GABRIEL LATER: BIOGRAPHY, CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIOLOGY AND WORKS - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) was a French-born sociologist, criminologist, and social psychologist. His greatest contribution was made in the field of sociology, which he conceived as something based on small psychological interactions between each person. The fundamental forces that would produce these interactions would be imitation and innovation.

Tarde came from a fairly wealthy family and his first intention was to study mathematics. However, a visual illness made him have to abandon that first vocation and start studying law.

Source: RoarH ~ commonswiki

Interestingly, he never received any training in sociology. All his knowledge was acquired on his own, aided by his experience as an examining magistrate in the area where he was born. Little by little, his writings on the subject allowed him to secure an important position in the French Ministry of Justice.

Despite the fact that he achieved considerable consideration at the time, his death seemed to make his work forgotten. He had to wait until the second half of the 20th century when some authors recovered their theories to explain social reality.

Biography

Jean-Gabriel De Tarde, the author's real name, came into the world in Sarlat (Dordogne), a French town. He was born on March 12, 1843, into a wealthy family.

His father, an army officer and judge, passed away when Gabriel was only 7 years old. The rest of his childhood was spent in the care of his mother.

The position of the family allowed him to study at a prestigious Jesuit school. There he showed a special interest in learning Latin, Greek, history, and mathematics. His biographers affirm that he was a brilliant student, although it seems that he complained about the strict discipline of the school. According to him, it limited their individual freedom.

college

The young Tarde finished his studies in secondary school graduating in Humanities. After this, at the age of 17, he entered the Polytechnic School to study mathematics.

In his own words, there began an "encyclopedic journey around all the sciences and in the construction of a vast philosophical system."

His vocation, however, was cut short by an eye disease. She appeared when she was 19 years old, apparently for studying obsessively. Later he had to leave mathematics and entered the University of Toulouse to study Law. A year at the University of Paris served him to complete his training.

First jobs

After finishing his studies, Gabriel accepted the position of examining magistrate in Sarlat and its surroundings. Despite the proposals that he received to occupy better positions, he never wanted to leave the area, since he wanted to be close to his mother.

In addition, he confessed that he preferred this work to more complex ones and thus focus on what was already beginning to be his true vocation: sociology. The position of judge provided him financial peace of mind and gave him enough free time to begin to develop his theory of society.

Tarde completed his first works on that subject in 1875, but did not even attempt to publish them at the time. It was in 1880 when he came into contact with the director of the Paris Philosophical Review, who was willing to publish some articles for him.

Between 1883 and 1890, he published Comparative Criminality and Criminal Philosophy, in addition to a few dozen articles on criminology. Little by little, he was gaining a very good reputation in those fields.

As for his personal life, Tarde married in 1887 and had two children.

Paris

Gabriel Tarde did not leave his birthplace until the death of his mother. After his death, he moved to Paris, where the Ministry of Justice commissioned him to carry out work on criminal statistics.

In 1894, he received the appointment as director of Criminal Statistics of the Ministry of Justice, a position he held until his death ten years later.

In the capital his career gained momentum. His publications led him to occupy the chair of Modern Philosophy in the College of France in 1899. The following year, he joined the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.

Despite these successes, Tarde was only able to teach at the aforementioned institutions. The university was always banned from him, since, at that time, the star sociologist was Durkheim.

Death

At the beginning of the new century, Tarde had achieved great prestige as a sociologist throughout Europe. His books had been translated into many languages ​​and he had become popular even with the non-specialist public.

However, his death, which occurred in Paris on May 13, 1904, seemed to make him forget his work. Before long, his work was barely remembered and would continue for several decades.

Contributions to sociology

Much of Tarde's work was born out of his rejection of the theses of Durkheim, the most influential sociologist at the time. Durkheim's theses gave great importance to the social, while Tarde believed that sociology was based on two concepts created by him: imitation and invention.

Tarde carried out in-depth and comparative analyzes of social phenomena, offering very new points of view at the time they were published.

Point

Tarde took as his starting point the fact that in science there is always a point that is repeated and that, precisely because of this, it provides the option of formulating general laws. That regularity is what scientists use to theorize and draw conclusions.

The novelty of Tarde's work lies in applying this principle to sociology. To do this, he first took psychology, where the law of repetition is found in memory. Past states of consciousness can be repeated in it.

In sociology, he also looked for the phenomenon of repetition and Tarde found it in imitation. Thus, he promulgated his first postulates of Psychological Sociology.

For the author there are three types of imitation: repetition, which is what a child does; opposition, which is the adolescent's position; and adaptation, typical of adults.

Imitation

Tarde's theses affirm that the social phenomenon has its most important basis in imitation. This, for the author, is a psychological phenomenon, which is why his doctrine is called Sociological Psychologism.

Imitation is produced by the mental relationship that exists between two people, one of them being the subject to be imitated and the other the one that reproduces their behaviors. Sociology, therefore, must study this relationship.

For Tarde, this imitation is a type of communication and, without it, the social phenomenon would not exist. That imitation is the psychological medium between the individual mind and social institutions. It is the way, in a way, in which the individual becomes the collective.

Tarde's theory indicates that all individuals, by imitating each other, are communicating socially and, in this way, based on the common behaviors imitated, institutions are organized.

Logical imitations and extralogical imitations

The author divides the imitation into two types. The first would be logical imitation, one that the individual consciously develops based on its advantages and benefits.

For its part, extralogical imitation occurs without any kind of mental calculation, without thinking about it. That does not mean that it cannot produce positive results, although this is generally not the case.

Invention

Invention is the source of human progress. For Tarde, only 1% of the population has creative traits. The author considers that if only imitation existed, society would not advance, remaining stagnant. Therefore, the invention is essential for the human being to advance.

Opposition

Tarde incorporated a new concept to the two mentioned above in his work The Universal Opposition, published in 1897. In this case it is the Opposition or Conflict, which, for the author, also plays an important role in the social evolution of the human being.

The sociologist thought that opposition arises when two ideas coming from the invention collide. In the end, the result of this clash, amplified by imitation, generates social changes.

Psychosocial theory of crime

One of the areas to which Tarde dedicated part of his work was crime, studying its psychosocial motivations. His general theory affirms that crime falls within the phenomenon of imitation. To understand this, it is necessary to take into account several factors.

The first is the breakdown of the moral tradition of Christianity. Another aspect that he pointed to was the exodus from the countryside to the city, while the third would be the formation of cultures that he considered deviant, such as the mafias.

As for the explanation of what he called criminal philosophy, he proposed two essential foundations: personal identity and social similarity. In the latter case, Tarde pointed out that individuals not adapted to any social group tended to commit more crimes.

Actor-Network Theory

As previously mentioned, Tarde's theories ceased to be taken into account upon the death of the author. Decades later, the Actor-Network Theory recovered much of its work.

Plays

The most outstanding works of Gabriel Tarde are The Laws of Imitation (1890), Social Logic (1894), Social Laws (1897), Studies in Social Psychology (1898) and Opinion and People (1901).

Complete bibliography

- La criminalité comparée. 1886

- La philosophie pénale. 1890

- Les lois de l'imitation. 1890

- Les transformations du droit. Étude sociologique.

- Monadologie et sociologie. 1893

- La logique sociale. 1894

- Fragment d'histoire future. 1896

- L'opposition universelle. Essai d'une théorie des contraires. 1897

- Écrits de psychologie sociale. 1898

- Les lois social. Esquisse d'une sociologie. 1898

- L'opinion et la foule. 1901

- La Psychologie Économique.

In Spanish

- Transformations of Translation Law, 1894

- Social Laws, 1897

- The laws of imitation: a sociological study, 1907

- Beliefs, wishes, societies. Essays for another sociology, 2011.

- Monadology and sociology

References

1. Infoamerica. Gabriel de Tarde (1843-1904). Retrieved from infoamerica.org
2. Alvaro, J. Garrido, A. Schweiger, I. Torregrosa, J. Emile Durkheim VS Gabriel Tarde. Obtained from psicologiasocialcue.bigpress.net
3. Sánchez-Criado, Tomás. Mitation, opposition and innovation of social forms: Finitude and infinity in Gabriel Tarde's Social Laws. Recovered from atheneadigital.net
4. New World Encyclopedia. Gabriel Tarde. Retrieved from newworldencyclopedia.org
5. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Gabriel Tarde. Retrieved from britannica.com
6. Upclosed. Gabriel Tarde. Retrieved from upclosed.com
7. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Late, Gabriel. Obtained from encyclopedia.com.