Dea Closson, Entry 3. (Latour)

            Bruno Latour is one of the foremost voices on scientific philosophy of our time.  In his book “The Pasteurization of France,” specifically in the first chapter, he redefines the way we look at science. He uses the great Louis Pasteur as a method for this new way of thinking.  He argues that the method in which we approach science, especially in cases of great scientific triumph, like Pasteurization, falls under the same presumptions and inconsistencies that Tolstoy writes in regards to “great men.”

            He beings by comparing scientific breakthroughs to war, saying that, like Napoleon on the battlefield, Pasteur’s discoveries in microbiology are the same as a war on microbes. Just like wars in politics and on battlefields, the war in science has the same false accounts of “great men” and that in reality science only becomes important due to many people who are involved. He asks the question why, if people so readily take Tolstoy’s view on war to be correct, do we have a hard time differentiating between the “actual” causers of scientific discoveries and the great men who seem to head the movement.  He says that, like in war, there has to be multiple actors in science in order for a theory to be proven effective and successful.

            He answers this question by first setting the stage for pasteurization by explaining the history of hygiene.  He says that Pasteur could not have been so successful without the world already essentially practicing the methods he recommended. Latour says that hygiene, which had been in practice since before the 1870, was the social movement for which Pasteur could build his credibility. Latour says that if Pasteur had never discovered microbes that society would most likely have moved on in the same direction, as the practice of Hygiene would have maybe solved the problems that microbes presented, without knowing the direct cause. Latour emphasizes the idea that without the previously existing social movement, that he says was hygiene, Pasteur’s ideas would have been found as just another idea. 

            In the end Latour takes this theory that science is, just like war, a product of the will of the masses and seeks to establish a basis for humans to take personal action to fight for the planet.