Bruno Latour was annoyed. It was the early 1990s, and the world was obsessed with drawing lines. On one side, you had "Nature"—the cold, hard facts of biology and physics. On the other, you had "Society"—politics, culture, and human whims. Latour looked at this divide and basically said, "This is a total lie." That’s the spark behind his 1991 bombshell (translated to English in '93), Latour We Have Never Been Modern. It isn't just some dusty philosophy book; it’s a manual for why our current world feels so chaotic.
Think about climate change or AI. Is a GPT-4 model just "math" (Nature)? Or is it a product of Silicon Valley "bias" (Society)? Latour argues it’s both and neither. He calls these things hybrids.
We pretend we are "modern" because we think we’ve finally separated humans from things. We think we’ve escaped the "primitive" mindset where people thought spirits lived in trees. But honestly, we’ve just swapped spirits for "market forces" or "global warming," which are just as tangled up in our lives as any ancient myth. Latour’s central point is that the more we try to keep Nature and Culture separate, the more they get knotted together in ways we can’t control.
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The Great Divide That Never Actually Happened
The "Modern Constitution" is what Latour calls our unspoken agreement to keep things tidy. We want scientists to handle the facts and politicians to handle the values. Simple, right? Except it never works that way.
Take the ozone hole, a classic Latour example. To talk about it, you need chemical equations (Nature), but you also need international treaties, aerosol industry lobbies, and skin cancer statistics (Society). You can’t pull a single thread without the whole rug bunching up. Latour suggests that the "Moderns" succeeded not because they actually separated these things, but because they got really good at pretending they did while churning out more hybrids than ever before.
He uses this term Purification. That’s the work we do to keep the categories clean. Then there’s Mediation, which is the actual mixing of humans and non-humans. We are obsessed with Purification in our rhetoric, but we are absolute masters of Mediation in our practice. This is why we feel so stuck. We have a political system that can't handle the "thing-ness" of the world and a science that tries to pretend it isn't political.
Why We Have Never Been Modern is Basically a Ghost Story
The book feels haunting because it tells us our progress is a bit of a delusion. We thought we were moving forward in a straight line, leaving the "backwards" past behind. But if we aren’t modern, then time isn't a straight line.
Latour’s idea of "non-modernity" isn't about going back to the Stone Age. It’s about realizing we are part of a giant "Parliament of Things." That sounds weird, I know. But imagine if we actually gave the Atlantic Ocean or a specific algorithm a "seat" at the table. Not literally a chair and a coffee, but a recognized role in our decision-making.
In the old way of thinking—the modern way—the ocean is just an object. In Latour’s world, the ocean is an actor. It does things. It pushes back. It has agency. When you stop seeing the world as a collection of passive objects waiting for humans to use them, everything changes. You start seeing a network of relationships.
The Problem With "Social Construction"
You’ve probably heard people say things like "gender is a social construct" or "race is a social construct." Latour had a complicated relationship with this. While he helped pioneer the sociology of science, he eventually got frustrated with how people used it.
If you say a laboratory fact is "socially constructed," people often think you mean it’s "fake" or "just an opinion." Latour hated that. He argued that something being "constructed" makes it more real, not less. A skyscraper is constructed. It’s made of steel, glass, permits, and labor. Does that make it a hallucination? No. It makes it sturdy.
In Latour We Have Never Been Modern, he’s trying to find a middle ground. He wants to move past the boring debate between "Realists" (who think facts exist independently of us) and "Constructivists" (who think we make everything up). He proposes Symmetry. We should use the same tools to explain a "true" scientific discovery as we do to explain a "false" one.
Actors, Networks, and Why Your Toaster Matters
This book laid the groundwork for Actor-Network Theory (ANT). If you want to understand any situation, you have to look at the "actors" involved. And for Latour, an actor isn't just a person.
- A hammer is an actor (it changes how you interact with a nail).
- A legal document is an actor (it holds people in place).
- A virus is an actor (it shuts down a global economy).
When we say "we have never been modern," we are admitting that these non-human actors have always been part of our social fabric. We aren't these detached, rational observers looking down at the world. We are in the thick of it, constantly negotiating with microbes, satellites, and silicon chips.
The irony of the modern age is that by trying to dominate nature, we created monsters we don't know how to talk to. We created a climate crisis because we thought "Nature" was an infinite, external sink that didn't have its own agency. Now that the sink is overflowing, our "modern" tools of politics and science are failing us because they were designed for a world that never actually existed.
Actionable Insights for a Non-Modern World
If we accept Latour’s premise, how does it actually change how we live or work? It’s not just for philosophy seminars. It’s a practical shift in perspective.
1. Map your own hybrids
Next time you’re facing a problem at work or in your community, stop trying to categorize it as "technical" or "human." Treat it as a hybrid. If a software project is failing, don't just look at the code (Nature) or the team chemistry (Society). Look at how the Jira tickets (the hybrid) are shaping the reality of the work.
2. Stop looking for "The Truth" in isolation
Facts are real because of the networks that support them. If you want to convince someone of a fact, you can’t just scream the data louder. You have to build the network. This means looking at the institutions, the equipment, the history, and the people that make that fact stay "true."
3. Respect the agency of things
Start noticing how the objects in your life "script" your behavior. Your smartphone isn't just a tool; it’s an actor that dictates how you spend your morning. When you design anything—a business, a garden, or a piece of art—ask what the non-human parts of that system are "asking" for.
4. Abandon the "Progress" myth
Stop worrying about being "behind the times" or "old-fashioned." If time isn't a straight line toward a modern utopia, then we are free to pull solutions from any era. Sometimes a "primitive" way of managing land or a "medieval" way of organizing a guild might actually be more effective than a "modern" corporate hierarchy.
5. Listen to the Parliament of Things
Before making a big decision, try to "voice" the non-human stakeholders. What does the local watershed want? What does the server farm need? By acknowledging these actors, we move away from the destructive arrogance of the "Modern" era and toward a more sustainable, messy, and honest way of living on Earth.
We were never modern. And honestly? That’s probably a good thing. It means we’re more connected to the world than we ever dared to believe.