Latour is for the person who has noticed that facts don't speak for themselves — they are assembled by networks of people, instruments, and institutions, and understanding how this assembly works changes everything. You've probably seen arguments where one side says "follow the science" and the other says "science is political" and felt that both are missing something. Latour spent his career in the gap between those positions, showing that the more carefully you study how knowledge is made, the more — not less — seriously you take it.
actor-network theorythe social construction of factsthe parliament of thingsmodernity as mythecology and politics
Where to Start Reading
Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar)
Latour's ethnography of a biology lab — he studied scientists the way anthropologists study remote communities. Provocative, accessible, and the book that made his reputation.
We Have Never Been Modern
Latour's most philosophical work — the argument that the separation between nature and culture, science and politics, was always an illusion. Short, dense, and paradigm-shifting.
Down to Earth
Latour on the politics of climate change — his most urgent and accessible book. The argument that ecological crisis is not an environmental issue but a political one. 100 pages.
“Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.”