"When a dancer stops dancing, the dance is finished." - Bruno Latour

What Latour calls "critical sociology" (an intellectual foundation of social justice) does three things. 1) It replaces the activities of real people with abstract forces from a limited set of existing categories, like capitalism, society, racism, etc. 2) It ignores the protests of the actors when they say that's not what they're doing. 3) It takes those protests as proof that the sociologists are correct and that ordinary people cannot bear to face the reality of the forces that motivate them.

The result is a discipline that believes in invisible, intangible - in other words, metaphysical - forces that manipulate us like puppets, and which, because they are not material, we have little hope of influencing. The error is not political, however: it is simply how many sociologists look at the world. Latour offers an alternative explanation of social constructions as existing in the material world, composed of the associations of people and things- a dance, in the metaphor above, that exists only so long as their interactions continue.

His book, Reassembling the Social, is actually an introduction to his confusingly-named Actor Network Theory. This episode can serve as an introduction to some of the core ideas of ANT.