The New Tarde

Abstract

The early 20th-century French sociologist and philosopher Gabriel Tarde was an important critic of Durkheim's ontology of the social. Tarde developed a microsociological and ontological critique of the philosophical problems of resemblance and of variation underlying Durkheim's comparative sociology. Recently, thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Éric Alliez have begun to revisit Tarde and to develop a theme of the significance of Tarde's thought as a harbinger of postmodern theory. This article examines Tarde's theories in the light of this new reception. It is shown that Tarde draws heavily from Leibniz's theory of the quantitative continuity of qualitative singulars in order to critique Durkheim's statistics-based social realism. While some key limitations of Tarde's critique are exposed, it is argued that Tarde finds a way to remain faithful to statistical sociology as a project even while calling radically into question the qualitative unity of the social.

Climate policy uncertainty and regional innovation performance: New empirical evidence from the United States

“…This theory also expresses the connection between CPU and innovation by disclosing that CPU urge firms to make strategic planning and find a way through innovation to achieve a competitive advantage. Similarly, diffusion innovation theory was discussed in 1903 by Gabriel Tarde (Toews, 2003). This theory highlights that newborn ideas, technologies, behaviors, and goods gradually spread through conventional sources or through population, rather than all at once (Kaminski, 2011).…”

Biosemiotics and Hominidae history: technicity, animals, and the limitations of human exceptionalism

“…It is productive to reread Leroi‐Gourhan in light of the enthusiasm generated by Bruno Latour's animated resurrection of Gabriel Tarde's theory of imitation (2010 [1903]) to critique postmodernism and provide salvation for sociology incarnate in the logic of actor network theory (Toews 2003; see also King 2016; Watson 2017). Leroi‐Gourhan's understanding of technologized animation anticipates how networks relate to actants, both human and nonhuman.…”

Friends of Relational Sociology? The Relational Current as a Space of Hospitality

“…Cantó-Milà, 2005;Donati, 2011;Crossley, 2011;Ruggieri, 2016;Pyyhtinen, 2010;Kemple, 2018;Papilloud, 2018); Gabriel Tarde (see e.g. Toews, 2003;Tonkonoff, 2018), George Herbert Mead (see e.g. Côté, 2018), and even Émile Durkheim (see e.g.…”