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Thinkers

Bruno Latour

Modern European · Europe · 1947 to 2022

French thinker who held that scientific knowledge is built through social processes and networks of people and things, not simply found.

What it is

Bruno Latour (1947 to 2022) was a French thinker who studied science as something people do. He worked across philosophy, anthropology and sociology, and became best known in the field called science and technology studies.

He began in philosophy and took his doctorate at the University of Tours in 1975. Fieldwork in Ivory Coast turned his interest toward anthropology. He taught at the Paris school of mines from 1982 to 2006 and then at Sciences Po in Paris until 2017, and in 2013 he received the Holberg Prize.

The main ideas

  • Watching the laboratory. With the sociologist Steve Woolgar he spent time in a laboratory at the Salk Institute and described what scientists actually do.
  • Facts are built. From such studies he drew the view that scientific knowledge is built through social processes and interactions, and is not simply found lying in nature.
  • Networks of people and things. He traced the networks of links between human beings and other things, to see how knowledge comes about. This approach became known as actor-network theory.
  • Actors of many kinds. Actor-network theory focuses on the relationships between human and nonhuman agents, and gives things a part in what happens.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine reading a news story that says a study has shown something. A reader following Latour would ask who ran the study, with which instruments, who paid for it, who checked it, and who now relies on it. The result looks like a plain fact only once all of that has been settled behind the scenes. This is an illustration of his way of asking questions, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Laboratory Life (1979, with Steve Woolgar) reports on his observation of scientists at work in a laboratory, the Salk Institute in California.
  • Science in Action (1987) is another of his major books.
  • We Have Never Been Modern (1991) is one of his best-known books.
  • In 2013 he was awarded the Holberg Prize for his studies of science and technology in society.

Questions and criticism

  • Does it deny truth? Some working scientists found his work hard to accept. It is fair to ask whether describing how facts are made also says anything about whether they are true.
  • Two audiences. His work drew sharp criticism from some scientists. It is fair to ask what they were reacting to, and what its supporters saw in it.
  • People and things. Actor-network theory counts non-human things among the agents. It is fair to ask in what sense an instrument or an animal can be an actor.

Close neighbours

The page on Thomas Kuhn is another account of science as a human practice with its own history.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Thomas Kuhn · He took up the view that science changes through the practices of its communities. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Modern European thinkers

Sources we used

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