Tarde, Gabriel

(1843-1904)

A French criminologist, widely regarded as one of the founders of social psychology, a contemporary of Émile Durkheim who debated with him the nature of sociology. Tarde described the basic social processes as those of imitation (or repetition), opposition, and adaptation, and saw sociology as the attempt to discover the social laws that governed these processes. His analysis of the importance of imitation suggests that it is some sort of cosmic law, analogous to-but also offering an alternative to-laws of societal evolution, since imitation rather than a common evolutionary trajectory could explain cultural diffusion . Tarde was a social nominalist, for whom only individuals are real, and all social phenomena were ultimately reducible to relations between two persons exhibiting similar beliefs and desires and imitating each other through interaction. This explains his disagreement with Durkheim, a social realist who argued that social facts existed independently of individuals, and that external social constraint was the basis of social order. His major publications-The Laws of Imitation (1890) and Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (1899)-are today of only historical interest, although attempts have been made to trace his influence in American interactionist sociology, and on the study of attitudes and collective behaviour.