Gabriel Tarde

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Gabriel Tarde (March 12, 1843 in Sarlat, France – May 13, 1904 in Paris) 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.

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. However, Emile Durkheim's sociology overshadowed Tarde's insights, and it wasn't until US scholars, such as the Chicago school, took up his theories that they became famous.

Everett Rogers furthered Tarde's "laws of imitation" in the 1962 book Diffusion of innovations.

Recently, 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.[1]

Contents

[edit] Works

  • La criminalité comparée (1890)
  • La philosophie pénale (1890)
  • Les lois de l'imitation (1890)
  • 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)
  • L'opinion et la foule (1901)
  • La psychologie économique (1902-3)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^  Bruno Latour (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[edit] External links


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