Aramis, Or The Love of Technology

Bruno Latour

Harvard University Press, Apr 15, 1996 - History - 314 pages

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. The story of the birth and death of Aramis—the guided-transportation system intended for Paris—is told in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several different parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis’s trail—conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence—perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.

Contents

• An Exciting Innovation: 12
• Is Aramis Feasible?: 51
• ShillyShallying in the Seventies: 74

About the author

Bruno LaTour was born in the French province of Burgundy, where his family has been making wine for many generations. He was educated in Dijon, where he studied philosophy and Biblical exegesis. He then went to Africa, to complete his military service, working for a French organization similar to the American Peace Corps. While in Africa he became interested in the social sciences, particularly anthropology. LaTour believes that through his interests in philosophy, theology, and anthropology, he is actually pursuing a single goal, to understand the different ways that truth is built. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, LaTour has written about the philosophy and sociology of science in an original, insightful, and sometimes quirky way. Works that have been translated to English include The Pasteurization of France; Laboratory Life; Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society; We Have Never Been Modern; and Aramis, or the Love of Technology. LaTour is a professor at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation, a division of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines, in Paris.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Aramis, Or The Love of Technology; ACLS Humanities E-Book; History e-book project
• Author: Bruno Latour
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1996
• ISBN: 0674043227, 9780674043220
• Length: 314 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / France; Social Science / Sociology / Urban; Technology & Engineering / Civil / General