We Have Never Been Modern

In The You On AI Encyclopedia

The book emerged from Latour's reading of the 1660 Boyle-Hobbes debate, which Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer had reconstructed in Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). Boyle won the right to speak for Nature through experimental demonstration; Hobbes won the right to speak for Society through sovereign authority. The settlement, Latour argued, constituted the modern division of knowledge and power. Scientists got Nature; politicians got Society; and the proliferation of hybrids — entities that refused the division — was rendered invisible by the rhetorical work of purification.

The book's central claim is that modernity is defined by a constitutional contradiction. Its official self-description insists on strict separation between nature and society, fact and value, non-human and human. Its actual practice proliferates hybrids constantly — greenhouse gases, GMOs, AIDS, nuclear reactors — that cut across every division. The contradiction is stable because the two operations (proliferation and purification) are performed by different institutions that do not talk to each other. Scientists proliferate hybrids in laboratories while denying that they are doing so. Politicians regulate hybrids in assemblies while denying that the technical details matter to political deliberation. The system works by mutual misrecognition.

The consequence is that the problems most characteristic of the contemporary moment — climate change, pandemics, ecological collapse, AI — are precisely the problems modernity cannot address. They are hybrids. Addressing them requires governance architectures that take hybridity seriously — that recognize the simultaneous natural and social character of the phenomena in question and deliberate accordingly. The existing institutions, organized around the purified categories, keep failing not because they are badly designed but because they are designed for a world that does not exist.

For the AI moment, the book's diagnosis is precise. AI is simultaneously technical artifact and social institution, mathematical optimization and political instrument, individual tool and civilizational transformation. The existing governance architectures — technical regulation on one side, civic advocacy on the other — reproduce the purified division and thereby fail to address the hybrid. The book does not solve the problem of AI governance. It identifies why the problem is hard: the existing categories cannot describe what needs to be governed, and building new categories is the prerequisite for any institutional response adequate to what AI actually is.

Origin

The book was published in French in 1991 and translated into English by Catherine Porter in 1993. It emerged from Latour's engagement with ecological politics in the late 1980s and his participation in debates about what French intellectuals called 'postmodernity.' His position was idiosyncratic: rather than celebrating or lamenting the end of modernity, he argued that modernity had never been what it claimed to be, and that the 'postmodern' condition was merely the moment at which the self-misdescription became harder to sustain.

The book was received with controversy in both anglophone philosophy (which found its style unfamiliar and its arguments against realism alarming) and French sociology (which found its rejection of Bourdieu's critical framework provocative). Over the following decades, as climate change and biotechnology made hybrid phenomena unavoidable, the book's influence spread across disciplines that had initially resisted it.

Key Ideas

Modernity as self-misdescription. The modern constitution never accurately described Western practice. It was always a rhetorical operation that proliferated hybrids while denying that hybrids existed.

The Boyle-Hobbes settlement. The division of labor between experimental science and sovereign politics was a contingent historical settlement, not a natural or necessary arrangement.

Proliferation and purification. Modernity's two simultaneous operations: producing hybrids and rhetorically denying them. The stability of the constitution depends on keeping the operations separate.

Postmodernity as recognition, not rupture. The postmodern condition is not the collapse of modernity but the moment at which the constitutional contradiction becomes visible.

A nonmodern future. The path forward is neither to preserve modernity nor to abandon it, but to acknowledge the hybrids and build governance structures adequate to what the world has always actually contained.