into a dead star, denies the meaning of its own existence, if, in the event of its constitu-
tion, one does not see it embody the labor of the shepherd or the farmer, the craftsman
or the clockmaker; I shall add to this comparison all varieties of scholars” (1977, 170).
Unfortunately, the French believe they have criticized the American version of nature
simply by pointing out that there is no nature that is not manmade. Once they had crit-
icized deep ecology and its excessive respect for a mythic nature, that of “wilderness,”
they thought they had nothing left to think (Ferry 1995).
- Having learned from experience that one must not demand too much of readers,
I have put together this book as if it presupposed no knowledge of my previous work.
Those who are familiar with that work will see, however, that I am returning to the
topic I addressed in the last chapter of my investigation into the modern Constitution
(Latour 1993); I am taking another look at what I called the Parliament of Things,
which was visible at the time, as it were, from the outside. The fact that it has taken me
nearly ten years to describe it from the inside does not simply prove that I think slowly.
I thought then that people had not done a good job talking about the sciences but that
they knew how to deal with politics. I did not imagine that politics would differ as
much from the picture drawn of it by political science as science differed from the pic-
ture drawn of it by epistemology. I was sadly mistaken. I addressed the issue in another
work, which is really the twin volume of this one, in which I attempted to extract the
philosophy proper to the science studies that my colleagues and I have been engaged in
for a number of years now, and that has had a great deal of difficulty taking root
(Latour 1999b). Finally, this book obviously presupposes a wholly different theory of
the social than the one espoused by the sciences of society* (a simple pendant, as we
shall see, to the politics of nature criticized in the pages that follow).
1. Why Political Ecology Has to Let Go of Nature
- With regard to this argument, see the companion volume (Latour 1999b). I am
especially indebted, of course, to the now-classic text by Steven Shapin and Simon
Schaffer (1985), and to the many commentaries it has generated. - On the origin, history and impact of this expression, I have recently compiled a
sort of encyclopedic assemblage (Latour and Weibel 2002). - Unlike Karl Popper (1963), who criticizes Plato’s “totalitarianism” the better to
save Socrates, I am not attacking either Plato or Socrates here, but rather the obsessive
repetition of the allegory in today’s trivialized version, which still claims to be saving
the Republic through Science. See Latour 1999b for a detailed analysis ofGorgiasthat
owes a great deal to Barbara Cassin (1995). - Foolish remarks of this sort were endemic to the famous “Sokal affair.” For over-
views of this tempest in a teapot, see Baudoin Jurdant (1998). - I must have been in my cups: I had promised never again to speak ill of episte-
mologists. But the so-called Sokal affair set me off again, reviving a righteous anger
against this form of fundamentalism in the realm of reason—which has a lot in com-
mon with the religious form. From here on, I shall distinguish the political epistemol-
ogy* that deals simultaneously with the organization of public life and with the sci-
NOTES TO PAGES 7–13
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