State of Nature – War against Nature.

Bruno Latour’s Hobbesianism

Abstract

This paper has two aims: On the one hand we show how certain life-forms lead to certain metaphysical and ontological conceptions and world views. We specifically concentrate on Thomas Hobbes and Bruno Latour – Hobbes being influenced by the English Civil War and Latour by climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. On the other hand, we show how Latour's work has been influenced by Hobbesian thought throughout his whole career and how he tries to adapt Hobbesian concepts such as state of nature, contract, Leviathan to his actor-network-theory and the later Gaia-hypothesis. Both thinkers share a critique of bifurcation of nature that divides reality into the artificial and the natural, premodern and modern. Due to the influence of the English Civil War and climate change and Covid-19, we concentrate on the concept of war.