Gabriel Tarde
Encyclopedia
Sarlat-la-Canéda
Sarlat-la-Canéda , or simply Sarlat, is a commune in the Dordogne department in Aquitaine in southwestern France.Sarlat is one of the most attractive and alluring towns in southwestern France.-Geography:...
, Dordogne
Dordogne
Dordogne is a départment in south-west France. The départment is located in the region of Aquitaine, between the Loire valley and the High Pyrénées named after the great river Dordogne that runs through it...
– 13 May 1904, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
) French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
sociologist
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, criminologist and social psychologist
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as if it were chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
), the fundamental forces being imitation
Imitation
Imitation is an advanced behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's. The word can be applied in many contexts, ranging from animal training to international politics.-Anthropology and social sciences:...
and innovation
Innovation
Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society...
.
Theory
Among the concepts that Tarde initiated were the group mindGroup mind
Group mind can mean:* Collective intelligence, a concept in sociology and philosophy* Egregore is a phenomenon in occultism which has been described as group mind.* Group mind , a type of collective consciousness...
(taken up and developed by Gustave Le Bon
Gustave Le Bon
Gustave Le Bon was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist...
, and sometimes advanced to explain so-called herd behaviour or crowd psychology
Crowd psychology
Crowd psychology is a branch of social psychology. Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. Historically, because large groups of people have been able to bring about dramatic and sudden social change in a manner that bypasses established due process, they have also...
), and economic psychology, where he anticipated a number of modern developments. However, Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
's sociology overshadowed Tarde's insights, and it wasn't until U.S. scholars, such as the Chicago school
Chicago school (sociology)
In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...
, took up his theories that they became famous.
Tarde took interest in criminology and the psychological basis of criminal behavior while working as a magistrate
Magistrate
A magistrate is an officer of the state; in modern usage the term usually refers to a judge or prosecutor. This was not always the case; in ancient Rome, a magistratus was one of the highest government officers and possessed both judicial and executive powers. Today, in common law systems, a...
in public service. He was critical of the concept of the atavistic criminal as developed by Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso, born Ezechia Marco Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature...
. Tarde's criminological studies served as the underpinning
Underpinning
In construction, underpinning is the process of strengthening and stabilizing the foundation of an existing building or other structure. Underpinning may be necessary for a variety of reasons:*The original foundation is simply not strong or stable enough....
of his later sociology.
Science Fiction
Interestingly, Tarde also produced one science-fiction novel entitled Underground Man. This novel tells the tale of a post-apocalyptic earth covered by ice where the surviving humans have gone to live underground. The novel develops on the new culture which is created by the humans where music and art are the dominating aspects of life.Influence
Everett RogersEverett Rogers
Everett M. Rogers was a communication scholar, sociologist, writer, and teacher. He is best known for originating the diffusion of innovations theory and for introducing the term early adopter....
furthered Tarde's "laws of imitation" in the 1962 book Diffusion of innovations
Diffusion of innovations
Diffusion of Innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. Everett Rogers, a professor of rural sociology, popularized the theory in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations...
.
From the late 1990s and continuing today, Tarde's work has been experiencing a renaissance. Spurred by the re-release of his essay Monadologie et Sociologie by Institut Synthelabo under the guidance of Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
'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
Félix Guattari
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French militant, an institutional psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician; he founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy...
.
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. Also on the heels of the re-release of Tarde's works has come an important development in which French sociologist Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
has referred to Tarde as a possible predecessor to Actor-Network Theory
Actor-network theory
Actor–network theory, often abbreviated as ANT, is a distinctive approach to social theory and research which originated in the field of science studies...
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 Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
ian (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 adapated in terms of methods in contemporary sociology, particularly in the area of ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
, and the study of online communities. Additionally, in 2010, Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
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.
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 ParsonsElsie Clews ParsonsElsie Worthington Clews Parsons was an American anthropologist, sociologist, folklorist, and feminist who studied Native American tribes—such as the Tewa and Hopi—in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. She helped found The New School...
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 WarrenHoward C WarrenHoward Crosby Warren was an American psychologist and the first chairman of the Princeton University Psychology department. He was also president of the American Psychological Association in 1913....
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
See also
- innovationInnovationInnovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society...
- diffusionDiffusionMolecular diffusion, often called simply diffusion, is the thermal motion of all particles at temperatures above absolute zero. The rate of this movement is a function of temperature, viscosity of the fluid and the size of the particles...
- propagandaPropagandaPropaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
- public opinionPublic opinionPublic opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views....
, one of Tarde's key concept - Serge MoscoviciSerge MoscoviciSerge Moscovici is a Romanian-born French social psychologist, currently the director of the Laboratoire Européen de Psychologie Sociale , which he co-founded in 1974 at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris...