- I have restricted myself to the trades that modernism has exploited most. This is
why, despite its importance, law is not mentioned. Indeed, law has always had the good
manners to accept its relativism and its constructivism without making a big fuss. It is
capable of recognizing that others have a legal system that is simply different; it agrees
to bring together reality and fiction in a positive way. It is less implicated, so to speak,
in the question of nature than Science, politics, or morality (Latour 2002d). The same
thing holds true for art, which we have not considered either, in spite of its importance
in the formation of the tasks of the collective, and for the same reason: no one has ever
said, even in the Western tradition, that the relation between art and nature was in-
disputable (Clark 1999, Latour and Weibel 2002)! I have thus retained only the trades
that are the most difficult to anthropologize, those which have real trouble with con-
structed entities.
- In Chapter 5, we shall add a seventh function to which all the professions will
have to contribute and that will have to do with following up on the learning curve of
the collective, namely, the age-old art of governing.
- The sciences have always participated in all the tasks of the collective, moreover,
as the new history of the sciences clearly shows, but this time they do so without hy-
pocrisy and according to due process; see among others the fine example of Galileo
(Biagioli 1993), Pasteur (Geison 1995), and Lord Kelvin (Smith and Wise 1989).
- The modern beginnings of this often chaotic history can be found in Shapin
1994 and Licoppe 1996.
- One can think of the difference it makes to the ethical debate if stem cells are
substituted for embryos for the therapeutic use of totipotent cells. Another example,
one that allowed the Pasteurians to introduce into the stalemated situation of the class
struggle between rich and poor a different struggle, the one betweencontagiousrich
and poor andvaccinatedrich and poor. Health measures taken against microbes would
have been unthinkable without this slight displacement of the struggle (Latour 1988).
Another canonical example is found in the way the French atomic scientists translated
the military art into nuclear physics: see Weart 1979. A marvelous case of compromise
and innovations with the basic laws of physics, in this case relativity theory, is pro-
vided by MacKenzie 1990. These arrangements and substitutions are innumerable, and
they define the sciences, often allied with technological breakthroughs, where task no.
3 is concerned.
- Science studies have pursued this point in a wide variety of ways: see Law 1986,
Bijker and Law 1992, and Bijker 1995. For the approach taken by researchers at the
Ecole des Mines, see especially Akrich and Latour 1992, and Latour and Lemonnier
- We can see the reversal with respect to the earliest studies undertaken in the so-
ciology of the sciences; these explained the closing off of uncertainties by the stabiliz-
ing effect of ideologies, the weight of sociological factors or institutions (in the ordi-
nary sense); see Barnes and Shapin 1979. Here, on the contrary, the sciences themselves
are participating in the stabilization of the collective. Conversely, we see that scientism
errs only because it confuses a particular skill (contribution to task no. 4) with the
overall scientific endeavor. It is no longer at all difficult to say that the sciences partici-
pate—and fortunately so—in the production of the indisputable. Let us reassure the
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