Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde

This book offers a new introduction to the thought of Gabriel Tarde, highlighting the continuing relevance, and even the novelty, of his thought, and showing that the micro-sociology offered to us by Tarde provides a framework through which we can understand a whole range of social phenomena.

Autorentext

Sergio Tonkonoff is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, and Senior Professor of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires. He is the author of From Tarde to Deleuze and Foucault: The Infinitesimal Revolution.

Inhalt

Contents

INTRODUCTION | Hypothesis about an oblivion and remembrance plan

Where to locate Tarde's work?

Three classical readings and a (neo) baroque one

Multitudes in heaven and Earth

The problem of the social and its pure sociology

CHAPTER 1 | Infinite and social theory

Infinitesimals or differentials

The labyrinth of the continuum

Leibniz's universe

The composition of the infinite

Towards an infinitist social theory

Micro-mega

CHAPTER 2 | Individual, Society and Social Field

From the society to individuals

From points to lines

The social as skein, the individual as wool ball

Beliefs and desires as infinitesimal social forces

Infinitesimal sociology

CHAPTER 3 | The social as contagion, creation and fight

Social hypnosis (not everything is wakefulness with eyes wide open)

Contagion lines and social epidemics

Opposition, conflict, struggle

The social as a field of struggles

From doubt to war

Invention as social relation (and as engine of History)

Adaptation: difference and integration

Contingency and necessity / virtuality and actuality

Great and small / chance and reason

CHAPTER 4 | Sociology of flows and ensembles

The logic of social contagion

Social logic and persuasive syllogisms

Non-logic laws of imitation

The world within the home and vice versa

Social ensembles or systems

Social intelligence and general will

A science of intensive communication

CHAPTER 5 | The Continuity of the multitudes

The Crowd

The multitude as paradigm and laboratory

The individual, the crowd and its leaders

The corporation

The public, the mass-media

Evolution and metamorphosis

APPENDIX | Cartographical note

Tarde in Paris

Tarde in North-America

Back to France

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ****

BIBLIOGRAPHY ****

INDEX