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Introduction
In 1993, Bruno Latour published a book whose express purpose was to challenge the received opinions of the intellectual world. Latour's concern in We Have Never Been Modern is what he calls the 'modernist settlement', the strict separation of nature and culture, language and reality, that provides the foundation for modernist thought. His first thesis is that this settlement has never been workable (hence the title of his book), and has skewed our understanding of the constitution of knowledge. This in itself is not controversial. His second thesis, however, is. Latour asserts that the attempts to provide alternatives to this settlement, most notably linguistic constructionism and its most prominent version, postmodernism, are inadequate. Far from providing a solution to the modernist settlement, Latour argues that they have led us down the wrong, possibly dangerous, intellectual path. What we need, he concludes, is a 'new settlement' that constitutes a radical break both with modernism and the alternatives that have taken hold in the academy.
In one sense what Latour is arguing here is not new. Critiques of modernism and the dichotomies on which it rests can be found in much nineteenth and twentieth century thought. Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, among others, offered approaches to the material/discursive dichotomy that challenged modernism. The importance of Latour's challenge, however, is its timeliness. He is addressing a problem - the linguistic turn in contemporary thought - that is unique to late twentieth century and early twenty-first century thought. The hegemony of the linguistic turn, the allegiance of what Latour calls 'the best minds of our time' to this position, presents us with a very specific problem that demands a solution tailored to that problem.
Latour's challenge has profound implications not only for the philosophy of science, his specific realm of expertise, but for all areas of knowledge. It also has significant consequences for political theory. For political theorists the reaction against the universalism, absolutism and objectivism of modernism has been pervasive. Almost to a woman/man political theorists have rejected what has now been labeled the 'grand tradition' of political theory. Retreating from the attempt to find the one, true, answer to political questions, political theorists have, like many other twentieth century thinkers, turned to language as an alternative. Following...