2nd Edition

The Social after Gabriel Tarde Debates and Assessments

Edited By Matei Candea Copyright 2016
    348 Pages
    by Routledge

    348 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Gabriel Tarde was a highly influential figure in 19th century French sociology: a prolific and evocative writer whose understanding of the social differed radically from that of his younger opponent Emile Durkheim. Whereas Durkheimian sociology went on to become the core of the social scientific canon throughout much of the 20th century, Tarde’s sociology fell out of the picture, and he was remembered mostly through a few footnotes in which Durkheim dismissed him as an individualist, a psychologist and a metaphysician.



    The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom ‘every thing is a society and every science a sociology’. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as "an alternative beginning for an alternative social science". This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like.



    This second edition has been expanded to include, alongside the original chapters, two key essays by Gabriel Tarde himself - Monadology and Sociology and The Two Elements of Sociology, as well as a significantly revised and extended introduction by the editor.

    Introduction: Revisiting Tarde’s house, Matei Candea  Part I: Two Essays  1. Monadology and Sociology, Gabriel Tarde  2. The Two Elements of Sociology, Gabriel Tarde  Part II: The Distance that Lay Between’: The Tarde–Durkheim debate reconsidered  3. The Debate, Gabriel Tarde & Emile Durkheim  4. Imitation: Returning to the Tarde–Durkheim debate, Bruno Karsenti  5. The Value of a Beautiful Memory: Imitation as borrowing in serious play at making mortuary sculptures in New Ireland, Karen Sykes  6. Tarde and Durkheim and the Non-Sociological Ground of Sociology, David Toews  7. If there is no such thing as Society, is Ritual Still Special? On using The Elementary Forms after Tarde, Joel Robbins  8. One or Three: Issues of comparison, Timothy Jenkins  9. The Height, Length and Width of Social Theory, Alberto Corsín Jiménez  10. Faith, Reason and the Ethic of Craftsmanship: Creating contingently stable worlds, Penny Harvey & Soumhya Venkatesan  Part III: Quantifying, Tracing, Relating: Fragments of Tardean method  11. Tarde’s Idea of Quantification, Bruno Latour  12. Gabriel Tarde and Statistical Movement, Emmanuel Didier  13. Tarde’s Method: Between statistics and experimentation, Andrew Barry  14. Intervening with the Social? Ethnographic practice and Tarde’s image of relations between subjects, James Leach  15. Tarde on Drugs, Or Measures Against Suicide, Eduardo Viana Vargas  16. On Tardean Relations: Temporality and ethnography, Georgina Born  17. Pass it On: Towards a political economy of propensity, Nigel Thrift  18. "Prova d'orchestra" or Society as Possession, Bruno Latour  Afterword, Marilyn Strathern

    Biography

    Matei Candea is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge and Fieldwork (Indiana UP, 2010) and a number of articles on  anthropological method and theory, the ethnography of politics and the anthropology of science. His current research focuses on the interplay of engagement and detachment in everyday relations between behavioural biologists and the meerkats they study.  See www.mateicandea.net.