De Vries, Gerard, Bruno Latour

B runo Latour once said that he hoped readers would get as much en- joyment from reading one of his books as from drinking a bottle of his family's wine.A paperback copy of Gerard de Vries's Bruno Latour costs about six dollars more than the Ontario price for a bottle of Maison Louis Latour Pinot Noir, so it can be the standard for judging this book.Gerard de Vries is a philosopher, and it is as philosophy, albeit -"empirical philosophy"-that he approaches Latour's oeuvre.Nonetheless, there is much here to interest sociologists.Following an introduction to Latour's style through vignettes from his sociological web opera, Paris ville invisible, and a brief biographical sketch, de Vries proceeds in more or less chronological order to summarize and contextualize Latour's major books.Three chapters are of particular interest to sociologists.Starting with Laboratory life (written with Steve Woolgar), de Vries devotes a chapter to showing how Latour's take on semiotics led to a distinctive and controversial contribution to science studies.In the next chapter, The pasteurization of France and Irreductions are framed as a contribution to reformulating the relation between science and society, and moving from epistemology to ontology.Through an examination of "Where are the missing masses?",Reassembling the social, and The making of law, the following chapter outlines Latour's critique and reformulation of sociology, shifting from the sociology of the social to the sociology of associations (actor-network theory).The final two chapters of the book are more philosophical, but still of sociological interest."A philosophy for our time" starts from Ulrich Beck on the risk society and Max Weber on rationality and disenchantment to understand what Latour is doing in We have never been modern, Politics of nature, and the art exhibit Making things public.Here and elsewhere, the author does a fine job untangling what is often puzzling in Latour's efforts to say something radically new, and in the case of Politics of nature, he provides an accessible summary of very difficult book.His task is even more difficult in the final chapter, on Latour's anthropology of the moderns, provisionally reported in An inquiry into modes of existence (AIME)-"not a book for the faint-hearted" (152)

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