Bruno Latour (1947–2022) was an influential and divisive figure in the social theory of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Trained as a philosopher, drawn toward anthropology in method, and disposed toward the study of institutions by temperament, he reshaped how scholars approach science, technology, law, politics, religion, and the environment. His work helped found science and technology studies, supplied the early framing for Actor-Network Theory, and pressed against assumptions that had long organized modern intellectual life. By his death his influence reached sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, legal theory, the environmental humanities, media studies, design, political theory, museum curation, and philosophy.
His central argument was simple in statement and disruptive in consequence. Modern societies picture themselves as split into separate provinces called nature and society, facts and values, objects and subjects. Latour holds that the split is largely fictional. In practice men assemble hybrids that bind together people, technologies, institutions, ideas, animals, instruments, and material things. Reality consists not of isolated entities but of networks of relation. Social inquiry, on this view, does not explain events by appeal to large abstractions such as society, culture, or technology. It traces the concrete links through which actors come to be joined.
He was born on June 22, 1947, in Beaune, in Burgundy, the youngest of eight children of a prosperous Catholic family whose winemaking house, Maison Louis Latour, reached back across centuries. He grew up among commerce, religious observance, and a deep sense of history. He kept his attachment to Catholicism through his life and sustained an interest in theology, biblical interpretation, and the workings of religious language.
Latour studied philosophy at the University of Dijon from 1966. He did well in the competitive agrégation and established himself early as a promising philosopher. In 1975 he completed a doctoral dissertation at the University of Tours, Exégèse et ontologie: une analyse des textes de resurrection (“Exegesis and Ontology: An Analysis of the Texts of Resurrection”), under the supervision of Claude Bruaire. The dissertation read biblical resurrection narratives and carried themes that stayed with him: the making of truth, the reading of texts, and the construction of meaning.
A turn came during anthropological fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire, carried out as part of his military service for ORSTOM, a French development research body. There he studied decolonization, industrialization, race relations, and the contact between French engineers and African technicians. He noticed that when machines broke, French engineers traced the failures to the culture, psychology, or habits of local workers, while the workers blamed the machines. The pattern held his attention. Technical trouble never stayed technical. It turned at once into social judgment. The episode shaped a conviction he carried for the rest of his life: technology, knowledge, and society cannot be pried apart.
This led him toward anthropology and toward the study of science. Rather than treat science as a privileged source of objective truth set beyond sociological view, Latour proposed to study scientists as anthropologists study any other community. With Steve Woolgar he carried out an ethnographic study of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, centered on the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin (1924–2024). The result, Laboratory Life (1979), stands among the founding texts of science and technology studies.
The book argues that scientific facts emerge through a tangle of researchers, instruments, funding, publications, laboratory routine, and material objects. Facts are not simply found. They harden through networks of practice and institution. Critics often read the argument as an assault on scientific truth. Latour insisted that he sought to explain how facts grow robust and command assent, not to deny that they are real.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the Paris School of Mines, Latour worked out the ideas that made his name. With Michel Callon and John Law he helped form Actor-Network Theory.
Actor-Network Theory set aside the usual line between active human subjects and passive objects. A scientist, a bacterium, a computer, a legal document, a microscope, and a government office could each operate as an “actant” within a network. The question was not whether an entity counted as human or nonhuman, but whether it exerted influence and changed the conduct of other entities. Social explanation, then, calls for tracing associations rather than positing hidden structures that settle outcomes in advance.
Several ideas came out of this work. One is “black-boxing,” the process by which complex systems pass into the taken for granted. Once a technology runs reliably, men stop noticing the intricate network that made it work. Another is “translation,” the process by which actors enlist allies and recast interests to build a stable network. These notions left a mark on organizational study, management theory, information systems research, and the study of science.
The major books of these years secured his international standing. Science in Action (1987) traced how scientific claims win acceptance as fact. The Pasteurization of France (1988) retold the rise of microbiology as the joint work of scientists, microbes, institutions, and political actors. We Have Never Been Modern (1991), his best known philosophical book, argues that modernity rests on the illusion that nature and society stand apart, while modern societies keep producing the hybrids that breach the line.
Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996) examined the failure of an ambitious French transit project. Mixing sociology, philosophy, the history of engineering, and literary experiment, the book showed how technical success and failure hang on the stability of social and material networks rather than on technical merit alone.
The 1990s drew Latour into the science wars. The physicist Alan Sokal (b. 1955) and others charged him with relativism and with eroding confidence in scientific truth. Latour rejected the charge. His position was never that scientific knowledge runs arbitrary. He argued that scientific authority follows from the building of networks that link instruments, observations, experiments, institutions, and communities of researchers. Facts hold because those networks hold.
His answer to the controversy appears most clearly in Pandora’s Hope (1999), which defends scientific inquiry while it keeps rejecting any picture of objective knowledge cut loose from practice.
From the late 1990s and across the next two decades, Latour widened his attention past science. He wanted to grasp how different institutions make different kinds of truth. One major project studied the Conseil d’État, the highest administrative court of France. After years of observation he produced The Making of Law, an ethnography of legal reasoning. Latour argues that legal truth differs from scientific truth at its root. Scientists settle facts by extending chains of reference outward into the world through instruments and experiment. Judges settle legal truth through carefully kept chains of documents, precedents, files, and procedural continuity. Legal objectivity comes not from reaching external reality but from holding the integrity of legal reasoning within an institutional tradition.
The study showed that his larger project was not the sociology of science alone but a general inquiry into how institutions make authority, legitimacy, and truth.
His most ambitious attempt to order these findings was the Inquiry into Modes of Existence, a research program funded by the European Research Council. Published as An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012) and paired with an extensive digital platform, the project set out to identify the distinct logics that govern different provinces of human life. Latour holds that science, law, politics, religion, economics, fiction, technology, and morality each carry their own standards of verification, their own procedures, their own kinds of truth. Confusion arises when one province is judged by the standards of another. Many critics misread science, he thought, because they treated it as if it should work like theology, demanding fixed certainty in place of ongoing chains of empirical check.
Religion held a particular place in his thought. Unlike many secular intellectuals of his generation, he never cast religion as a primitive belief bound to fade. In Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech he argues that religious language runs on principles apart from scientific description. Religion seeks transformation and renewal, not the recording of empirical fact.
After 2000 Latour turned toward environmental thought and the politics of climate. He came to hold that climate change exposed the poverty of the old political categories. The line between nature and society, troubled in his eyes from the start, could no longer hold in an age when human activity reshaped planetary systems.
Politics of Nature (2004), Facing Gaia (2017), and Down to Earth (2017) worked out a new ecological philosophy. Drawing on the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock (1919–2022), Latour set aside the image of nature as a stable backdrop. He described the Earth as an active party to human affairs.
His concept of the “Critical Zone” carried his ecology forward, the thin film of soil, air, water, organisms, and human activity that holds life on the planet. Rather than place humanity on an abstract globe, Latour argued that political thought has to begin from the fragile ecological systems that make existence possible.
In the later writing, politics turns from a contest among ideologies toward a contest over habitation. The central political question is no longer which social system should rule, but how men might learn to live within a finite and vulnerable Earth. He came to describe the future as a struggle between those who stay attached to ecological reality and those who keep chasing fantasies of limitless growth and escape.
Alongside the scholarship, Latour became an institutional builder and a curator. After his move to Sciences Po in 2006 he served as Vice-President for Research from 2007 to 2013. He founded the Médialab, which pursued digital methods in social science, and helped start SPEAP, an experimental graduate program that joined politics, art, and public engagement.
His interests reached the gallery as well. Working often with Peter Weibel (1944–2023) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, he co-curated Iconoclash (2002), Making Things Public (2005), Reset Modernity! (2016), and Critical Zones (2020). These exhibitions turned philosophical argument into visual and spatial form, treating artworks, scientific instruments, political artifacts, and technological objects as parties to shared networks. He also co-curated the 2020 Taipei Biennale.
In his last decades his influence ran well past the academy. Architects, designers, artists, urban planners, environmentalists, and legal scholars drew on his work. He became a precursor of the postcritique movement tied to thinkers such as Rita Felski (b. 1956). In his essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004) he argues that intellectuals should move past endless debunking and toward construction, composition, and care.
He grew uneasy, at the same time, that parts of social constructivist thought, including readings of his own work, were finding use among climate-change denialists and conspiracy theorists. He answered by defending scientific institutions with vigor while he held to his conviction that scientific knowledge is made through networks, not found in isolation.
Honors came across his career: the Bernal Prize, the Unseld Prize, the Holberg Prize in 2013, the Gifford Lectures, the French Légion d’Honneur, the Spinozalens Prize, and the Kyoto Prize in 2021. In keeping with his habits, he gave the monetary portion of the Kyoto Prize to Sciences Po.
Bruno Latour died of pancreatic cancer in Paris on October 9, 2022, at the age of seventy-five. He left his wife Chantal, their children Chloé and Robinson, and several grandchildren. His papers went to French archives, so that later scholars might trace the growth of a body of work that changed many fields.
His legacy stays contested. Admirers regard him as an original thinker of the first rank, a scholar who changed how intellectuals understand science, technology, law, politics, and ecology. Critics hold that his refusal of the old line between facts and interpretations risks breeding confusion about truth. Even many critics grant the scale of what he did.
Few thinkers of the twentieth century did more to unsettle inherited categories. Across philosophy, anthropology, sociology, law, religion, environmental thought, and art, Latour returned again and again to a single question: how do humans and nonhumans come to be connected in ways that produce durable realities? His answer, that reality emerges through networks of relation rather than through isolated substances, reshaped whole fields and set his place among the consequential social theorists of his time.
Latour’s whole frame is a misunderstanding claim raised to civilizational scale. Modernity, he says, rests on a confusion, the split between nature and society that the moderns enforce while breaking it at every turn. We have never been modern, which is to say everyone misread what they were doing the entire time. The science warriors misread him. The critics misread critique. The deniers misread how facts get made. The moderns commit category mistakes, judging one mode of existence by the standards of another. Wherever Latour looks he finds a confusion, and wherever he finds a confusion he offers the cure, which is to trace the networks and sort the modes the way he traces and sorts them. The man who understands becomes the man the confused world needs.
Pinsof would point at the demand side first. Who buys this product? Intellectuals who want to feel like saviors. Latour sold them the most sophisticated version on the market. The critic gets to unmask. The diplomat of modes gets to compose. Either way the intellectual is the one repairing a confusion the rest of us cannot see. Self-flattery sells, and Latour priced it for the high end, the museum, the lecture hall, the European research grant.
Then the wrinkle. Latour attacked the savior-intellectual himself. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004) reads almost like Pinsof: stop unmasking, stop debunking, the critic has run dry. For a moment Latour sounds like a man about to admit that the understanders understand nothing the rest of us do not already use. He does not stop there. He swaps one savior role for a grander one. In place of the critic who exposes, he installs the diplomat who composes and the curator who cares. The intellectual still repairs the world’s confusion. He repairs it with a finer instrument. The attack on the misunderstanding myth becomes a higher version of the misunderstanding myth.
Now read the stated motive against the likely one. Latour’s stated mission is clarity: dissolve the false split, calm the science wars, teach the moderns their own hybrids, defend the planet. The savvy reading watches what a coalitional primate does while saying these things. He builds a school. He coins translation, a word that names the recruitment of allies and the bending of their interests, and he calls it metaphysics. He founds the Médialab and SPEAP and takes an office at Sciences Po that hands out recognition. He derogates rivals, the positivists, the Sokal camp, Bourdieu, the moderns as a class. He gathers a following and a stack of honors. Pinsof’s test asks whether the man is failing at his stated goal of changing minds or succeeding at his real goal of climbing, allying, and outranking. By the stated measure the science wars were a sad misunderstanding. By the savvy measure Latour won status, built a coalition, and ended decorated. He was not confused. He was effective.
The coalition reading catches the late turn too. For decades Latour loosened the authority of the bare fact and taught that science is allies and instruments rather than nature speaking. Then constructivism turned up in the mouths of climate deniers and the populist right, and Latour reversed, defending scientific institutions with heat. The misunderstanding-myth version says he corrected an error, that the deniers had abused his ideas. The savvy version says his coalition’s interests moved. His tribe, the progressive academy and the climate-anxious elite, now needed facts shored up, so the man who spent his prime destabilizing facts pivoted to defend them. No confusion cleared. A coalition served, on schedule.
Put Pinsof’s hardest question to Latour’s central villain. What if the moderns understand their hybrids all too well? Latour treats the split between nature and society as a confusion the moderns maintain without seeing it. The strategic reading says the split is no confusion. It pays. It lets science claim a neutral authority above the fray. It lets politics claim it merely follows nature. It lets each camp launder its interests as objective necessity. The disavowal of hybrids is a savvy move, not a senior moment. Latour half saw this. He wrote that the modern constitution multiplies hybrids while denying them, which sounds like strategy. Then he filed it under misunderstanding and offered to renegotiate the constitution, as though a clever enough diplomat could talk men out of an arrangement that pays them.
And the deniers he ended up fighting. The misunderstanding myth says they failed to grasp how science works. Pinsof says they grasped their incentives. An oil interest understands the science it has reason to understand and funds the doubt it has reason to fund. A populist understands that fighting the experts wins the votes of people who resent the experts. No exhibition at Karlsruhe and no diagram of the Critical Zone moves a man who is winning under the present arrangement. The world Latour wanted to save did not want saving. It wanted what it was already getting.
Latour spent his life on a beautiful claim, that reality is made through the patient work of connection, and that we misread our own modernity from the start. The cynical close turns the claim back on him. The split was never an error. It was a working arrangement that served the men who kept it. The deniers were never confused. They had incentives. The science wars were not a tragic mix-up. They were a status fight he won. The one thing the moderns got wrong, on this reading, is the belief that anyone got anything wrong. Latour built the most refined misunderstanding myth of his age and sold it to the people whose standing rose by buying it. In the end the only misunderstanding is that there was a misunderstanding.
Bourdieu built a sociology that reads a man’s ideas against the position he holds in a structured field of rivals, the capital he carries into it, and the strategies he uses to climb. Bruno Latour spent a career refusing that sociology. He rejected the hidden structures, the determining forces, the whole habit of explaining a thinker by his place. Reading Latour through Bourdieu does what the subject would have hated, and does it on ground he left undefended. The aim is not debunking. The conditions of the work’s making and its welcome trace without touching whether it is true.
Bourdieu starts with the field, a space of positions held by men who compete for a stake they all believe in. A newcomer with little accumulated standing has one good strategy, heresy. He cannot win by mastering the existing terms better than the men who set them, so he refuses the terms and proposes new ones. Latour enters French intellectual life from the side. He trains in philosophy at Dijon and writes a dissertation on the resurrection narratives at Tours. He comes to the study of science through anthropology and a stint at a development-research body in Côte d’Ivoire, not through the consecrated centers of Paris sociology. That entry from the margin is a handicap and a license. He owes the reigning schools nothing, and he makes his name by saying that the reigning schools have it wrong from the ground up.
What he brings to the young field of science studies is capital earned elsewhere. Theological training in the reading of texts. Philosophical equipment from the agrégation. The ethnographer’s eye carried back from West Africa to a California laboratory. He also carries the durable dispositions of a prosperous Catholic Burgundy home, the long historical sense and the religious seriousness that a winemaking family across centuries lays down in a man before he chooses a single idea. In a settled field these imports count for little against the home currency. In a field still forming its rules, foreign capital trades high. Laboratory Life turns the anthropology of distant peoples on the men in white coats, and the move lands because no one owns the right to describe the laboratory yet. Latour converts the capital of the outsider into the founding capital of a discipline he helps invent. The man who insists on flat description, on following the actors wherever they go, arrives carrying a heavy inheritance that shapes what he can see and say.
The deepest contest of his life is with Bourdieu himself. Both men want the same prize, the authoritative account of how science makes truth. Bourdieu offers a reflexive sociology: the scientific field, its own capital, the struggle for the monopoly of competent speech. Latour offers networks, actants, translation, and a flat world with no structure hiding behind the actors. To take the prize he has to displace the dominant figure in his national field, and he does it by the route open to a challenger, by declaring the dominant method dead. His essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004) reads, in this light, as a strike at the Bourdieusian habit of unmasking, the move that finds a hidden interest behind every stated reason. Latour says the critic has run out of road and the time has come to compose rather than expose. The essay is a bid to retire the reigning weapon and arm the field with his own.
Here the symmetry sharpens. To unseat Bourdieu, Latour plays the game Bourdieu described better than most of its open believers. His concept of translation is recruitment, the enlistment of allies and the bending of their interests toward a shared end. That is the building of social capital under another name. He founds the Médialab and helps start SPEAP, bases from which to train followers and consecrate their work. He moves to Sciences Po and takes the office of Vice-President for Research, a seat that hands out recognition. He crosses into the art world and co-curates large exhibitions at Karlsruhe, where he turns intellectual standing into curatorial authority and trades it back as cultural weight. Each step is a position-taking, an accumulation, a conversion of one capital into another. The theorist of the flat network climbs a structured ladder with a sure foot.
Bourdieu’s sharpest claim holds that the refusal of the economic is the high play in the economy of symbolic goods. The man who gives money away buys something dearer than money. Latour wins the Kyoto Prize in 2021 and gives the cash to Sciences Po. The gift reads as disinterest, and disinterest, in Bourdieu’s account, is the gold coin of the academic world. The honors gather across the late years, the Holberg Prize, the Légion d’Honneur, the Gifford Lectures, Kyoto. These are the marks of full consecration. The heretic has become the canon.
This is the law Bourdieu states and Latour lives. The boldest heresy, once it wins, hardens into the new orthodoxy. The young man who refused “the social” is now taught as doctrine across sociology, anthropology, geography, law, design, and the environmental humanities. We Have Never Been Modern is assigned, not argued with. Actor-Network Theory is a method with handbooks. The refusal of method has become a method. Students learn to follow the actors the way an earlier cohort learned to find the hidden interest behind the stated reason. What began as a strike against orthodoxy now sets the terms that the next challenger will have to refuse.
Bourdieu drew an axis from the autonomous pole of a field, where peers judge peers, to the heteronomous pole, where outside powers, the market, the state, the press, set the terms. He warned that intellectuals lose their own capital when they drift toward the heteronomous side and court the wide public. Latour’s late turn to climate, to the politics of habitation, to the role of planetary prophet, moves him toward that pole. He does not lose by it. He converts the move into a fresh consecration, the sage of the Critical Zone, read by architects and activists who never opened a sociology journal. The conversion works because his stock of standing is large enough to spend.
One move could have closed this account before it opened. Bourdieu demanded that the sociologist turn the instruments on himself, account for his own place in the field he studies. Latour refused that reflexivity. He read it as the critic’s trap, another turn of the unmasking he wanted to leave behind. By refusing it he left the door open. The man who taught a generation to trace every actor’s interests declined to trace his own, so the tracing falls to others.
None of this shows the work false. Bourdieu rejected the move that reads an idea off its origin and calls the matter closed. A theory holds or fails on its own ground, and Latour’s network world has changed how serious men think across many fields. The field reading does something narrower and harder to dodge. It shows that the man who said reality is relation all the way down, with no structure crouched behind the actors, was carried by a structure he could read in everyone but himself, and that he reached the summit of a hierarchy he spent his life denying was there. He played the field as well as anyone alive. He declined to admit there was a field to play.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s social man is tribal. His group is bounded. It has members and outsiders, kin and rivals, and he will sacrifice for the first and fight the second. Latour’s social man is a node in an open web that runs through bacteria, instruments, documents, and the Earth, a web with no boundary, no enemy, no blood. Strip the vocabulary and Latour’s relational man is the liberal universal man in new dress, connected to everything, bound to no one in particular, owing his loyalty to a network that takes in the whole planet and therefore no tribe at all. Mearsheimer would call this the delusion under fresh paint. The cosmopolitan web is the liberal dream of universal belonging, rebuilt out of actants. Man as Latour draws him has no people to die for. Man as Mearsheimer finds him has little else.
Now turn the anthropology on Latour the man. Mearsheimer holds that a worldview comes mostly from the value infusion of childhood, with reason arriving late and weak to dress what socialization already installed. Look at the infusion. A prosperous Catholic family in Burgundy, a winemaking house with centuries behind it, deep historical sense, the rhythms of the Church. The boy is steeped in a world where bread becomes body, where matter carries spirit, where nothing stands alone and everything connects through a sacramental order. Then the grown man writes a doctoral thesis on the resurrection narratives, and after that a life’s work telling us that the modern split between matter and meaning is false, that hybrids run everywhere, that the world is relation rather than dead stuff. Mearsheimer’s reading is plain. Latour did not reason his way to a relational, anti-secular, connected world. He took it in at the family table before he could argue, and he spent sixty years giving the infusion an argument. The resurrection dissertation is the tell. Reason came last and did the dressing.
This is the human condition. Every theorist runs on the same two engines and rationalizes after. The charge against Latour is sharper. A thinker who built his name on tracing every connection missed the connection that formed him, the one running back through the cradle and the parish. He could see the link binding a scientist to a microbe. He could not, or would not, see the link binding the man to the faith of his fathers, because that one had shaped the eye doing the looking.
The politics fares worse. Late Latour calls men to land on the Earth, to share an attachment to the fragile Critical Zone, to form a politics around a common planet. The call asks for a planetary we. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says there is no planetary tribe and there never will be. Men feel for kin and group what they cannot feel for the species. Loyalty is bounded by its nature. A politics that asks a Frenchman, a Texan, and a Chinese farmer to sacrifice for the same globe asks each to extend to strangers and rivals the devotion he keeps for his own. That is the universalist error of liberalism moved from human rights to ecology, and it loses to nationalism wherever the two meet, which in climate politics is daily. The Earth cannot be a tribe. Latour wanted it to be one and called the wanting realism.
Reason ranks last, so the science wars look different through this glass. Latour spent decades on how facts get made and how men should argue over them, as though the quality of the reference chains decided what a population believes. Mearsheimer puts reason third. What a man accepts about the climate or the vaccine comes mostly from his group and his gut, with argument trailing behind to justify a verdict already reached. The deniers Latour fought in his last years do not reject the science because they misread how it is built. They reject it because their tribe rejects it and reason is the weakest faculty in the room. Latour half felt this when his own tools turned up in enemy hands, and he answered with more epistemics, a defense of institutions, a sorting of modes. Mearsheimer would call the answer hopeless, since it brings the weakest faculty to a fight the other two are running.
Latour’s group was the European progressive academy, the anti-positivist humanities, the climate-anxious elite. He stayed in it from start to finish. When the populist right seized constructivism, the in-group man defended the in-group’s institutions, the science he had spent a career unsettling. Mearsheimer reads that pivot without strain. It was no fresh conclusion reached by reason. It was a member protecting his people when a rival picked up their weapon. He never left his tribe. He defended it on schedule.
So what for Latour, if Mearsheimer is right? Two dissolutions. As a man, he is a French Catholic of a certain class and century who received his world before he could weigh it and gave it an elegant argument after the bell. As a theorist, he is the last and finest of the liberal universalists, the man who abolished the lone individual only to put in his place a self bound to everything and so to no people. The thing he shared with Mearsheimer, the death of the atom, turns into the blade. Mearsheimer’s social being is tribal, bounded, and real. Latour’s is connected, boundless, and a dream. The theorist of connection built his life on the one connection that does not govern us and walked past the two that do.
