Tarde,Gabriel

Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) was a founder of sociology. Attentive to differences and repetitions as revealed in statistics, sociology was to represent, in his view, a higher evolution and universalization of scientific method that would finally expel ontologized conceptions of community and reject what Bergson, following Tarde, would later term “intellectualism”: the tendency to build analysis on reifications. In the end, Tarde's vision was denied by colleagues who asserted that the moral evolution of human social life elevates human relations into a special category of relations requiring sociology to be limited to a compartmentalized discipline. Beginning in 1999, the first wave of revival and republication initially pressed Tarde into the service of Deleuzian and Latourian remonstrations against anthropocentrism and neo‐Kantianism. Recently, a second wave characterized by the operationalization of Tarde's twenty‐first‐century reception, resonating with views of society as fluid and networked, has produced new empirical work based on Tarde's thought.