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Introduction
Gabriel tarde ranks as one of the three most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France,
but, especially in recent years, he has been read less closely than either Auguste Comte or Emile
Durkheim. Too often dismissed as a debator of Durkheim who lost, or the dated antecedent of Le Bon,
Tarde has been stigmatized as an inchoate and imprecise philosophical or literary writer. Such
misconceptions, magnified many times by distorted secondary accounts, have flourished. Remarkably
few are those who have sufficiently penetrated Tarde’s work to find more than support for their
preconceived notions. This volume has been prepared to facilitate a more careful examination of
Tarde.
Tarde contains much of value for the present-day social scientist. The famous debate with
Durkheim did not in fact terminate with a clear victory for either side; each man contributed to a more
sophisticated picture of the relationships between the individual and society, and in the debate one
finds many issues clarified which later writers have seldom considered in such detail. Awareness of
the problems raised in the debate—and the solutions of Tarde and Durkheim—heightens one’s
sensitivity to basic issues of the nature and scope of sociology, problems that plague sociologists
even today.
One finds too, in Tarde, the elaboration of a general conceptual framework that serves to integrate
middle-level theory and emipirical analysis. But the integration provided by this framework is not
simply one of dry categorization: abstract formulations are skillfully combined to generate middlelevel
propositions which, in turn, generally either are tested or the necessary evidence is indicated
which would serve to confirm or reject them. One can observe, in Tarde’s hands, how such a general
framework—one which incorporates innovation, conflict, and change as central elements—can serve
as a powerful beam to bring into focus and illuminate selected empirical problems.
The propositions concerning imitation and diffusion, which derive largely from this framework, are
among the most stimulating of Tarde’s ideas for contemporary research. Criminologists, too, find
some some of their guiding concepts in Tarde’s writings on deviance and social control. Tarde also
scrutinized collective behavior, mass communication, and public opinion, not as isolated phenomena
but as elements to be explained within the context of broader societal patterns. But unlike subsequent
mass society theorists, Tarde integrated his discussion of macro-societal changes with those on the
small group level. In this way, for example, he arrived at a two-step model of communication flow. In
following Tarde through these and other problems, we can observe a versatile mind, always seeking,
often reaching, the ideals that he set for the creative thinker. Finally, in presenting his thoughts Tarde
offers a model of literary exposition that more contemporary writers would do well at least to
consider if not to imitate.
I. Life
Jean-Gabriel Tarde was born in the small town of Sarlat, about one hundred miles east of Bordeaux,
in 1843. 1 His father’s family was practically as old as the town, and, since the eleventh century,
Tardes, or de Tardes, had served as local officials of one sort or another. (The aristocratic particle,
dropped by the family in 1789 but restored in 1885, was never used by Tarde in his writings.) These
traditions intrigued Tarde, and he wrote several short volumes on the family and the town, as well as
editing and republishing the papers of outstanding family members. 2