Gabriel Tarde

Works

• 1890The Laws of Imitation

  Social life as the spread of inventions through imitation from mind to mind, just as nature repeats itself through vibration and heredity; Tarde formulates laws of this spread, for example from the inner to the outer and from superiors to inferiors.

• 1893Monadology and Sociology

  Essay renewing Leibniz’s monadology: every thing is a society of smaller agents, and science must explain the large by the small and numerous; reprinted in Essais et mélanges sociologiques (1895).

Position

Tarde is on the map as a founder of French sociology who lost the contest with Durkheim and was later rediscovered. He explained social life not by collective facts standing above individuals but by countless acts between them: inventions arise in individual minds and spread through imitation – as custom, fashion and education – until they meet other inventions in opposition and new adaptations arise. Social science, he argued, must follow these flows of beliefs and desires, which in principle can be counted, as statistics and the movements of public opinion show. In “Monadology and Sociology” (1893) he extended this view in Leibniz’s manner: every thing is a society, and everywhere the elementary agents are small and numerous. In “L’opinion et la foule” (1901) he set the modern public, a dispersed community held together by the press, against the crowd. Durkheim objected that social facts are external to individuals and constrain them and cannot be explained by imitation; the two argued in print in the 1890s and in a public debate in Paris in 1903. After Durkheim’s school prevailed in French universities, Tarde remained known mainly in American social psychology and communication research. Deleuze read him as a thinker of difference and repetition, and Bruno Latour as a forerunner of actor-network theory.

Life & context

Gabriel Tarde was born on 12 March 1843 in Sarlat in the Périgord, the son of a judge. After studying law in Toulouse and Paris he spent more than two decades as a magistrate in his home district, for many years as examining magistrate in Sarlat, and wrote on crime statistics and criminology, opposing Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal. “The Laws of Imitation” (1890) made him known. In 1894 he moved to Paris as director of criminal statistics at the Ministry of Justice; he taught at the Collège libre des sciences sociales and the École libre des sciences politiques, and in 1900 he was elected to the chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France and to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. He died in Paris on 13 May 1904; his chair passed to Henri Bergson.

Further main works

• La Criminalité comparée (1886)
• Les Lois de l’imitation (1890)
• La Philosophie pénale (1890)
• Monadologie et sociologie (1893)
• La Logique sociale (1895)
• L’Opinion et la foule (1901)