Gabriel Tarde

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Gabriel Tarde bigraphy, stories - French sociologist

Gabriel Tarde : biography

12 March 1843 – 13 May 1904

Jean-Gabriel De Tarde or Gabriel Tarde (12 March 1843 – 13 May 1904) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as if it were chemistry), the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation.

Influence

  • Sigmund Freud built on Tarde’s ideas of imitation and suggestion for his work on the theory of the crowd.Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Religion and Society (PFL 12) p. 116.
  • Everett Rogers furthered Tarde’s "laws of imitation" in the 1962 book Diffusion of innovations.
  • From the late 1990s and continuing today, Tarde’s work has been experiencing a renaissance.David Toews, "The Renaissance of philosophie Tardienne", in Pli: the Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 8, 1999. Spurred by the re-release of his essay Monadologie et Sociologie by Institut Synthelabo under the guidance of Gilles Deleuze’s student Eric Alliez, Tarde’s work is being re-discovered as a harbinger of postmodern French theory, particularly as influenced by the social philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

For example, it has recently been revealed that in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s milestone book which effected his transition to a more socially-aware brand of philosophy and his writing partnership with Guattari, Deleuze in fact re-centered his philosophical orientation around Tarde’s thesis that repetition serves difference rather than vice versa.David Toews (2003) "The New Tarde: Sociology after the End of the Social" Theory Culture & Society Vol. 20 No. 5., 81-98. Also on the heels of the re-release of Tarde’s works has come an important development in which French sociologist Bruno Latour has referred to Tarde as a possible predecessor to Actor-Network Theory in part because of Tarde’s criticisms of Durkheim’s conceptions of the Social.

A book on the Social after Gabriel Tarde, Debates and Assessments, is planned for release by Routledge in 2009, and is likely to provide the first set of mature critiques of the recent renaissance of Tarde as well as to suggest models for scholars to use Tarde’s thought in their scholarship. This book is expected to include contributions that philosophically reflect the Latourian (including a contribution from Latour himself) as well as Deleuzian approaches to Tarde, and to also highlight a number of new ways Tarde is being adapted in terms of methods in contemporary sociology, particularly in the area of ethnography, and the study of online communities. Additionally, in 2010, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay released a short book called The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology, in which they show how Tarde’s work offers a strong critique of the foundations of the economics discipline and economic methodology.

Theory

Among the concepts that Tarde initiated were the group mind (taken up and developed by Gustave Le Bon, and sometimes advanced to explain so-called herd behaviour or crowd psychology), and economic psychology, where he anticipated a number of modern developments.Tarde was very critical of Émile Durkheim’s work at the level of both methodology and theory.Thomassen, p. 231-249 However, Durkheim’s sociology overshadowed Tarde’s insights, and it was not until U.S. scholars, such as the Chicago school, took up his theories that they became famous.Armand Mattelart, , University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 257.

Criminology

Tarde took an interest in criminology and the psychological basis of criminal behavior while working as a magistrate in public service. He was critical of the concept of the atavistic criminal as developed by Cesare Lombroso. Tarde’s criminological studies served as the underpinning of his later sociology.

Tarde also emphasised the tendency of the criminal to return to the scene of the crime and to repeat it, which he saw as part of a wider process of repetition compulsion.Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) p. 514

Imitation

Tarde considered imitation, conscious and unconscious, as a fundamental interpersonal trait, with the imitation of fathers by sons as the primal situation, resting on prestige.Ellenberger, p. 528

Tarde highlighted the importance of the creative exemplar in society, arguing that "genius is the capacity to engender one’s own progeny".Quoted in Ellenberger, p. 891

Notes

Science Fiction

Tarde also wrote a science-fiction novel entitled Underground Man. The plot is a post-apocalyptic story of an Earth destroyed by a new Ice Age. Humanity must rebuild a new civilization underground. The choice is made to lay the foundation of their utopia on music and art.

Works

  • La criminalité comparée (1890)
  • La philosophie pénale (1890) – Translated by Rapelje Howell and published as Penal Philosophy in 1968
  • Les lois de l’imitation (1890)- Translated by Elsie Clews Parsons in 1903 and published as The Laws of Imitation
  • Les transformations du droit. Étude sociologique (1891)
  • Monadologie et sociologie (1893)
  • La logique sociale (1895)
  • Fragment d’histoire future (1896)
  • L’opposition universelle. Essai d’une théorie des contraires. (1897)
  • Écrits de psychologie sociale (1898)
  • Les lois sociales. Esquisse d’une sociologie (1898) – Translated to English by Howard C Warren and published in 1899 as Social Laws – an Outline of Sociology
  • L’opinion et la foule (1901)
  • La psychologie économique (1902–3)
  • Fragment d’histoire future (1904) – Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and published as Underground Man in 1905