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We Have Never Been Modern
Latour's 1991 manifesto against the modern constitution: the short, dense book that argued the divide between nature and society is a fiction that the proliferation of hybrids has always already undone. The philosophical foundation of the AI-as-hybrid argument.
We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation 1993) is the book that most sharply articulated Latour's challenge to the modern constitution. Across 150 compact pages, it argues that the modernity Western societies believe themselves to inhabit has never actually existed. What exists instead is a constant proliferation of hybrids — entities simultaneously natural and social — paired with a rhetorical operation that insists hybrids do not exist, that each hybrid is really one pure thing or the other. The book reframes the crisis of postmodernism not as the collapse of modernity but as the recognition that modernity was always a self-misdescription. For AI, the analysis is foundational: if the modern constitution cannot accommodate hybrids, and AI is paradigmatically hybrid, then the governance architectures that AI demands cannot be produced by the purified categories modern institutions have inherited.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Latour's reading