The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom everything is a society and every science a sociology. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuzes philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tardes sociology as "an alternative beginning for an alternative social science". This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like.
Introduction: Revisiting Tardes House, Matei Candea Part 1: The Distance that lay Between: The Tarde-Durkheim Debate Reconsidered 1. The Debate, Gabriel Tarde & Emile Durkheim 2. Imitation: Returning to the Tarde-Durkheim Debate, Bruno Karsenti 3. The Value of a Beautiful Memory: Imitation as Borrowing in Serious Play at Making Mortuary Sculptures in New Ireland, Karen Sykes 4. Tarde and Durkheim and the Non-Sociological Ground of Sociology, David Toews 5. If There is No Such Thing as Society, Is Ritual Still Special? On Using The Elementary Forms after Tarde, Joel Robbins 6. One or Three: Issues of Comparison, Timothy Jenkins 7. The Height, Length and Width of Social Theory, Alberto Corsin Jimenez 8. Faith, Reason and the Ethic of Craftsmanship: Creating Contingently Stable Worlds, Penny Harvey & Soumhya Venkatesan Part 2: Quantifying, Tracing, Relating: Fragments of Tardean Method 9. Tardes idea of Quantification, Bruno Latour 10. Gabriel Tarde and Statistical Movement, Emmanuel Didier 11. Tardes Method: Between Statistics and Experimentation, Andrew Barry 12. Intervening with the Social? Ethnographic Practice and Tardes Image of Relations Between Subjects, James Leach 13. Tarde on Drugs, or Measures Against Suicide, Eduardo Viana Vargas 14. On Tardean Relations: Temporality and Ethnography, Georgina Born 15. Pass It On: Towards a Political Economy of Propensity, Nigel Thrift Afterword, Marilyn Strathern