Gabriel Tarde 1843 – 1904

Jean-Gabriel de Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist, and social philosopher, and the chief rival of Emile Durkheim in the foundation of French sociology. After two decades as a magistrate in the Dordogne, he was appointed to the chair of modern philosophy at the College de France. His Laws of Imitation, Social Logic, and Universal Opposition developed an original theory in which the social is constituted by the diffusion of inventions through imitation, opposition, and adaptation among individuals. Long overshadowed by Durkheim's collective approach, his thought has been recovered in recent decades for the analysis of networks, publics, and the diffusion of innovations.

Jean-Gabriel Tarde was born in 1843 at Sarlat in the Dordogne, the son of a magistrate. After a Jesuit education and law studies at Paris and Toulouse, he served from 1869 as a magistrate at Sarlat, where, isolated in the provinces, he composed the books that would establish his reputation: Les lois de l'imitation (1890), La logique sociale (1895), L'opposition universelle, and the early essays gathered later as Etudes penales et sociales.

From 1894 he was head of the criminal statistics service at the Ministry of Justice, and from 1900 held the chair of modern philosophy at the College de France. His mature works include the Essais et melanges sociologiques, the anti-utopian science-fiction Underground Man (1896), Social Laws (1898), the Psychology of the Public, and the late great Opinion and the Crowd (1901). He carried on a lifelong polemic with Emile Durkheim over the foundations of sociology.

Tarde grounded social life in the elementary microsocial facts of imitation, opposition, and adaptation, and held that the great waves of fashion, opinion, language, and law diffuse outward from interpersonal contagion rather than from any super-individual collective consciousness. Eclipsed in France by Durkheim's victorious school, he has been recovered in recent decades by Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze as a pioneer of network sociology and philosophy of difference. He died at Paris in May 1904.