Gabriel Tarde - Influence

Influence

• Sigmund Freud built on Tarde's ideas of imitation and suggestion for his work on the theory of the crowd.
• Everett Rogers furthered Tarde's "laws of imitation" in the 1962 book Diffusion of innovations.
• From the late 1990s and continuing today, Tarde's work has been experiencing a renaissance. Spurred by the re-release of his essay Monadologie et Sociologie by Institut Synthelabo under the guidance of Gilles Deleuze's student Eric Alliez, Tarde's work is being re-discovered as a harbinger of postmodern French theory, particularly as influenced by the social philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

For example, it has recently been revealed that in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze's milestone book which effected his transition to a more socially-aware brand of philosophy and his writing partnership with Guattari, Deleuze in fact re-centered his philosophical orientation around Tarde's thesis that repetition serves difference rather than vice versa. Also on the heels of the re-release of Tarde's works has come an important development in which 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.

A book on the Social after Gabriel Tarde, Debates and Assessments, is planned for release by Routledge in 2009, and is likely to provide the first set of mature critiques of the recent renaissance of Tarde as well as to suggest models for scholars to use Tarde's thought in their scholarship. This book is expected to include contributions that philosophically reflect the Latourian (including a contribution from Latour himself) as well as Deleuzian approaches to Tarde, and to also highlight a number of new ways Tarde is being adapted in terms of methods in contemporary sociology, particularly in the area of ethnography, and the study of online communities. Additionally, in 2010, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay released a short book called The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology, in which they show how Tarde's work offers a strong critique of the foundations of the economics discipline and economic methodology.