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Theory, Culture & Society
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The New Tarde

Sociology After the End of the Social

David Toews

The early 20th-century French sociologist and philosopher Gabriel Tarde was an important critic of Durkheim's ontology of the social. Tarde developed a microsociological and ontological critique of the philosophical problems of resemblance and of variation underlying Durkheim's comparative sociology. Recently, thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour and Éric Alliez have begun to revisit Tarde and to develop a theme of the significance of Tarde's thought as a harbinger of postmodern theory. This article examines Tarde's theories in the light of this new reception. It is shown that Tarde draws heavily from Leibniz's theory of the quantitative continuity of qualitative singulars in order to critique Durkheim's statistics-based social realism. While some key limitations of Tarde's critique are exposed, it is argued that Tarde finds a way to remain faithful to statistical sociology as a project even while calling radically into question the qualitative unity of the social.

Key Words: Deleuze • difference • Durkheim • modernity • postmodern theory • social ontology

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, No. 5, 81-98 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/02632764030205004
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