Background
Tarde, Gabriel was born on March 12, 1842 in Sarlat, Dordogne, France.
criminologist psychologist social philosopher
Tarde, Gabriel was born on March 12, 1842 in Sarlat, Dordogne, France.
L’Ecole Normale Supérieure.
1881-1900, Directeur du Service de la Statistique au Ministère de la Justice. 1900-1904, Professor of Sociology, Collège de France.
Tarde’s sociology grew out of his work as a criminologist engaged in the study of deviant behaviour. Loosely attached to the school of Antoine Cournot, he developed a psychological as against a purely biological or mechanical conception of scientific sociology. Tarde’s enduring aim was to reduce all social facts to the phenomenon of imitation, in which an act, a feeling or an idea tends to be transmitted from one person to another. By maintaining in a novel way that the startingpoint of imitation is invention, an essentially individual and non-social fact, he called into question the generally accepted notion that fundamental social facts are constituted by an interdependence, based on coordination without imitation. Thus for Tarde the sociologist’s task is to determine how imitation occurs and is modified under circumstances of every kind, in short to establish the ‘laws of imitation’. According to him. from such laws we may infer that humanity is advancing towards an ever growing unity and equality. These views, which were explicitly opposed to those of Émile Durkheim in particular, aroused much debate. Tarde was one of the most brilliant early representatives of the ‘École du milieu social', which stands opposed, in the field of criminology, to the biological school.