We Have Never Been Modern

Bruno Latour presents a sweeping reassessment of what it means to be "modern," arguing that the foundational distinction Western societies draw between nature and culture has never actually held in practice. Writing from within the interdisciplinary field known as science studies, Latour contends that contemporary life is saturated with hybrid entities that intertwine science, politics, technology, law, religion, and economics, yet no established intellectual framework can account for them.

Latour opens by observing that a single newspaper article on the ozone hole weaves together atmospheric chemistry, industrial strategy, heads of state, meteorology, Third World politics, and ecological activism. Similar entanglements appear throughout the daily news: The AIDS virus links biology, diplomacy, the chemical industry, and sub-Saharan Africa; frozen embryos, deforestation, and contraceptive debates each bind together science, law, and politics. Despite this constant mingling, analysts continue to slice these phenomena into tidy compartments. For roughly 20 years, researchers in science studies have traced the connections between exact knowledge and the exercise of power using the concept of translation, or network, yet this work remains misunderstood because critics segment it into the familiar categories of nature, politics, and discourse.

Latour identifies a deeper crisis in the critical stance itself. The three dominant modes of modern critique, naturalization, socialization, and deconstruction, are each powerful in isolation but incompatible when combined. The networks traced by science studies are simultaneously real, narrated, and collective. Anthropology offers a model: Ethnographers routinely weave together myths, technologies, cosmologies, and political forms when studying other cultures, yet no such treatment is permitted for the modern world, because moderns define themselves as having cleanly separated nature from culture.

Using the events of 1989 as a framing device, Latour identifies a double crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the collapse of socialism; simultaneously, the first global environmental conferences signaled the crisis of capitalism's promise to exploit nature without limit. He introduces his central hypothesis: The word "modern" designates two sets of practices that must remain distinct to be effective. Translation creates hybrids of nature and culture; purification creates two entirely separate ontological zones, one for humans and one for nonhumans. As long as these practices are considered separately, we are modern; as soon as we attend to both, we cease to be wholly modern. A further paradox follows: The more the moderns forbid themselves from conceiving of hybrids, the more their proliferation becomes possible.

To reconstruct what he calls the modern Constitution, the foundational framework that separates and distributes scientific and political power, Latour turns to the 17th-century dispute between the natural philosopher Robert Boyle and the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Drawing on scholars Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Latour shows how Boyle and Hobbes jointly invented the modern world. Boyle developed the air pump and a new empirical style, enlisting credible witnesses to attest to phenomena produced in the laboratory. His innovation was to apply the repertoire of legal testimony to things rather than to human witnesses, creating a discourse from which politics was excluded. Hobbes sought to unify the Body Politic under a single Sovereign and rejected Boyle's method because laboratories would redivide authority by introducing spaces where gentlemen claimed independent access to nature. Together, they established a world in which the representation of things through the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the social contract. Latour argues, however, that Shapin and Schaffer remain asymmetrical: They are constructivist about nature but realist about society.

Latour synthesizes the modern Constitution as four interlocking guarantees. Nature is transcendent yet mobilizable in the laboratory; Society is freely constructed yet governed by transcendent laws. A third guarantee holds that Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct, and purification must stay separate from mediation. A fourth removes God from both constructions while keeping God available as arbiter and spiritual presence. Together, these guarantees render the assembling of hybrids invisible, yet this denial enables their expanded proliferation. Latour compares this to premoderns who, according to anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Philippe Descola, obsessively think through connections between social and natural order, thereby constraining hybrid expansion. He rejects the charge that modernity is false consciousness: The moderns simply never represent purification and mediation together.

Drawing on sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, Latour argues that denunciation, the characteristic activity of modern critical thought, has been exhausted. Once the scapegoating mechanism becomes visible, wholehearted accusation becomes impossible. Latour arrives at the titular claim: We have never been modern. Modernity has never begun as the Constitution describes it. The nonmodern attitude deploys instead of unveiling, adds instead of subtracting, fraternizes instead of denouncing, and sorts out instead of debunking.

As quasi-objects proliferate, from frozen embryos and expert systems to gene synthesizers and psychotropic drugs, they can no longer be assigned to either the object or the subject side. Latour adopts philosopher Michel Serres's concept of quasi-objects to name these entities: They are more social and fabricated than the hard parts of nature, yet more real and objective than the screens onto which society was supposedly projected. To accommodate them, he proposes adding a vertical axis of mediation alongside the horizontal axis of purification, creating space where hybrids can receive a place, a name, and an ontology, a defined kind of being.

Latour surveys three philosophical strategies for absorbing quasi-objects and argues that all fail. The Kantian tradition sharpened the distinction between things-in-themselves (realities posited beyond direct human access) and the knowing subject; the philosopher Hegel raised this to a historical contradiction; phenomenology made it an insurmountable tension. The semiotic turn autonomized language as a mediator but could not follow quasi-objects once both referent and speaking subject were bracketed. The philosopher Martin Heidegger designated the central point where everything holds together but refused to find Being in ordinary entities, taking the modern Constitution at its word. Postmodernism, exemplified by Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard, accepted the separation of nature and culture while abandoning the productive tension at modernism's core.

Latour also reconsiders modern temporality, drawing on French writer Charles Péguy's meditation on historicity. The modern sense of irreversible progress is a product of the Constitution rather than a neutral framework. Latour proposes replacing the linear arrow of time with a spiral in which elements from all periods can be combined. More broadly, he calls for a Copernican counter-revolution: Rather than starting from the extremes of Nature and Society, explanation should begin from the middle, from quasi-objects and mediators. Nature and Society become not starting points but provisional results.

In his final chapter, Latour dismantles both the Internal Great Divide (between Nature and Society at home) and the External Great Divide (between Western and non-Western cultures), arguing that the second is an exportation of the first. There are no cultures, only natures-cultures, and the differences between collectives are differences of size rather than of kind. Scientific facts circulate widely but remain within networks of standardized measurement: Universal gravitation can be verified everywhere, but only through the relative extension of instruments and institutions. Even the Pythagorean theorem does not exit its networks any more than the Achuar, an Indigenous people of the Amazon, leave their villages.

Latour concludes that modernization as traditionally conceived is impossible and proposes four guarantees for a nonmodern Constitution: the nonseparability of the common production of societies and natures; continuous tracking of how Nature and Society are produced; freedom redefined as a capacity to sort hybrid combinations; and the production of hybrids made explicit, becoming the object of an enlarged democracy. Humanism must be redistributed: The human is not a pole opposed to the nonhuman but the intersection of multiple morphisms, meaning the technological, zoological, social, and theological forms that shape human existence. Latour envisions this as a Parliament of Things, in which scientists speak for natures with their networks visible and citizens appear with the objects that have always been part of collective life. He closes by returning to 1989: If neither Nature nor non-Western peoples will become modern, then the task is to change our ways of changing.