Latour's We Were Never Modern

Such claims, however, sound cacophonous to modern ears. One becomes so accustomed to the split between hard science and the social and, of course, the former's dominance. Does not hard science investigate eternal natural laws while the human sciences tread water while describing social currents? Latour challenges such misconceptions with his provocative earlier work: We Were Never Modern.

The title’s bold claim becomes clearer when one starts with an anecdote from one of Latour’s more recent works An Enquiry Into Modes of Being. Going about things topsy turvy – starting from the end – has two advantages. First, Latour already conceptualised, and hid his current, and likely final, project when starting with the first (Harman, ?:?). Whereas,
In We Were Never Modern, for example, Latour (?:?) traces a key moment of this split back to Hobbes and Boyle. Boyle believed void exists and thus something invisible which would transcend the senses and translated into natural laws possible; Hobbes did not. Hobbes wanted a powerful benevolent ruler, the Lethiavan, to bind and filter all knowledge. Boyle wanted a more egalitarian fact-checking society. Then, Boyle collaborates to build his air pump, showed voids possible and with the social capital also spreads his egalitarian gospel. Boyle, however, does not disclose the mediations needed his experiment's production. Nor does void, as a scientific fact, require its confirmation includes process (which includes a lawsuit brought by Hobbes). All such mediations fade once an objective, “natural” law has been
His early field work with Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, saw him observing biologist in the laboratory for two years (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). Another project, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, shows how scientist and engineers navigate their nature’s resistance (Latour, 1987). Another, The Pasteurization of France, demonstrated how Pasteur became the father of microbiology (Latour, 1988). Every time, like Boyle, the producing of scientific facts or truths turns out not so pure. Au contraire, mediations are myriad. Modernity's narrative of progress undergirded by the scientific exceptionalism mistook reproductivity for pure, unmediated