The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments

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 Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as "an alternative beginning for an alternative social science". This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like.

Matei Candea is a lecturer in social anthropology at Durham University, UK, and previously Sigrid Rausing Lecturer in collaborative anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his doctorate from Cambridge in 2006 for work on difference, knowledge and relationality in Corsica, and has published a number of articles on this topic and on the subject of ethnographic method and anthropological theory. A book entitled Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge and Fieldwork is forthcoming with Indiana University Press in 2010. His post-doctoral research focuses on the interplay of engagement and detachment in everyday relations between behavioural biologists and the animals they study.