Modernity Leaks

Latour’s Reading of Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Abstract

This paper examines Bruno Latour’s reading of Leviathan and the Air-Pump, arguing that the Boyle–Hobbes controversy, as reconstructed by Shapin and Schaffer, becomes foundational for Latour’s critique of modernity. It situates Latour’s reception of the book within broader shifts in science studies during the 1980s, focusing on the principle of generalized symmetry and a critique of social constructivism—a critique that, in Latour’s account, turns on the partition of representation introduced by the modern Constitution. This conceptual division assigns the representation of humans to politics and that of nonhumans to science—a structure that, according to Latour, emerged only with the settlement of the Boyle–Hobbes controversy. The paper shows how Latour appropriates the conceptual personae of Hobbes and Boyle as delineated by Shapin and Schaffer and transforms them into the founding figures of this bifurcation, while bringing to light the theologico-political dimension of the laboratory.