A scientist friend asked Bruno Latour point-blank: "Do you believe in reality?" Taken aback by this strange query, Latour offers his meticulous response in Pandora's Hope. It is a remarkable argument for understanding the reality of science in practical
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with ass
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
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an
What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination? Pasteu
Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our society, yet their working remains little understood. The conventional perception of science in Western societies has been modified in recent years by the work of philosophers, sociologist
Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick--a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these fi
This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory p
A guided-transportation system intended for Paris, Aramis represented a major advance in personal rapid transit: it combined the efficiency of a subway with the flexibility of an automobile. But in the end, its electronic couplings proved too complex and
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 pa
