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Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde
Tarde gabriel.gif
Born 12 March 1843
Sarlat-la-Canéda, Dordogne, France
Died 13 May 1904
Paris, France
Nationality French
Fields sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist
Institutions Collège de France
Alma mater University of Toulouse
University of Paris
Influences Antoine Augustin Cournot, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Influenced Alexandre Lacassagne
Eugen Lovinescu
Bjorn Thomassen
Paolo Virno
Peter Sloterdijk
Serge Moscovici
Everett Rogers
W. I. Thomas
Florian Znaniecki
Robert E. Park
Sigmund Freud
B. R. Ambedkar
Bruno Latour

Gabriel Tarde (French: [taʁd]; in full Jean-Gabriel De Tarde; 12 March 1843 – 13 May 1904) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as if it were chemistry), the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation.

Tarde was born in Sarlat in the province of Dordogne, and he studied law at Toulouse and Paris. From 1869 to 1894 he worked as a magistrate and investigating judge in the province. In the 1880s he corresponded with representatives of the newly formed criminal anthropology, most notably the Italians Enrico Ferri and Cesare Lombroso and the French psychiatrist Alexandre Lacassagne. With the latter, Tarde came to be the leading representative for a "French school" in criminology. In 1900 he was appointed professor in modern philosophy at the Collège de France. As such he was the most prominent contemporary critic of Durkheim's sociology.

Among the concepts that Tarde initiated were the group mind (taken up and developed by Gustave Le Bon, and sometimes advanced to explain so-called herd behaviour or crowd psychology), and economic psychology, where he anticipated a number of modern developments.Tarde was very critical of Émile Durkheim’s work at the level of both methodology and theory. However, Durkheim's sociology overshadowed Tarde's insights, and it was not until U.S. scholars, such as the Chicago school, took up his theories that they became famous.


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