It was late in the afternoon, towards the end of February. Paris was mired in a protracted cold spell and the city was already consumed by a chilling darkness. My tiny office at the Institute of Political Science (Sciences Po), which gave onto the Rue des Saints Pères and the austere façade of the Faculty of Medicine opposite, was still full of cardboard boxes stuffed with books. I had only arrived at the start of the year and shelves had not yet been built. After a curt knock and not much of a pause, a tall and slightly hunched man entered, wearing what looked like a tweed cloak. Though I recognised him as my new university’s research director, I did not know a great deal more about him. He sat in the only available chair and asked me what I was working on. For the next half an hour, my visitor questioned me on my research, probing the various arguments, gently raising some objections. Perhaps because his interest was clearly not in the finer points of European integration, the subject of my research, the conversation left me with a feeling of having drawn out something deeper from my own work. At the end of it, my visitor shook my hand, welcomed me to Paris, and left my office, all without removing his cloak.
My visitor was Bruno Latour. Latour’s death on 9 October has prompted a flurry of acknowledgements of his towering status as philosopher, thinker, guru and public intellectual. Reading some of the tributes and thinking back to Latour’s unprompted visit to my office just over a decade ago, I cannot help wondering whether his death also signals the passing of a certain kind of thinker and public figure. The end, if you like, of the long tradition of the intellectuel. If this is the case, what – if anyone – is taking their place?
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