The Pasteurization of France

The Pasteurization of France is split into two sections: the first section ("War and Peace") is a history of the development and adoption of Pasteur's germ theory while the second ("Irreductions") is a theoretical work, structured into numbered clauses and elaborations, which presents an early version of actor-network theory. Guerre et Paix Latour begins by contesting that histories of the science should explain outcomes as the product of "science" or "social forces", claiming he will explain Pasteur's rise to prominence without resorting to "social forces", appealing to technical details, and using only the language provided by the sources examined. Beginning an analogy which will continue throughout this half, Latour likens Louis Pasteur to Napoleon Bonaparte in Tolstoy's War and Peace: not a "great man" whose actions shape history, but someone to whom responsibility for the achievements of others are attributed after the fact. For this first half of the book, Latour relies on the contents of three periodicals contemporary to Pasteur's work: Revue Scientifique, ''Annales de l'Institut Pasteur, and Concours Médical''. Latour argues the adoption of germ theory by hygienists is not because the theory is correct but because they serve the hygienists' goals by organizing, simplifying, and triaging the countless individual hygienic practices they had developed. Latour generalizes this to argue for a sociology of associations where action is accomplished through the enrolment of other parties aligning their goals with your own. These parties may not be human: Latour treats Pasteur's manipulations of microbes in the lab as a means of recruiting them to carry out his tests and demonstrations. Latour walks through several more accounts from the history of Pasteur's work to demonstrate this principle, including how Pasteur moves through different disciplines of study throughout his career to build his reputation across different fields and how publications serve to attribute to Pasteur the works of the entire Pasteur Institute. Latour then describes a difference in the uptake of Pasteur's work between military and civilian doctors. The former are eager to use Pasteur's work to reduce illness and death among soldiers to improve their military might, but germ theory interferes with the role of private doctors, due to the conflict between patient confidentiality and public health requiring them to report contagious illness. These clinicians only have cause to adopt germ theory into their practices once it makes itself useful to them in producing diagnostics and vaccines. In a brief passage between the two halves of the book, Latour argues that there is no separation between "science" and "society". Returning to his initial claim that he would account for Pasteur's rise in the terms of the era without resorting to social or technical explanations, he contests that no explanation can wholly avoid appealing to power relations, but that his account is no more or less valid than others. Latour closes by explicitly drawing a distinction between his own project and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Irréductions This second half consists of a series of aphorisms, interspersed with commentaries and longer interludes (emulating the form of universalizing the arguments made in the first half of the book. This section draws influence from Spinoza's ''Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. ==Editions==