Background
Tarde was born on the 12th of March in 1843 at Sarlat-la-Canéda. An only child, he was raised by a sensitive and tender mother, his father, a judge in Sarlat, having died when Tarde was seven.
criminologist social psychologist sociologist
Tarde was born on the 12th of March in 1843 at Sarlat-la-Canéda. An only child, he was raised by a sensitive and tender mother, his father, a judge in Sarlat, having died when Tarde was seven.
His relative obscurity was partly a result of the fact that he spent most of his life outside of Paris and the French university system.
Abroad, his greatest influence was on Edward A. Ross and on Robert Park and Edward Burgess and their University of Chicago colleagues who are associated with the theories of social interaction and cultural diffusion.
He received a rigid classical education at the local Jesuit school and later maintained that a common classical education was a valuable mechanism for producing social integration among the elite groups of a country. He obtained a secondary degree in the humanities and at first intended to pursue science and mathematics at the École Polytechnique.
Tarde served as a magistrate in the Dordogne and, from 1894, as director of the criminal statistics bureau at the Ministry of Justice in Paris. From 1900 he was professor of modern philosophy at the Collège de France. By 1875 he had developed his basic social philosophy. Holding that invention is the source of all progress, Tarde believed that perhaps 1 person in 100 is inventive. Innovations are imitated, but the imitations themselves differ in degree and kind. Opposition arises both between varied imitations and between the new and the old in culture. The outcome is an adaptation that is in itself an invention. Tarde saw this sequence as an unending cycle constituting the process of social history and explained the phenomenon in Les Lois sociales (1898; Social Laws). He treated the repetition phase in his best-known work, Les Lois de l’imitation (1890; The Laws of Imitation). Tarde’s work in this area influenced later thinking about the concepts of social psychology and the diffusion of social ideas.
In La Criminalité comparée (1886; “Comparative Criminality”) and other works, Tarde attacked the extreme biological-causation theories of Cesare Lombroso and his school, pointing out the importance of environment in criminal behaviour. His two-volume Psychologie économique (1902) stimulated the institutional economics of John Hobson in the United Kingdom and Thorstein Veblen in the United States.