We Have Never Been Modern

“The present book is essentially a work of metaphysics, a kind of political ontology. Latour’s goal is to break down traditional philosophical categories of nature, power and language… Latour’s insights are abundant, from his advocacy of multinaturalism (versus multiculturalism) to his call for social theorists to recognize the historicity of objects… This is a wonderful book to disagree with—a refreshing break from the straight-jacketed sycophancy that defines so much of the history and philosophy of science. It is not an easy book, but the reward for the philosophically minded is well worth the wrestle.”—Robert N. Proctor, American Scientist

“If you like the kind of antidualist philosophizing that keeps trying to break down the distinctions between subject and object, mind and body, language and fact, and so on, you’ll love Latour… He does the best job so far of breaking down the distinctions between making and finding, between nature and history, and between the ‘premodern,’ ‘the modern’ and ‘the postmodern.’”—Richard Rorty, Common Knowledge

“[Latour] stakes out an original and important position in current debates about modernity, antimodernity, postmodernity, and so on. These debates can only be enriched by Latour’s attention to the practical coupling of the human and the nonhuman, and they can only be enlivened by the thumbnail critiques offered along the way of thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Bachelard, Habermas, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Heidegger.”—Andrew Pickering, Modernism

“An interesting and deeply thought-out presentation of the large scale problems of our world seen in relation to the idea of ‘modernism.’ The book focuses on the interrelationships between three large-scale domains: science and technology, politics and government, language and semiotic studies… Latour examines the premodernists, postmodernists, antimodernists, and so-called modernists and concludes that we really never were modern and now need to pursue a form of modernism (which he describes) purged of its counterproductive features.”—Choice