Science as Culture

Vol. 15, No. 2, 159 –170, June 2006

REVIEW

A Congress of the World

NOEL CASTREE
School of Environment & Development, University of Manchester, UK

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, by Bruno Latour, trans.
Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 307 pp., paperback.

The . . . genie is already out of the bottle. There is no retreat to innocence . . . The
questions that remain are political and start with paying attention to the invocational
voice. Who can speak? Who is silenced? Who is commanded? (Chris Chesher, 1997,
p. 91).

Bruno Latour is a career subversive. Iconoclasm is his creed, dissent the beating heart of
all his writings. For over three decades he has made a virtue of disputing what, in his view,
passes for ‘common sense’ within and beyond the sciences. He is one of our great debun-
kers, and in Politics of Nature his voice remains as idiomatic and incorrigible as it did
when an English-speaking audience first encountered it in the late 1970s. The book
crowns a canon of commanding weight. It is the fifth of his single authored texts to be
translated into English and confirms his status as more than a ‘mere’ science studies
scholar. Unlikely as it no doubt seemed when the germinal Laboratory Life (Latour and
Woolgar, 1979) was published, Latour’s serried writings have resonated far beyond the
once obscure sub-field in which he first made his name. This is no accident, of course.
Latour has self-consciously used his status as a pioneering science studies scholar to
reach a much wider readership spanning the humanities and social sciences. This was
most obvious in We Have Never Been Modern (1993), where he employed a constitutional
metaphor to expose the contingency and non-necessity of the foundational assumptions
that organize thought and practice in the Western world. Over a decade on, it is equally
obvious in Politics of Nature, where Latour undertakes the no-less (im)modest task of
drafting a new constitution for a democracy yet to come.

Correspondence Address: Noel Castree, School of Environment & Development, University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Email: Noel.Castree@manchester.ac.uk

0950-5431 Print=1470-1189 Online=06=020159–12 # 2006 Process Press

DOI: 10.1080=09505430600708069
160 N. Castree

As such, the book fleshes-out the tantalizing final section of We Have Never Been
Modern entitled ‘A parliament of things’—indeed, it can be usefully read as the anticipat-
ory-utopian compliment required by the explanatory-diagnostic ruminations of that earlier
book. Its ambition is to set Western democracy on a new footing by rendering familiar
habits of collective decision-making strange and calling for their dissolution. Essentially
a work of philosophy, Politics of Nature traces the normative implications of the actor –
network ontology with which Latour has, for better or worse, become associated. For his
devotees and detractors alike, the book thus fills a major gap in Latour’s thinking and will
doubtless attract praise and censure in equal measure since, typically, its core theses are as
novel and grandiose as they are unsettling. For my own part, I regard Politics of Nature as
a utopian intervention that is far removed from the realms of possibility in terms of its nor-
mative recommendations. Though it can be interpreted as a bold, original and even coura-
geous critique of our actually-existing democracy, it can equally be seen as lacking
intellectual seriousness. Indeed, an uncharitable reading of Politics of Nature suggests
that its singular content merely reflects its author’s compulsive need to tread where
others have not—even if those others cannot then follow in his steps for fear of losing
their way in a profoundly alien terrain.
Below, I organize my comments on Politics of Nature into five sections leading to a
short conclusion. After an inevitably stenographic account of the book’s arguments, the
third section of the essay addresses some possible misunderstandings of Latour’s
project. Thereafter I offer some rather terse observations on Politics of Nature. These
animadversions relate to how Latour authorizes his claims, the utopian cast of his argu-
ments, and his proposals for science respectively.

A Parliament Fit for a Pluriverse

Even those who regard Latour as a gadfly would concede that he is never less than inte-
resting. Politics of Nature is predicated on a claim whose seeming outrageousness has
become a hallmark of Latour’s thinking. Western democracy, he argues, suffered a
cardiac arrest at the outset. Though he never uses the term, ‘We have never been demo-
cratic!’ is undoubtedly the book’s po-faced and cheeky mantra. Whether one goes back
to the Athenians or nineteenth century Europe, Latour insists that Western democracy
has always been anti-democratic, tainted by a despotism it was the supposed antithesis
of. On the basis of this sweeping indictment, Politics of Nature proposes to set us on
the right path. As readers soon discover, this involves more than a simple change of direc-
tion. Latour wants us to take a U-turn, retracing our steps so that we begin the journey from
scratch equipped with an altogether new map.
Politics of Nature is, in effect, an attempt to answer the most venerable question of poli-
tical philosophy: namely, who should rule and how? The book’s title is in this respect
rather misleading. Though Latour says much about politics, nature and science—in
characteristically subversive ways—his central concern is with forms of government.
As anyone familiar with We Have Never Been Modern knows, this is not government
in the conventional (and narrow) sense of formal political and legal institutions. Rather,
Latour works on a much broader canvas. For him, it is important to scrutinize the many
taken-for-granted assumptions that have silently organized cognition and action in the
(supposedly) democratic West for generations. These assumptions, Latour insists, consti-
tute a form of government every bit as real as, but much more pervasive than, those
 A Congress of the World 161

practices contained in the political and legal spheres (spheres we normally think of as
constituting the sum-total of governmental activities). It is a failure to recognize this
fact that, in Latour’s view, explains why Western democracy has fallen-short since
its inception. Though we may flatter ourselves that our form of government is the best
yet invented, Latour seems to say, we remain blind to its constitutive limitations.
So what is wrong with our ‘modern constitution’? And what should replace it? Many of
Latour’s publications of the 1990s constituted a detailed answer to the first question and
Politics of Nature recapitulates it succinctly enough in its early chapters. The modern
constitution, Latour argues, divides public life into two houses, metaphorically speaking,
because it is predicated on a set of dualisms that are as arbitrary as they are problematic.
On the one side, we have the house of society within which the affairs of people are
conducted. This is the house of opinion, of rival viewpoints, of argument and counter-
argument: in short, this is the house of politics. On the other side, Latour argues, we
have the house of nature. This is the house of facts, of intransigent objects, of states of
being: in short, this is the house of things-in-themselves. Historically, Latour points out,
science has enjoyed the peculiar power and privilege of shuttling between the two
houses. It has told society what the capacities, possibilities and limits of nature are,
while translating society’s wishes into achievable realities insofar as those wishes
impinge upon the non-human world.
Latour’s reservations about this bicameral arrangement, in which science acts as a go-
between, are spelled-out in his critique of environmental thought and politics (what he
calls ‘political ecology’). Latour certainly approves of the environmental movement’s
attempt to speak for a more-than-human world, but charges it with a failure to understand
its own practices. Specifically, he identifies three related weaknesses that it shares with its
erstwhile opponents by virtue of its inability to escape the terms and conditions laid down
by the modern constitution. First, he argues that the environmental movement is, paradoxi-
cally, too preoccupied with nature. Far from being an innocent and accurate description of
one of reality’s two major regions, Latour regards the label as a way of aborting politics:
‘simultaneously a standard, a foil, a reserve, a resource and a public dumping ground’ (p.
58). For him, nature becomes an alibi that environmentalists use to silence dissenters by
pointing to the more-or-less incontrovertible ‘facts’ of non-human life. This links, sec-
ondly, to environmentalism’s use of science in the prosecution of its arguments. For
Latour, this use is all-too-conventional: science is routinely taken to be nature’s spokes-
person by environmentalists, its cognitive authority used to short-circuit the political
process by ending conflicts of opinion.1 Thirdly, and finally, Latour argues that the
environmental movement has operated with a restrictive understanding of what constitutes
politics. In seeking to get humans to take nature seriously, it has failed to see that ‘nature’
is an illegally convoked assembly in which the relative importance of entities is taken to be
a matter of fact rather than of debate. In this sense, it has pre-empted politics while appear-
ing to give apparently non-political entities a political voice.
To summarize, Latour argues that the environmental movement represents a failed
promise: not the ‘meagre’ promise of getting non-humans onto the political agenda, but
rather the rich promise of renewing democracy in the West. The stunted democracy to
which we have become accustomed, in Latour’s view, arbitrarily divides the world in
two, presumes to know its constituents in advance, and stymies deliberation by recourse
to an appellate court—the court of objects and entities to which appeal is made when dis-
putes arise. In seeking to push environmentalism where it has been unable to go, Latour
162 N. Castree

throws down the gauntlet early in his book: for he wishes to challenge the self-evidence of
the society– nature dualism, the idea that science is nature’s truth-teller, and the idea that
politics starts only after its constituency has been decided. To phrase all this in terms of the
fundamental question that Latour asks in Chapter 2 of Politics of Nature ‘how can we draw
up a Constitution that will allow us to achieve a common world through due process?’
(p. 54, emphasis added).
His answer to this question, which takes up most of the book and defines whatever origi-
nality it possesses, is abstract but nonetheless substantive. Latour tears-up the unwritten
constitution of the moderns—the one we still live with—and proposes a root-and-
branch reconstruction of Western democracy. His starting point is the ontological position
he has adumbrated over many years, which is now burdened with the label ‘actor –network
theory’. In simple terms, Latour’s is a relational ontology that accents becoming over
being and relations over entities-in-themselves. Inspired principally by Michel Serres,
Gabriel Tarde and Isabelle Stengers, he sees the world as ‘impure’ from the outset. His
is a universe where no Maginot lines prevail, where properties are constantly exchanged,
where the one is indistinguishable from the many. After Deleuze we might call this a
‘transcendental empiricism’ that respects the ceaseless commotion of a seamless reality
that is no more (or less) than all the entities that co-constitute it. This generous ontology
steers a path between the Scylla of a rigorous atomism and the Charybdis of an expressive
holism, splitting the difference between them as it were.
In her celebrated manifesto, the ever-quotable Donna Haraway declared that ‘The
cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 150). Latour takes
this to heart. In keeping with his ontological commitments, he wishes for a form of govern-
ment where ‘the composition of a common world . . . is no longer a given from the outset
. . . [but is instead] the object of debate . . .’ (p. 62). In this republic of more-than-human,
less-than-natural assemblages ‘matters of concern [will] have replaced matters of fact’
(p. 63). In other words, politics will not be grounded in a priori determinations of
who the relevant constituencies are and nor will it be short-circuited by the appeal to
putatively non-political realities. Rather, politics will become the endless process of
determining who counts as an actor deserving of consideration by others in a new
world congress. To Latour’s detractors this may well sound like a soft-headed cosmo-
politics that childishly and irresponsibly ‘levels’ all worldly entities. But Politics of
Nature does not propose a new constitution that leaves us with no means for making
distinctions and decisions—that is, a constitution in thrall to the hybridity and
ambivalence of the world. On the contrary, Latour’s vision of a democracy-to-come
possesses, in its own way, the same systematic qualities as the modern constitution it
wishes to transcend. Let me explain.
Latour’s new agora is based on an equally new separation of powers. As with the
modern constitution, he envisages a public life governed by two houses (Figure 1). But
the duties of these houses now cross-cut and reconfigure those of their would-be predeces-
sors. Latour’s first house will answer the question: ‘how many are we?’. It will do so by
being open to perplexity—that is, a willingness to be surprised by what entities can do—
and being a forum for consultation—that is, a process of determining how one should
judge the existence and importance of entities. Latour’s second house will answer the
question: ‘how can we live together?’. It will do so by first deciding on which collectives
are to count (what Latour calls the process of ‘institution’) and then, secondly, arranging
their claims in some sort of rank order (what Latour calls ‘hierarchy’). Lest this notion of a
 A Congress of the World 163

Figure 1. The old and the new bicameralism. Here the two new houses cross-cut the ‘modern’
dichotomies of nature– society and fact – value. They perform four functions which, in Latour’s
view, define a ‘true’ democracy. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Politics of Nature
(2004) by Bruno Latour, trans. by C. Porter, p. 109 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Credit: # 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

new democracy sounds rather static, Latour is careful to insist on the auto-critical powers
of his two houses. At any one moment in time, those entities that do (or do not) fare well in
the political process can, at a later date, find their status changed (Figure 2). The import-
ance of science in all this is not hard to fathom for those who know Latour’s work in this
area well. Unburdened of the requirement to act as a mirror of nature, science enters the
democratic process as a purveyor of what he calls ‘propositions’: that is, ‘association[s] of
humans and non-humans before [they] . . . become . . . a full-fledged member of the col-
lective . . .’ (p. 247). For Latour, science’s special contribution is to give voice to those
many ‘quasi-objects, quasi-subjects’ that others in the putative collective would otherwise
be unable to hear. In his new constitution science can, at last, be ‘brought into democracy’
because it will relinquish its perceived role as an apolitical mouthpiece for the non-human
world. It will, in short, take-on its rightful responsibility as an interlocutor in ‘shared con-
versations’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 154) about collective fates.
As I hope is now clear, Politics of Nature is, fundamentally, a book about good govern-
ment. If one were asked to summarize it in a slogan then I would say that it aims for what
Steve Fuller (2000, p. 11) calls ‘the experimental society’—where the society in question
is more-than-human. At base, Latour’s ideals are republican. He wants a world where as
many constituents of the collective as possible have the right to object and be heard: free
speech writ large. Ethically, if there is any categorical imperative at all in Politics of
Nature it seems to me to be this: all entities should never be treated only as means but
always, potentially, as ends (see Latour, 1998).
Though I have necessarily offered a skeletal rendering of Latour’s arguments, it is none-
theless clear that Politics of Nature is a highly abstract work—nothing less, in fact, than an
exercise in ‘first philosophy’. Latour’s blueprint for an as-yet-unrealized democracy rarely
gets more concrete than metaphorical claims about a new bicameralism that will, in
reality, require an infrastructure to make it flesh. Nor does he venture into the realms of
164 N. Castree

Figure 2. A political constituency in motion. In Latour’s democracy-to-come the entities entitled to

political considerability are not pre-determined but, rather, open to constant reassessment. Entities
thrown out by the power of rank-ordering may return as appellants, in the next iteration.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Politics of Nature (2004) by Bruno Latour, trans.
by C. Porter, p. 111 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Credit: # 2004 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College

moral philosophy, ignoring whole traditions of normative thought that offer principled
answers to questions of justice, rights, needs and entitlements regarding both people
and non-humans. No doubt these traditions are too encumbered by the modern imaginary
to be of service in Latour’s new constitutional order. Even so, there is enough in Politics of
Nature to fascinate those familiar with Latour’s work, as well as those encountering it for
the first time. Before proceeding to an evaluation of the book, let me try to dispel some
possible misinterpretations of its central theses.

Reading Latour
It is easy to misread Latour for the simple reason that he is not easy to read. Even those
accustomed to his distinctive idiom and unconventional ideas can find themselves
wishing that a small user’s manual was at hand to help them navigate his many texts. Poli-
tics of Nature is no different, despite the excellence of Catherine Porter’s translation from
French. Aside from the obvious challenge of grasping Latour’s unusual interpretation of
nature, science and politics, he insists on utilizing a new conceptual vocabulary fit for a
new democratic settlement. On top of this, he writes in a prolix and often elliptical
way—one that those new to his work will doubtless find very off-putting. Though his
characteristic wit is evident throughout Politics of Nature, it does little to relieve almost
300 pages of abstruse verbiage. In his defence, Latour does make some concessions.
 A Congress of the World 165

Sensing that his enciphered language might alienate even the most tenacious readers, he
includes a glossary and a ‘Summary of the argument (for readers in a hurry)’ (pp. 231–
236). He is also at pains at several points in the book to address the reader directly, reas-
suring them that while the journey they have embarked upon is not easy it will ultimately
lead to a luminous summit if only they persist.
Notwithstanding these aides and inducements, the room for misunderstanding Latour’s
arguments is considerable. The potential for travesty seems to me to lie in three main
areas. Firstly, some may think that Politics of Nature is making an epochal argument:
namely, that we are in a new era of technoscience whose chimerical offspring require
an adjustment in our political practices. But this is emphatically not the case and it is
telling that Latour has avoided the epochal prefix ‘post’ in all his recent work. The new
constitution specified in Politics of Nature is not one intended to map onto a new world
reality. Rather, Latour sees it as a scandalously overdue response to a universe that was
never divisible in the way the modern constitution supposed it to be.
Secondly, and more seriously, the unwary reader might interpret Politics of Nature as an
idiosyncratic attempt to enfranchise non-humans. But, again, this would be to misconstrue
things. Latour’s critique of the environmental movement indicates as much. In an essay
entitled ‘To ecologise or modernise? That is the question’ (Latour, 1998, p. 221), he
asks whether ‘the eco-movement is . . . a new form of politics or a new branch of politics’
(emphasis added). His conclusion, reiterated in Politics of Nature, is that it should be the
former but in practice is merely the latter. By seeking to make visible those non-humans
excluded from political reasoning, Latour argues that bio and ecocentrists are missing the
point. What they should be doing is not ventriloquising the silent majority of plants,
animals, insects, microbes, machines or what-have-you. Instead, they should be
showing how these things are not a separate political constituency at all but an intimate
part of what we wrongly call the ‘human’ assembly. In any given actor-network, it is
not that ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’ should each have political entitlements. Rather, it
is that all of them do by virtue of the fact that ‘they’ are not a collection of preformed indi-
vidual entities that just happen to be related. Rather, their ‘individuality’ is an achievement
wrought out of their intimate association. For Latour, it is thus simply nonsensical to
suggest that some actors can exclusively ‘hold’ or extend to others the capacity for politi-
cal participation or political considerability. Because he takes a non-essentialist view of
being-in-the-world, because the ‘I’ is always already a ‘they’, then the political must
for Latour be a promiscuous domain.
Thirdly, and finally, some readers might get the wrongful impression that Latour wants
the world, in all its mangled diversity, to speak for itself in his new parliamentary proposals.
Such a wish is, of course, absurd. But it is not, in fact, one that Latour expresses. Politics of
Nature holds true to Marx’s famous dictum: ‘they cannot represent themselves, they must
be represented!’. John O’Neill (2001) usefully recounts a Borges’ short story in order to
demonstrate the impossibility of self-representation. In the story a Don Alejandro seeks
to construct a world parliament. Twirl, his associate, points out that the parliamentarians
would never be adequately able to represent the views of so many citizens. He thus pro-
poses that the parliament should be akin to the perfect map: that is, one ‘that was of the
same scale as the [world] and that coincided with it point-for-point’ (O’Neill, 2001,
p. 485). Analogously, because Latour advocates a non-essentialist ontology where actors
do not fall into fast-frozen categories, the problem of both epistemic and proxy represen-
tation is especially acute. If actors are unique by virtue of their networks, then nothing
166 N. Castree

else can ‘stand for’ them in either sense of the term representation. But given the number of
actants that someone like Latour might want to admit into a new political congress, the
Twigg solution is clearly absurd. Even if it weren’t it would descend into a tyranny of
the ignorant since many constituents would be ill-equipped to determine their own and
others’ best interests. We thus have to accept the intractability of what, adapting
Haraway (1991, ch. 9), we might call ‘situated representation’. That is, representatives
must sometimes speak for others but they do so from specific positions they are not
always conscious of or which escape their control (Rose, 1997). Confronted with this situ-
ation, the best we can do is ask of representatives: who or what are they?; who do they speak
for and how?; what legitimacy do they possess as spokespersons? (O’Neill, 2001, p. 489).
Though Politics of Nature does not offer detailed answers to these questions, it does
concede that scientists, politicians, moralists and economists will remain the four great
representative groups in any future democracy of things. Thus Latour is not ‘against’ rep-
resentation in its ‘speaking of’ and ‘speaking for’ forms. Rather, he is keen to multiply the
number of representations that might capture collective attention at any one moment, while
attending carefully to the power that representatives necessarily have in this process.
These three possible misapprehensions having been addressed, let me now venture
some criticisms of Politics of Nature. I begin, in the next section, by asking how Latour
grounds his plenary arguments.

Latour the Visionary

In the introduction I made mention of Latour’s pedigree as an intellectual subversive. He is
someone who likes to lead rather than to follow, and it is precisely because his thought is so
unorthodox that it has attracted such wide attention. One imagines that being Bruno Latour
is both a wonderful and lonely thing. Because he claims to see what almost all of us
cannot—be it about science specifically or our mode of government more generally—he
presumably buys his singular vision at the cost of scholarly companionship. His is the
heroic role of the seer-genius who must educate (and tolerate) the common herd of
people who remain blind to those realities that are, paradoxically, right before their eyes.
I am not being entirely facetious here. Politics of Nature continues Latour’s trademark
practice of informing readers that pretty much everything they believe about the world is
incorrect. Indeed, the book reminded me of Heidegger’s essays on technology, not because
of any commonality of subject matter but because of the same breath-taking commitment
to reveal a world hidden to us by our habitual thoughts and actions. Consider the following
comment on page 2 of Latour’s book: ‘political ecology has not yet begun to exist’. Here
Latour is claiming that while political ecology (in his terms, the environmental movement)
exists at one level, at another it is misguided: in need of nothing less than root-and-branch
reinvention. Though we live in an era when ‘meta-narratives’ are supposedly dead in aca-
demia, Latour clearly disagrees: from We Have Never Been Modern to his current book he
is happy to tell very big stories about the past, present and future. This begs the important
question of how Latour authorizes his sweeping claims. Do the arguments of Politics of
Nature constitute an insightful anatomization of current maladies and real possibilities?
Or do they simply reflect the predilections of an especially fertile intelligence hell-bent
on being heretical at all costs?
In his paradigmatic investigations of science in action, Latour has frequently insisted
that he is seeking to defend science by ‘adding reality’ to the misperceptions that both
 A Congress of the World 167

practitioners and lay people have of it. Similarly, there is little doubt that Politics of Nature
is intended to add reality to our current understanding of what democracy is and could be.
But I think some contradictions attend Latour’s expose and reconstruction. Firstly, the
book seems to me to operate with a ‘double reality’ problematic that is redolent of tra-
ditional Marxist notions of ideology. At one point Latour argues that ‘. . . if political
ecology . . . is obliged to “protect nature”, it is going to focus on the wrong objective as
often as on the right one . . .’ (p. 27). Here the modern constitution that Latour casts asper-
sions on is taken to be a real phenomena that supports a less-than-perfect democracy while
co-existing with, and concealing, a networked world that threatens to detonate its very
structures. At the very least, one might expect an analysis of why and how the modern con-
stitution has survived despite it ignoring a socio-natural world that should be partitioned in
the way that constitution partitions it. Secondly, this begs the question of why the modern
constitution is now ripe for overthrow given that there is, in Latour’s estimation, nothing
more (or less) hybrid about the present than the past. Fredric Jameson has famously said
that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Analogously,
given that Latour’s critique of modern democracy knows no peers, it is hard to imagine
why the modern constitution underpinning that democracy will wither away (supposing
that such a constitution actually exists in the stark terms Latour describes it). His ideas
alone can hardly precipitate its demise; the force of a good argument is clearly not suffi-
cient. What is required, presumably, is some tendency immanent in the present that will
cause the supercession of democracy as currently constituted.
In sum, Politics of Nature contains several predicates that, if they are not implausible,
then they are at least in need of further explication. If our current governmental arrange-
ments are really as anaemic as Latour maintains then it seems passing strange that a
uniquely perspicuous individual is needed to identify the fact. Apparently, Latour has
been blessed with vision at once Olympian and X-ray. Equally, if Latour’s alternative con-
stitution is truly a bride in waiting, it seems odd that he can identify no determinate force
capable of hastening its arrival at the altar. Latour offers only one ‘empirical’ case study in
the book (relating to prions) and certainly no ‘real world’ analysis. In light of this, one is
left with the impression that Latour has created a set of arguments that, while arresting and
clever, are entirely of his own making. Whatever purchase on reality they may have is
weakened by his fondness for ideal –typical argumentation, hyberbolic incantation and
rarefied generalization. What Marxologist Dick Howard (1988, p. xx) said in another
context seems to me to be apt here:

The critic is caught in a dilemma. Either the critique is its own self-foundation—in
which case the critic is not necessary because the critique lies in the things them-
selves; or the critique of founded on something external to the criticized . . . in
which case the critic cannot avoid the accusation of arbitrariness since the critique
depends on criteria to which it can appeal but which it can know only by falling into
that immanence of self-foundation which makes the critic unnecessary.

Concrete and Abstract Utopias

If this all seems unduly harsh, then we can at least explore the value of Latour’s normative
arguments when set within the context of a long and honourable tradition of utopian
168 N. Castree

thinking. These arguments can be seen as a hugely inventive thought-experiment that

offers us a benchmark against which to judge the present and orient change-making
actions for the future. This experiment derives its radicalism from precisely the lack of
immanence I criticized Latour for above. Barely incipient in the present, Latour’s democ-
racy-to-come can best be read as a provocation—one intended to point-up the contingency
and inadequacy of our existing governmental structures. He would not, of course, agree
with this reading. In his conclusion, for example, he declares that ‘there is nothing less
utopian than an argument that aims at nothing but putting an end to that [existing]
utopia, the modernist eschatology that is still expecting its salvation . . .’ (p. 224). But I
beg to differ. Politics of Nature opens-up a terrain so foreign that conventional maps
and instruments are of little use for the reader. The brave new world of democracy
charted by Latour inevitably confronts us as an ideal rather than a live option.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1998, p. 1) has observed that ‘utopias are breeders of illusions
and, inevitably, of disillusions’. I think this judgement too cynical. The brilliance of
Latour’s proposals for a new bicameralism is two-fold. First, they inevitably take us
back to a time before the modern constitution was solidified, not in a spirit of nostalgia
but as a reminder that things could have been very different (and, again, the force of
this argument only applies if we believe that Latour’s modern constitution really exists
as he depicts it). Secondly, Latour’s proposals are sufficiently systematic and original to
comprise a clear alternative to our current constitutional set-up. Because they refuse to
have any truck with modern democracy, they occupy a contrast space from which we
can evaluate its fundamental attributes rather than merely its local details.
This said, I think these proposals are problematic. In One Dimensional Man Marcuse
wisely observed that utopian critiques are typically ‘thrown back to a high level of abstrac-
tion’ (1964, p. xiii). This applies to Politics of Nature where only the rudiments of a future
democracy are fleshed-out. If one puts oneself in the position of the three main audiences
that might read the book—namely, those interested in science, political theorists/philoso-
phers and environmentalists—then you wouldn’t bet on them staying the course. Inge-
nious though Latour’s proposals are, they are so lacking in detail and are so elusive at
times, that these readers might well know not what to do with them. For instance, by
the third chapter I became—despite great concentration—so confused by the numerous
neologisms used (defined in the Glossary, pp. 237 –250) that I began to lose the thread
of argument. Likewise, while Latour’s re-scripting of the fact –value distinction is fasci-
nating (though I doubt many readers of his book will believe that distinction maps neatly
onto the institutional separation between science and the realm of formal politics),
somehow the resulting notion of ‘matters of concern’ kept escaping me. At worst, then,
Latour’s undoubtedly original arguments may be taken as an intellectual curiosity that
is as exciting and mad-cap as schemes for cold fusion. I am clearly too immured in the
modern constitutional order to think outside the box in the way Latour wants his
readers to do.

Science as Government
My third and final set of criticisms relate to Latour’s treatment of science and its role as a
mechanism of government. His plan is not to democratize science but, rather, to fully
realize its potential as an organ of democracy. This is science for the collective, not by
it. The current-day sciences, he argues, need to slough off the image of Science as a
 A Congress of the World 169

purveyor of truth so that they no longer curtail due process. In this he usefully recalls us to
the idea of science as a republic mistaken for an autocracy—an idea famously associated
with Michael Polanyi (1962). Steve Fuller (2000, p. 8) usefully notes that ‘strictly speak-
ing, science is a representative body in which the few speak for the many . . . [I]t both
governs and is governed without being formally constituted as a government . . .’.
Latour sees it this way too, as a form of rule whose political function has been for too
long concealed by resort to ‘facts’, ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ when public assent on
matters human and environmental is required.
So far so interesting, if rather overstated. Contrary to Sokal and Bricmont’s (1998)
ignorant polemic against him, Latour is a champion of science not its enemy. But the
price of Politics of Nature’s utopian cast and abstract character is that his discussion of
science by-passes the live debates on science and democracy among scientists, science
policy makers, other STS scholars, and the wider public. This is the understandable but
regrettable result of Latour’s desire to transcend the present and leave it far behind.
Science, as currently practised and understood, is too important to be left to scientists
alone (and it was ever thus). And if it is to be left in their expert hands then suitable
checks and balances are required so that its power is not abused. In this light, Fuller’s
Governance of Science (2000) or Collins and Evans’ (2002) recent essay on ‘expertise
and experience’ offer far more incisive and relevant arguments than does Latour, who
operates at several removes from real-world scientific enterprise and its wider social
and environmental consequences.
Politics of Nature confirms Bruno Latour’s passage from a science studies specialist to a
philosopher with grand ambitions. The book redeems the promissory note offered at the
end of We Have Never Been Modern, at last fleshing-out how a ‘parliament of things’
might function. Despite my reservations, I would recommend Politics of Nature—not
so much to aficionados of Latour’s work (who will read it anyway) but to those who
know it only slightly. Though not an easy read, the book is never less than challenging,
maddening and interesting. In writing it, one imagines that Latour wished to position
himself in a long and distinguished line of French intellectuals feted for the profundity
of their thought. One of those intellectuals was Pierre Bourdieu, who towards the end
of his career talked of ‘realist utopias’ as part of his savage attack on neo-liberalism in
France and abroad. For Bourdieu such utopias are feasible: they can, with luck and
much effort, become realities. Bruno Latour has not, alas, offered us a realist utopia in
Bourdieu’s sense. Instead, he has left current realities far behind in favour of a would-
be world that is little more, one suspects, than a fascinating fantasy.

Note
1
Strangely, Latour says nothing about issues where scientific research on the non-human world is divided
and inconclusive.

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