As Sartre had done before him, Latour placed first in the agrégation de philosophie, the country’s famously exacting national exam. His early career followed a path trodden by earlier French intellectuals.
It is not difficult to see Latour, who grew up among the vineyards of his wealthy Catholic family’s celebrated Maison Louis Latour Domaine, as the original for the modern subject he critiqued. In his later work he fretted over why his generation had so readily adopted an unsustainable ideology of boundless growth and progress. Although he shied away from psychological explanations, which he dismissed as reductive, he recognized that his interest in environmental questions had a personal dimension. Latour, who was born in Burgundy in 1947, liked to note that his lifespan coincided with the Great Acceleration, the post-1950 explosion in fossil fuel consumption. When something piqued his interest-and something often did-his mouth hung open to release a little salvo of “Ahs.” During our two weeks together, in which I followed him to countless meetings and events across France (including a “puppet think-tank” at an international puppetry festival in Strasbourg), Latour was repulsed by the “soulless” façade of a history department that shared its premises with a dog food manufacturer, fascinated by the design of the stairs at a Catholic publishing house, contemptuous of a new mall (“a horror story in the middle of Paris”), unimpressed by the wallabies in the “pathetic zoo” at the Jardin des Plantes, bowled over by a sedimentary rock in Alsace-Lorraine, and astonished at the diminutive size of a boulevard named after Charles de Gaulle. Often it seemed as though there was nothing too trivial to escape his notice. (He jokingly referred to his graphomania as “a disease, really.”) Yet unlike Inspector Maigret-or most academics of his stature, even-he enjoyed being surprised more than being right. With his flat cap and trench coat, Latour was like a detective at a crime scene, asking questions about mundane objects, snapping pictures with his phone, and scrawling endless notes, often on his iPad. Spending time with Latour, I was often reminded of Norbert, the amiable self-parody from his book Aramis, Or The Love of Technology, who goes about the city interviewing staplers, ATMs, speed bumps, and door knobs. As it turned out, his fieldwork was not confined to their research alone. 1The idea was that I would observe him observing a group of climate scientists at a laboratory in the Vosges mountains. In 2017, I emailed Latour to ask if he would be open to letting me follow him around “in action” for a magazine profile. He worked across genres (Nietzschean aphorisms, scientific articles, epistemological policiers), media (political surveys, one-act plays, web operas), and milieux (recent collaborators included curators, geologists, and clergy), enacting the very dissolution of disciplines that he championed. Part of Latour’s genius was to absorb and synthesize disparate schools of thought-and to extend their grip on the world. His characterization of Pasteur-“playing on all of the professions he is always ahead of them, moving each of them by the combined force of others”-came to double as canny self-portraiture. It was not lost on Latour, a generous, inveterate collaborator, that his own success could be partially explained by his ability to put his philosophy into practice. “If, therefore, we say of a man that he has moved a mountain, it is because he has been credited with (or has appropriated) the work of the crowd that he claimed to command but that he also followed.” “A crowd may move a mountain a single man cannot,” Latour wrote in The Pasteurization of France (1984), his unconventional study of Louis Pasteur. Latour did for science something similar to what Tolstoy, one of his heroes, did for history-namely, reveal that its landmark theories and discoveries, like epochal wars and revolutions, far from being the work of a few great men, were actually the product of careful coordination between an abundance of human and non-human actors. This was a precept held by Bruno Latour, among the most inventive and influential philosophers of postwar Europe.
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