Gabriel Tarde

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Gabriel Tarde

Jean-Gabriel Tarde (March 12, 1843 – May 13, 1904) was a French criminologist and sociologist. He is known as one of the founding fathers of sociology. Tarde proposed a different way of looking at the social world, opposing Emile Durkheim’s views of society as a collective unity, regarding it instead as an aggregate of individuals.

Based on this view of the importance of the individual, he analyzed human society, particularly human progress, to be governed by three basic processes - "Invention," "Imitation," and "Opposition." These depended on individual characteristics, such as invention requiring a gifted individual, in a supportive social context. Although his work was not well received in France, due to the dominance of Durkheim's views, his application of his work on imitation was significant in criminology. Arguing against the Positivist criminology of Cesare Lombroso, Tarde suggested that the social environment is crucial both in the development of criminal behavior and its control.

Tarde's work has had a long-term impact on sociology, criminology, and social psychology, fields of study which seek to better understand the social nature of human beings and thus to support the development of healthy societies.

Life

Jean-Gabriel Tarde was born on March 12, 1843 in Dordogne, Sarlat (now Sarlat-la-Canéda), about one hundred miles east of Bordeaux, France. He was the son of a military officer and judge. He was raised by his mother from the age of seven, when his father died. He was educated in a Jesuit school in Sarlat, obtaining classical training.

As most of the youth he was confined to bed due to fragile health, he engaged himself in intellectual work, studying philosophy and social sciences. He also studied law in Toulouse and Paris. From 1869 to 1894 he held several legal posts near Sarlat, and served as a magistrate in Dordogne.

Tarde married in 1877 to Marthe Bardy Delisle, with whom he had three children.

Tarde was made known through his articles on psychology, published in the Philosophical Review of Théodule Ribot. In them he criticized "biological fatalism" of Cesare Lombroso. He published his famous La Criminalité Comparée (Comparative Criminology) in 1886.

After the death of his mother, Tarde left Sarlat and settled in Paris. He obtained a post as director of criminal statistics at the Ministry of Justice. He also lectured in numerous peripheral institutions outside the university and from 1900 held the chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France.

Tarde died in Paris, France in 1904.

Work

Gabriel Tarde believed that three distinctive, yet interrelated processes characterize human society - Invention, Imitation, and Opposition. He wrote on those processes in his 1898 Social laws (Les lois sociales).

Invention, according to Tarde, was the source of all progress. However, only one percent of people can connect creative associations in their minds and can thus be regarded as gifted or inventive. Tarde believed that social factors contribute to inventiveness. For example, more coherent ties and better communication among gifted individuals can lead to mutual stimulation, resulting in greater flow of new ideas. Also, cultural values, like adventurousness or bravery, could lead to new discoveries, as in the time of Spanish explorers in the Golden Age.

Imitation, on the other hand, is much more widespread in society. Most people are not inventive but only copy what they see from other people. Tarde codified his ideas in the “three laws of imitation”:

1. the law of close contact;
2. the law of imitation of superiors by inferiors, and
3. the law of insertion.

Opposition takes place when two or more inventions come into conflict with each other, or when the new and the old ideas collide. Oppositions may be associated with social groups, like nations, regions, or social classes, or may remain inside the minds of individuals. The outcome of opposition is often an adaptation.

Tarde was aware of the need to back up his ideas with data, and thus urged the collection of information on different social phenomena - from crime rates, strikes, and industrial production, to church attendance, voting, and similar social acts. He believed that by analyzing such data sociologists would be able to trace shifts in public opinion.

Among other areas that Tarde worked on were the "group mind" and economic psychology, where he anticipated a number of modern developments. He was supporter of mass-society, believing that people need to be together to faster channel new ideas and opinions. He believed that newspapers had a particularly crucial role in society, as they helped create public opinions and reinforce group loyalties.

Tarde’s subtle and individualistic sociology directly opposed Emile Durkheim, who viewed society as a collective unity. Tarde directly challenged Durkheim in many papers. However, as the university system in the French Third Republic was based on Durkheim’s sociology, Tarde lost the battle. It was only in the United States that his views were rediscovered several decades later.

Criminology

Tarde left significant influence in the area of criminology. In his La Criminalité comparée (1886; Comparative Criminality) Tarde opposed the extreme biological-causation ideas of Cesare Lombroso and his school of Positivist Criminology, who claimed that criminality was inherited, and that biological predispositions lead one to become a criminal. Tarde, on the other side claimed that environment played a significant role in criminal behavior.

Tarde held that an elite was needed to govern society, keeping the balance between innovative ideas and traditional cultural patterns. Crime and social deviance arise when this elite starts to disintegrate. The process is further amplified when the elite comes in touch with deviant subcultures through migrations and other forms of social mobility.

Tarde devised a theory of "imitation and suggestion," through which he tried to explain criminal behavior. He believed that the origins of deviance were similar to the origins of fads and fashions, and that his “three laws of imitation” can explain why people engage in crime.

The law of close contact explains that people have a greater tendency to imitate the fashions or behaviors of those around them. If one is constantly surrounded by deviant behavior, one is more likely to imitate that type of behavior than the other of which he knows little. Direct contact with deviance fosters more deviance. Tarde believed that as society becomes denser, people will start to imitate each other more. He suggested that the mass media played a key role in the proliferation of crime, as criminals copied each other’s style which they learned about through the media.

Tarde’s second law of imitation - the law of imitation of superiors by inferiors - explains that poor or youngsters imitate rich or elders, and that crimes among poor are in fact their attempts to imitate wealthy, high-status people. The third law - the law of insertion - says that new behaviors are superimposed on old ones and subsequently either reinforce or extinguish previous behavior. For example, if criminals start to use a new type of weapon, they will not use the old one any more.

Tarde’s three laws of imitation had an enormous impact on the study of deviance and social control.

Legacy

Although Tarde had no direct followers in France, except for some criminologists, his ideas had a long-lasting influence on both sociology and criminology. His concept of the group mind was later taken up and developed by Gustave Le Bon, advanced to explain so-called herd behavior or crowd psychology. Everett Rogers furthered Tarde's "laws of imitation" in the 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations. Sociologists from the Chicago school of sociology took up some Tarde's insights and further built on them. They influenced later thinking about the concepts of social psychology and the diffusion of social ideas.

Publications

• Tarde, Gabriel. 1902. La psychologie économique. Paris: F. Alcan
• Tarde, Gabriel. 1969. On communication and social influence: Selected papers. The Heritage of sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Tarde, Gabriel. 1974 (original published 1898). Social laws (original title: Les lois sociales. Esquisse d’une sociologie). New York: Arno Press. ISBN 0405055277
• Tarde, Gabriel. 1999 (original published 1893). Monadologie et sociologie. Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo. ISBN 2843240654
• Tarde, Gabriel. 1999 (original published 1895). La logique sociale. Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo. ISBN 2843241170
• Tarde, Gabriel. 1999 (original published 1897). L’opposition universelle. Essai d’une théorie des contraires. Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo. ISBN 2843241146
• Tarde, Gabriel. 2001 (original published 1890). Penal philosophy (original title: La philosophie pénale). New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 076580705X
• Tarde, Gabriel. 2001 (original published 1898). Études de psychologie sociale. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 0543986705
• Tarde, Gabriel. 2001 (original published 1901). L'opinion et la foule. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 0543970833
• Tarde, Gabriel. 2002 (original published 1896). Fragment d'histoire future. Abraxas. ISBN 8495536528
• Tarde, Gabriel. 2003 (original published 1890). Les lois de l'imitation. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 1421252783
• Tarde, Gabriel. 2003 (original published 1891). Les transformations du droit. Étude sociologique. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 054388564X
• Tarde, Gabriel. 2004 (original published 1886). La criminalité comparée. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond. ISBN 2846710724

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Beirne, Piers. 1993. Inventing criminology: Essays on the rise of homo criminalis. SUNY series in deviance and social control. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 079141275X
• Davis, Michael M. 1906. Gabriel Tarde, an essay in sociological theory. New York: Davis.
• Gabriel Tarde. Encyclopedia of World Biography, on <http://www.bookrags.com>. Retrieved on September 16, 2007, from <http://www.bookrags.com/Jean_Gabriel_Tarde>
• Katz, Elihu. 2006. Rediscovering Gabriel Tarde. Political Communication, 23(3), 263-270.
• Williams, Gwen. Gabriel Tarde and the Imitation of Deviance. Retrieved on September 16, 2007 from <http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/tarde.htm>

External links

All links Retrieved September 23, 2007.

• Forefathers of Memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation – Article by Paul Marsden, originally published in Journal of Memetics, vol. 4, 2000
• Gabriel Tarde – Biography in Encyclopedia Britannica
• Gabriel Tarde and the Imitation of Deviance – On Tarde’s work in the context of social learning theory, by Gwen Williams
• Jean-Gabriel Tarde – Biography on Answers.com
• Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology – Full-text work by Tarde
• A Tardean Sociology of Mathematics - Article on Tarde's work

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