Bruno Latour - The Affects of Capitalism

The Royal Academy Lecture in the Humanities and Social Sciences

On Wednesday 26 February 2014, the French Professor in Sociology, Bruno Latour, gave a lecture at the Royal Library, The Black Diamant.

The Affects of Capitalism
Through the work of science studies applied to the peculiar discipline of economics, a very innovative view of the ways in which the "economic infrastructure" affects people has been proposed. However, it is not always clear in what way it modifies the older ideas of capitalism and the distribution of political positions that have been generated by such concept. The lecture will illustrate this new view by showing the place of Economics in modern anthropology, and which redefinition of politics it entails.

Professor of anthropology and President of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Kirsten Hastrup, writes about the speaker:

Bruno Latour has been one of the most influential thinkers in the social sciences, broadly defined, since his early work on Laboratory Life (co-authored with Steve Woolgar, 1986). In the plethora of works that have appeared since then, Latour has consistently challenged established categories and scientific complacency and encouraged social scientists to study connections and networks rather than boundaries and entities. Travelling freely in the intellectual landscape between philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, Latour has invited his readers to take a fresh view of the world, and to transcend dominant categorical oppositions, such as modern/non-modern, culture/nature, human/non-human.