Abstract
Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal.
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Notes
Simmel does not use exactly these words, although in fact he distinguishes precisely the levels I describe here.
This includes, for example, phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology, and grounded theory.
The first thinker to mention in this context would be Marx, who assumes a dialectical relationship between productive forces and the relations of production (Marx 1867, 1885, 1894). Gehlen (1940/1988) thinks of the human as being naturally artificial, so that technology, or rather the invention and application of technology, are natural to the human being. This thought can already be found in a sophisticated form in the work of Plessner (1928/1975; see also Lindemann 2011). Unlike Latour’s model, a Plessnerian framework allows for a description of laboratory practices that distinguishes different action positions of social persons, living organism (see Lindemann 2009b) and technological artifacts (see Lindemann 2009a: chap. 5).
See the ethnomethodological studies collected in Weingarten et al. (1976).
Sartre (1943) is concerned with a dialectic between the “for-itself” and the “in-itself.”
The difference between Luhmann and Parsons is that Parsons (1971) assumes a formal set of four functions, whereas Luhmann assumes that the communicative process itself produces functional subsystems: it is an open question how many subsystems will emerge.
See Knorr Cetina’s (1992) empirically oriented criticism of the theory of functional differentiation.
To be precise, these should be referred to as theories of limited range, which relate to a restricted segment of the historical reality of societies.
See the overview by Nassehi (2004).
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Lindemann, G. On Latour’s Social Theory and Theory of Society, and His Contribution to Saving the World. Hum Stud 34, 93–110 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9178-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9178-9