Extract: Remembering Bruno Latour
In 2025, David Robertson invited me to help him with a special journal issue, reflecting on the research of an academic whose work has inspired both of us - the incomparable Bruno Latour (1947-2022). A key figure in Science and Technology Studies, Latour was, at heart, a philosopher whose profoundly different way of understanding the world has influenced anthropologists and philosophers, sociologists and climate theorists. The editorial we wrote for that special issue of Implicit Religion is available in full for those with institutional access, but I’m including a short extract here, to pique your interest in Latour’s work and ideas. If you want to hear more from the man himself, start with this freely available podcast from the RSP.
Latour’s early work challenges the theoretical foundations of many contemporary approaches, including critical theory, sociology and anthropology, but at the same time challenges the underlying rationalist Protestant worldview that underpins all traditional scholarly approaches. The realisation that scientific truths were also cultural constructions—or perhaps transformations would be more accurate—and the resulting destabilisation of the certainty of “facts” led Latour to examine the broader culture that depends upon their objective certainty. We Have Never Been Modern (1991, 1993 in English), The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010) and ultimately An Enquiry into the Modes of Existence (2013) challenged the taken-for-granted or ready-to-hand dichotomies through which The Moderns (that is, you and I) establish their superiority over others. As well as the dichotomy of Modern/Primitive, Latour challenges the dichotomy of Fact/Fetish, which is ultimately to question the epistemological underpinning of modernity—that Modern society is established upon objective, universal and empirical certainties, which we have termed “facts”. With this work, arguably Latour was following in a grand French tradition, in which linguistics (Silverman 2004), psychoanalysis (Gallop 2018), and even history (Foucault, 1995) are put into the service of philosophical deconstruction. But like many of the aforementioned scholars, his redefinition of the very foundations of the scholarly method resonated far beyond his original disciplinary remit.
