Book Review : A Challenge to the Power of Reason

The Pasteurization of France by Bruno Latour, translated from French by Alan Sheridan and John Law (Harvard University Press: $30; 273 pages)

Have you heard the one about crossing the Godfather with a deconstructionist? The offspring makes you an offer you can’t understand.

Cheap joke.

Deconstructionism, you may recall, is the school of radical literary criticism which holds that nothing has intrinsic meaning and that texts may be massaged to say just about anything the reader wants.

This enterprise, which got its start in literature, has now reverberated through many academic disciplines, where its nuggets of truth have proved a fruitful, if somewhat dense, way of looking at things.

Today’s book, “The Pasteurization of France” by Bruno Latour, brings the deconstructionist point of view to the history and sociology of science. Latour’s first goal here is to debunk the image of Louis Pasteur as the man who single-handedly brought the world the germ theory of disease, a solitary hero who fought enormous odds to improve public health, the man Paul Muni played in the movie.

“A crowd may move a mountain; a single man cannot,” Latour writes. “If, therefore, we say of a man that he has moved a mountain, it is because he has been credited with (or has appropriated) the work of the crowd that he claimed to command but that he also followed.”

Latour, who is a French sociologist of science, does not stop there. His book is not simply a revisionist history. He uses the Pasteur story to make a broader argument, namely, that the idea that science is something inherently different from politics is a myth.

Arguing With Science

“There is no essential difference between the human or social sciences and the exact or natural sciences, because there is no more science than there is society,” he says.

And this leads him to a still-broader argument, namely, that there is no distinction between reason and power and those who treat the two as separate and distinct are making a basic mistake. Science, the epitome of reason, is no different from any social enterprise.

“I quickly unearthed what appeared to me to be a fundamental presupposition of those who reject ‘social’ explanations of science,” Latour writes. “This is the assumption that force is different in kind to reason; right can never be reduced to might. . . . I decided to see how knowledge and power would look if no distinction were made between force and reason. Would the sky fall on our heads? Would we find ourselves unable to do justice to science?”

And this leads Latour to a still-broader argument, presented in the form of numbered aphoristic paragraphs, which I cannot begin to summarize except to say that he contends that reason itself is a myth.

“The thread of argument is never straight,” he says. “Those who talk of ‘logic’ have never looked how something is spun, plaited, ranked, woven, or deduced. A butterfly flies in a straighter line than a mind that reasons.”

‘A Matter of Taste’

Reason, he writes, “is a matter of taste and feeling, know-how and connoisseurship, class and status. We insult, frown, pout, clench our fists, enthuse, spit, sigh, and dream. Who reasons?”

To go back: Whether Latour’s argument about Pasteur is right or wrong I haven’t a clue. He says that a variety of powerful social forces were all heading in the same direction in late-19th-Century France and that Pasteur simply put himself at the head of the column. Hero worship has done the rest, so that now every town and village in France has a street named “Pasteur.”

Whether right or wrong, Latour’s view of Pasteur’s contribution is certainly iconoclastic, as is each of the succeeding arguments in this seminal though difficult book.

Knowledge and power are inseparable. Science is a social activity whose basic rules, terms and methods are socially agreed on and have no independent status outside of that agreement. We accept the givens so implicitly that we hardly ever think of them as givens.

Reasons for Questioning

Latour’s questioning of the power of reason is particularly strong. We pay lip service to reason, but few of us are ever persuaded by it. In general, people decide what they believe first and make up the appropriate reasons second. There are always plenty of reasons to go around.

The effort to explain necessarily distorts, Latour argues. He shows that science itself resists explanation, though there is great reluctance to believe it.

“Few people still believe in the advent of the Enlightenment, but nobody has yet recovered from this loss of faith,” Latour writes. “Not to believe in it is to feel that we have been thrown back into the Dark Ages.”

And that is where contemporary thought has put us. A loss of faith, with nothing to replace it. Nothing to believe in.