Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. By Bruno Latour. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 316. $39.95 cloth.

Abstract

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. By Bruno Latour. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 316. $39.95 cloth. Reviewed by Mariana Valverde, University of Toronto1 Law & Society Review readers are likely to have heard the news that Durkheim is dead. Yet Durkheim-style thinking persists. Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra tried to make us realize that if we no longer believe in God as the guarantor of order and meaning, we cannot continue to imagine that phenomena can be neatly categorized as effects of larger causes, with causes in turn organized in a coherent if mobile system. Zarathustra's words fell on deaf ears, however. Today, we may have learned that the world is neither static nor orderly, but we have not looked at our thinking tools to see which ones assume an order behind phenomena. Some who did hear Nietzsche's message decided to throw away all tools, in postmodern despair. Others buried their noses in concrete particulars (e.g., the historical turn). But mainstream sociologists, believing that scholarly raw material comes only in two currencies, facts and concepts, continue making the world-revisioned as sets of data-fit pre-given categories. Bruno Latour's critique of structuralist-influenced sociology does not take up the tired slogan about facts being socially constructed; on the contrary, it leaves facts to one side, concentrating on critiquing concepts. American audiences, often merging all things French into a single Rorschach blob, have not realized that Latour is adamantly opposed to the cultural-studies folk who came to believe that deconstruction (a method for analyzing texts) could replace both politics and social science. For Latour (as for Foucault, an affinity repeatedly recognized in this book), Durkheimian sociology has to be abandoned not because it is hopelessly positivist-though it is-but because it is not scientific enough. Invoking an alternative social science tradition, one that begins in Durkheim's forgotten rival Tarde and goes through Garfinkel's ethnomethodology to science studies, Latour's book is curiously optimistic: it is an anti-Durkheimian rules of sociological method. So just what is the new method, and why should legal scholars care? For Latour, the task of scholars begins by taking up a scientific skeptical stance and swearing never to use prepackaged abstract notions-or at least, to use them only after acknowledging that they are black boxes that could and should be opened at some point. One can then study how various actors interact in a particular setting, and how they help or hinder each other to generate a more or less durable result: the germ theory of disease, a new subway train, a legal doctrine, etc., with these accounts being notable by the absence of sociology's familiar concepts. Durkheim's claim to fame was that, unlike other late-nineteenth-century writers on issues such as crime and madness, he did not talk about hybrid entities such as degeneration, but rather began by positing and enshrining the social. For Latour, this attempt to purify a social realm is as problematic as its opposite, biological reductionism. And while Latour may be somewhat unfair in stating that contemporary sociology treats the social as a kind of stuff, his criticism of sociology's founding move is on the whole apposite. …