Beginning an analogy which will continue throughout this half, Latour likens Louis Pasteur to Napoleon Bonaparte in Tolstoy's War and Peace: not a "great man" whose actions shape history, but someone to whom responsibility for the achievements of others are attributed after the fact.
These parties may not be human: Latour treats Pasteur's manipulations of microbes in the lab as a means of recruiting them to carry out his tests and demonstrations.
This section draws influence from Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus[1] Latour asserts absolute irreducibility of all things and that disputes are resolved by "tests of strength" based on who can speak for more actants.
[2][3] Originally published in French in 1984, an English translation by Alan Sheridan and John Law was released in 1988 as a companion piece to 1987's Science in Action.
Latour's choice to examine only three periodicals (characterized by John Forrester as "bold and blinkered")[1] was seen by some as overly limiting,[14] not consideration for the material surrounding these journals.
[5][17] As the beginning of Latour's writing on actor-network theory and his divergence from the strong programme of sociology of scientific knowledge,[2] The Pasteurization of France drew considerable negative response from several adherents.
"[8] Evan Melhado levelled a similar critique of the explanatory potency of Latour's approach, stating that it was wholly dependent on existing accounts of the same events.