On Latour's Social Theory and Theory of Society, and His Contribution to Saving the World
Human Studies 34 (1):93-110 (2011)
| Abstract | Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,705 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJeff Kochan (2006). Rescuing the Gorgias From Latour. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (4):395-422.
Jeff Kochan (2010). Latour's Heidegger. Social Studies of Science 40 (4):579-598.
Edwin Sayes (2012). From the Sacred to the Sacred Object. Techné 16 (2):105-122.
E. Seguin (2000). Bloor, Latour, and the Field. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 31 (3):503-508.
Nicholas J. Rowland, Jan-Hendrik Passoth & Alexander B. Kinney (2011). Latour's Greatest Hits, Reassembled: Review of Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. [REVIEW] Spontaneous Generations 5 (1).
Karen François (forthcoming). Pro-Latour. Foundations of Science.
Matthias Gross (2010). The Public Proceduralization of Contingency: Bruno Latour and the Formation of Collective Experiments. Social Epistemology 24 (1):63 – 74.
Srikanth Mallavarapu & Amit Prasad (2006). Facts, Fetishes, and the Parliament of Things: Is There Any Space for Critique? Social Epistemology 20 (2):185 – 199.
Bruno Latour (1988). The Author Rebounds: Latour to Oldroyd. Social Epistemology 2 (2):183.
Bruno Latour (1987). The Author Responds: Latour to Oldroyd. Social Epistemology 1 (4):347 – 350.
Bruno Latour (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2011-05-01Total downloads7 ( #133,587 of 549,130 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,397 of 549,130 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
