter what it is to be associated together. It is thus a major contribution to Latour’s social theory since it is now possible to compare the ways legal ties build up associations with the other types of connections that he has studied in other fields of acticity. His project of an alternative interpretation of the very notion of society has never been made clearer than in this work. To reuse the title of his first book, this book is in effect the Laboratory Life of Law.

In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the past twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated--a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to "capital-S Science" as a higher authority. Such modes of extension--or modes of existence, Latour argues here--account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.

Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis.

The Pasteurization of France (Paper)

The Pasteurization of France

We Have Never Been Modern

We Have Never Been Modern (OIS)

Latour: ?science? In Action – How To Follow Scient Ists & Engineers Through Society (cloth)

Pandora?s Hope – An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies (Paper)

Pandora?s Hope – An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies (cloth)

Politics of Nature – How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (OIP)

Iconoclash – Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion & Art