10
 Journal of Clas sical Sociology 13(3) 393  –401 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co. uk/journalsPermiss ions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1468795X13480679  jcs.sagepub.com  JCS 133 10.1177/1468795X13480679JournalofClassicalSociologyToews 2013 Corresp onding author : David Toews, Department of Sociology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: [email protected] Tarde’s sociology of difference: Its classical roots and contemporary meanings David Toews York University, Canada Gabriel T arde Monadology and Sociology , ed. and trans. Theo Lorenc. Melbourne: re.press, 2012. 95 pp. ISBN 978-0-98081-972-4 (pbk). Science, then, is the source of every social revolution. It is this extra-social research which opens for us the windows of the social phalanstery in which we live and lets in the light of the universe. (Tarde, 1903: 80) Over the past decade, the stunning writings of Gabriel Tar de have had a growing influ- ence and his thought has become a key reference in social and cultural theory. Now, set to spur yet another round of reading, and increasingly research application, of this semi- nal thinker, we have Theo Lor enc’s first-ever English tr anslation of Tarde’s  Monadology and Sociology, providing a crystallization of key points of critical contact between these titular terms and Tarde’s thought. That he harks all the way back to the rationalist phi- losopher Leibniz in this important text is the key to the possibility of finally gaining a coherent view of Tarde’s modern project. The book vividly demonstrates why for him modernity is understood in and through the intimate role of sociology in the epistemol- ogy and methods of scientific inquiry . Science constantly refines and alters its theories. Knowing one’s world through science requires eschewing the membership codes of familiar social territories and instead composing singular monadic orders, or multiple temporary orders of reality. As we shall see, at the centre of monadic orders are subjects who experience a profound socially f oundational  unsociability, an experience of differ- ence that existentially has priority over, and lends information and vitality to, the given forms of their social membership. Tarde’s modern project thus stands to be recognized as the major sociological theory of difference from the classical era. T arde was a product of a European  fin-de-siècle infused with anxiety and enthusiasm (Toews, 2008). In his day he was a French minister of statistics and a doyen of the nascent field of sociology that sought to give conceptual shape to this brave new world. Review essay 

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 Journal of Classical Sociology

13(3) 393 –401

© The Author(s) 2013Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1468795X13480679 jcs.sagepub.com

 JCS13310.1177/1468795X13480679Journal of Classical SociologyToews013

Corresponding author:

David Toews, Department of Sociology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada.

Email: [email protected]

Tarde’s sociology of difference:Its classical roots andcontemporary meanings

David ToewsYork University, Canada

Gabriel Tarde Monadology and Sociology , ed. and trans. Theo Lorenc. Melbourne: re.press, 2012. 95

pp. ISBN 978-0-98081-972-4 (pbk).

Science, then, is the source of every social revolution. It is this extra-social research whichopens for us the windows of the social phalanstery in which we live and lets in the light of

the universe. (Tarde, 1903: 80)

Over the past decade, the stunning writings of Gabriel Tarde have had a growing influ-

ence and his thought has become a key reference in social and cultural theory. Now, setto spur yet another round of reading, and increasingly research application, of this semi-nal thinker, we have Theo Lorenc’s first-ever English translation of Tarde’s Monadology

and Sociology, providing a crystallization of key points of critical contact between thesetitular terms and Tarde’s thought. That he harks all the way back to the rationalist phi-losopher Leibniz in this important text is the key to the possibility of finally gaining acoherent view of Tarde’s modern project. The book vividly demonstrates why for himmodernity is understood in and through the intimate role of sociology in the epistemol-ogy and methods of scientific inquiry. Science constantly refines and alters its theories.Knowing one’s world through science requires eschewing the membership codes offamiliar social territories and instead composing singular monadic orders, or multipletemporary orders of reality. As we shall see, at the centre of monadic orders are subjectswho experience a profound socially foundational  unsociability, an experience of differ-ence that existentially has priority over, and lends information and vitality to, the givenforms of their social membership. Tarde’s modern project thus stands to be recognizedas the major sociological theory of difference from the classical era.

Tarde was a product of a European fin-de-siècle infused with anxiety and enthusiasm(Toews, 2008). In his day he was a French minister of statistics and a doyen of thenascent field of sociology that sought to give conceptual shape to this brave new world.

Review essay 

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394  Journal of Classical Sociology  13(3)

In later years, his ideas were mostly forgotten in favour of Durkheim’s conception of amodern society emerging from processes of functional differentiation, centred on homo

duplex. The latter is an unstable desiring human animal coexisting with a more respon-sible and consistent self that is bonded to others by the obligation to adhere to common

rules, morals, and ethical beliefs, which show up as external and coercive social factsinfluencing social behaviour in a manner that can be illuminated by quantitative methodsof study. At our present-day juncture we are seeing democratic social movements chal-lenging the norms and methods of older modernist conceptions of the social. Accordingly,I believe there is now an opening for a thinker, like Tarde, who is willing to re-examinethe possibilities of how we can know ourselves sociologically.

Well before Bergson, at the fin-de-siècle, Tarde had pointed out that the state of sciencehad come to rest upon a false dichotomy of the interior and the exterior of our experiences:for example, where we see qualitative sensation set in opposition to quantitative move-

ment. As a result, the seductive and false idea was being spread that this illusory gapwould soon be closed in some new breakthrough that would counter our so-called ‘mod-ern alienation’ (pp. 16, 42, 54). The ‘almost mythological absurdity’ of this notion of finalconvergence consists in the erroneous notion that ‘distinct beings can of themselves

become new beings numerically added to the former ’ (p. 35, original emphasis). To thecontrary, in pursuing this illusion in ever more unique, intimate, and technically difficultencounters, Tarde asserts, ‘science tends to pulverize the universe’ (p. 15). The pulveriz-ing methods of science ‘multiply beings’ and do this ‘indefinitely’ (p. 15). In sociology asmuch as in physics or chemistry, it is not a question of discovering isolated individual

items bonding to somehow magically form whole new ‘social’ beings. It is rather much tothe contrary: through the scientific method the world is parsed into smaller and smalleritems, from atoms to particles and beyond. For Tarde, the proper vocation of science isdetecting and harnessing processes of the diffusion of similars  (p. 15). In the spirit ofTarde, one should therefore ask: how can we see science anew as a popular and commu-nicative activity, as a much more radically de-centred mutual involvement of states and processes – scientific observers and their subject-matters – conceived as meant for eachother and as needing to seek a mutual understanding  of their relations (Latour, 2007)?

In the late nineteenth century, Tarde struck upon the idea that the project of science

could be radically renewed by reorientating it around Leibniz. Leibniz in fact inventedthe same mathematical tools of scientific inquiry as Newton. He had the same ideasoriginally inspired by the study of bodies and motion, envisioned in the exact same period of time. Leibniz, though, took this fledgeling science in a very different directionthan would Newton and the latter’s philosophical interpreter, Kant, applying it far beyondthe physics of known, simply bounded bodies. Leibniz viewed his work as a Scientia

Generalis aimed at computing factual truths in a manner that raises them up into rationalor conceptual truths (Cassirer, 1943). The key to this broad conception of the applicationof calculus for Leibniz had to do with the implications he saw in it for conceiving the plastic or composite nature of objects (Smith, 2011). His aim was to use such conceptsto gain knowledge of worlds beyond that with which we can normally have any kind ofempirical contact (Smith, 2011).

It is quite a challenge to do justice to Leibniz’s thought from a modern vantage point.What makes it worth sustaining the attempt is that it now appears to be as much due to

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the nature of this vantage point as Leibniz’s aim. With Voltaire’s ridicule of Leibniz inCandide seemingly still burned into our minds, we have been used to labelling his workas speculative, close to a kind of science fiction. An outline of his thought in ninety briefsections, Leibniz’s Monadology describes, as even his most sympathetic contemporary

interpreter puts it, ‘an order of reality which, for the sake of being intelligible, leaves thesensible domain almost totally behind’ (Rescher, 1991: 12).

What makes Leibniz still a radically novel thinker is his deceptively simple idea in the Monadology that reality must be made up of substances without parts (Rescher, 1991).Such a premise entails that we accept that the event of these substances, or let us say themode in which they become matters of concern, exceeds science’s apparatus, which dealsonly with parts. Many will therefore dismiss Leibniz’s approach as speculative, or ideal-istic. But they would be missing the fact that he also claims that every object is a compos-ite, which seems, contradictorily, to overlap with current theories of assemblage. Studying

the  Monadology, one thus searches for an explanation of this apparent contradiction.Following Cassirer (1943), I suggest that for Leibniz the solution is in the vocation of sci-ence. However, while Cassirer related this to what he saw as a nascent symbology, I willstress that Leibniz saw science’s vocation as less to construct and more to analyse objects,to break them down into parts. This analytic process can be viewed phenomenologicallyas an assemblage, but when one brackets the latter view, an interesting insight emerges:assemblage does not, and could not, fully coincide with Leibniz’s reason for scientificinquiry. Here is where I would draw a contrast between Leibniz’s agenda and Weber’sconcept of the scientific vocation as value-free (Weber, 1958). The reason to do science,

for Leibniz, is neither construction nor destruction, but has more to do with acknowledge-ment and adaptation vis-à-vis the resistance of the real, which is singular and irreducibleto the composite but lives within the composite like an unsociable element precariouslysubsisting within an infinitely complex environment that wants to subsume it.

These simple elements Leibniz terms monads. A monad is not a specific kind of per-son or particle. The monad is not held together by a function, or purpose, or how usefulit may be in any way. It is not an assemblage or a composite. It does not internalize the perspective of a society. It is deduced from the existence of societies, in the sense thatsocieties are composites, to be sure, but our knowledge of the monad’s integrity and

unity is not strictly logical or a priori. The question of whether it can be seen as, ormapped as, a structure is an interesting and open one (Johansen, 2013). Yet it is importantto grasp the monad’s experiential dimension. This is because at the same time that itresults from deduction, this very deduction is an experienced by-product of empiricalscientific inquiry and is historically and culturally contingent (Toews, 2010). The possi- bility, and the desirability too, of the deduction of monads is itself an inference based onsituated observation, taken from the experience that science reaches points at which theidentity of certain simple elements resists further analysis. This failure, which is due tothe nature of the object and not merely to the insufficiency of funds or ideas, is an inte-gral feature of the event of science (to which would be interesting to relate, for instance,Popper’s notion of falsification). To be sure, everything happens as if it is merely ourintelligence which exhausts the possibilities for figuring out further clever ways of breaking objects down; yet while, as we shall see, the event and the human effort, our project, signified here are important, for Leibniz this experience should not

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 be interpreted as an assemblage-building process or reduced to merely a quasi-Kantiantranscendental limit of knowledge. Rather, it is interpreted as a necessity of the universeas monadically structured, because if, in addition to composites, monads could also be broken down further, all objects would become indistinct.

To be sure, Leibniz left himself open to simplistic ontologizing: for example, to theimpression that his intent was to isolate monads as singular noumenal beings completelyunrelated to each other and determined by their own vastly diverse inner logics and appe-tites. Whatever his intention, Tarde points out that such a construal of the monads unnec-essarily stresses their isolation from each other (p. 15). What is needed, though, is not toreplace this impression with a more robust theory of how the monads relate to each otherfrom the point of view of their own identities. In the way I see Tarde, what he is suggest-ing is needed is a description of the dynamic process by which two orders of differenceare involved in a give and take in relation to each other. Leibniz asserted that monads

denote a maximal order of difference, while composites exhibit all sorts of degrees ofdifference. The way Tarde sees it, the maximal order of difference among monads should be interpreted as a state of complete belief or commitment of each one to its own logic(p. 15). But this so-called ‘pyschomorphic’ interpretation is only a temporary theoreticalconceit which Tarde effects in order to put forward a more lasting, major modification tomonadogical theory by positing that we should understand this belief to be for the most part a virtuality, like a force, rather than a simple actual state. This opens the possibilityto understand the monad in terms of a dynamic process: that is, as actualizing a desiretoward  a belief, which is more plausible and useful than just saying it has ‘an appetite’.

As we shall see below, Tarde will soon then dismantle the psychologistic aspect of theseterms desire and belief, decisively distancing them from mere descriptions of states ofself-consciousness. What is important is that the widest form of difference (belief) is thusrevealed to be intimately related to the more narrow or subtle degrees of difference(desire), without having to appeal to an external (or composite) cause of the changes thatthe monad is undergoing (not to be confused with another monadic source  of suchchanges, which he will see in how monads imitate each other). This then, in turn, alsoallows us to understand better how a monad can be human or non-human. This distinc-tion is usually taken as a wide – even, for some, the widest – form of difference. Of

course, though, at the same time we know from our relationship with animals that it canalso very often involve very subtle, even imperceptible degrees of difference. In fact, itis not too hard to see that the continuity of any identity is actually just a practical matterof accepting a certain range of small differences as neglible for some particular purpose.Humans, then, can be seen as connected to non-humans by a chain of such identities.Scientific inquiry is this chain’s purpose or guarantor.

A Tardean monad, therefore, is a site of a certain refinement of inquiry as it graduallyreaches the point where we can believe that there is something that exists before us thatis what it is. This is not at all to say that we can thereby somehow result in perfect knowl-edge of this given as external observers; nor is it to posit sense-certainty. Like an inter-actionist sociologist who takes an actor’s definition of his or her situation as fundamentaland natural, for Tarde the scientific inquirer detects, rather than defines, the integrity ofa monad. A monad is the objectivizing reality and necessity of a belief, which animatesand explains the desire subsumed in monads. Tarde here refines and expands

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the epistemology of monadological theory, effecting a further change in register from psychomorphism to sociomorphism, as he explains that the site of monadic inquiry is asorting out of possessions in which ‘social elements hold each other or pull each other ina thousand ways’ (p. 56).

Some formulate the ultimate reality of an object as a thing-in-itself that we can onlyunderstand through how it ‘reveals’ itself with its appearances. Scientists talk about anindividual object in terms of a set of properties. The realist will typically see those prop-erties as appearances with certain qualities that must be described. For Tarde (Bergsonwould repeat this point), this unfortunately leads to unnecessary intellectualization. Anyqualitative description, say, of an emotion is only a ‘sketch’ of what is ultimately a pos-sessive relation (p. 56). Tarde sees a set of properties as denoting not a list of abstractqualities like hardness or liquidity, but rather the fact that a monad possesses certainother items in nature. Monads can be laid bare only ‘in the intimacy of their transitory

characters, each fully unfolded before the other, in the other, by the other’ (p. 56). Monadsget entangled with each other in this way by imitating each other, which is a sharing of possessions (see, for example, how Sykes, 2010, applies Tarde in her ethnography of borrowing).

Who possesses? Action is possessive action. Possessing a monad, say, a certainchemical property, enables an individual to possess another monad, perhaps a certainorgan, which expands capacity for further possession, further action. Unilateral pos-sessions are generally unstable and typically reciprocal possessions become predomi-nant, as in the modern age, where each citizen is ‘at once the master and servant of

every other’ (p. 51). This explains why very often individual people strongly resembleeach other, even sometimes across cultures. An individual is a concentration of posses-sions: Tarde says: ‘I desire, I believe, therefore I have’ (p. 52). Yet ‘the initial and finalterm is always difference, the characteristic, the bizarre and inexplicable agitation atthe basis of all things, which reappears more clearly and sharply after each successiveeffacement’ (p. 41). Thus, science ought to consist in refusing to see resemblances,apparent constraints, and orders as deep forms or principles and ought to insist on see-ing them as ordering problems that the individuals are working out amongst them-selves (p. 51). The action of a particle on another particle is a problem of relation

 between them, not a form or a principle of collision; the metaphor used for descriptionshould not be granted some mysterious deep meaning of its own. A worshippingwoman may possess beliefs that have come from highly definite and predictable, imi-tative relations with others; it only obfuscates matters to claim she is acting under theconstraint of some pre-existing harmony, structure, or other external set of conditions.The problem does not consist in whether it is better to generalize from an a priori the-ory or a grounded theory. Rather, each individual for Tarde is ‘an indefinitely enlargedsphere of action’ (p. 27). The problem is only to discern how the individual changes interms of the limits of her perspectival reach as her possessions and relations change,and on a larger scale how diversity produces temporary stable patterns which thenform the basis for new diversities (p. 41).

This raises a key point of contrast with Leibniz’s monads: Tarde’s monads can influ-ence each other. All through the composite social structures of social life we can per-ceive rays or lines of beliefs and desires where actors influence each other. Pillars

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appear on a house that is centuries and worlds apart from the original context in which pillars were invented. The individual who decided to possess pillars is imitating but atthe same time inventing his own order. Order is characterized by symmetry. But the factof symmetry in general, as seen in all sorts of non-human phenomena (for example,

crystals), Tarde tells us, proves that individual social agents are by no means to beunderstood exclusively or by some kind of priority on the model of human actors, sinceanything   ‘which results not from a competition of intermingled plans which clashtogether, but from an individual’s design executed without hindrance is symmetricaland regular’ (p. 32). As individual human persons we sometimes succumb to ‘the preju-dice which leads us to judge all external monads as inferior to ourselves’ (p. 35), but thenecessarily interactive nature of all individuals will always undermine the rugged indi-vidual and require opening up to others, since ‘left to its own devices a monad canachieve nothing’ (p. 34).

This appears a contradiction until one realizes that individuals and monads are not to be equated. In Leibniz’s system, monads are, as it were, their own agents. In Tarde’s revi-sion, the monads – sites of irreducible questions, beliefs, and desires – are open to eachother. They are not more passive than Leibniz’s monads, but they do require a mediumto relate to each other. That is the role of what Tarde terms individuals. Individuals areagents. Monads are like mechanisms in that they enable agents to achieve their goalsaccording to some form of order. However, they are not like mechanisms in that they aresingular and irreducible and actually supply, rather than merely facilitate, such goals.They would be very close to being like software programs, except that they are a situ-

ated, non-generalizable essence of a specific line of action, not a template. Individualsand monads are therefore intimately related to each other. Monads are like a concept ofhabitus, but with a tendency toward symmetrical order, and the monad alters only by theinfluence of other monads that vie for dominance in the individual. Perhaps it would be better to state it this way: that individuals work through the composites that chance hasdealt them which make up themselves and their environments, and in doing so aspire tothe power, symmetry, and simplicity of monadic order . In this vein, individuals composetheir realities. Monadologically speaking, thus, the individuals of Tarde thereby work tomediate monads within composites.

Yet nor is the monadology of Tarde merely one more theory of subjectivation, as beliefs and desires are located in monads, not strictly in individuals per se, and can existin non-humans. People often miss this point, Tarde tells us, because they tend to think ofthese qualities as terms of our privileged human emerging consciousness of the world.Yet nothing is more obvious than the fact that there are as many unconscious as con-scious beliefs and desires. According to Tarde, ‘a desire or an act of faith not only canexist without being felt, but actually cannot be felt as such, any more than a sensation can be active by itself’ (p. 19). And so why may beliefs and desires not apply ‘just as muchto unknown and, I submit, unknowable phenomena, ex hypothesi different from sensa-tions, but no more or less distinct from sensations than the latter are from each other?Why may sensation not be seen simply as a species of the genus quality?’ (p. 19, originalemphasis). So, what are  the social and psychological implications of a concept ofmonadic order that extends to a complexity far beyond humanly sensible, observable, presentable order? This is Tarde’s question. How can we open up Leibniz’s famously

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windowless, free-standing monads to beliefs and desires? Tarde feels confident in assert-ing that this is a question for sociological research, and remarks that it follows that ‘allsciences seem destined to become branches of sociology’ (p. 28).

What was an ontological factor, a universal substance, in Leibniz turns in Tarde’s

 post-rationalism into a pragmatic condition, a universal unsociability associated withmonadic orders. Yet despite this pragmatic turn, a Tardian sociology cannot rely upon,and in fact must problematize, the traditional interactionist assumption that human beings are naturally communicative or sociable with each other. In Tarde, a kind of uni-versality inheres only in the fact that monads require unsociability of individuals in orderto formulate monadic desires, which thereby produces a maximal individual difference.Maximal difference entails a profound unsociability that is not reducible to mere opposi-tion. To oppose, to be merely anti-social, is to react, in a kind of rudderless way, to beingat sea in the composite world of degrees of difference. As Simmel (1903) would put it in

a different register, conflict is a form, not a limit, of sociation. Tarde (2009), though,much more radically than Simmel, thematizes hesitation, a fecund disengagement whichis a limit of sociation. In terms of his monadology, this suspension of sociability is inti-mately located in what we have termed the individual’s involvement with the pursuit ofmonadic order. It is thus a necessary condition of action, and of agency. To be sure, anindividual takes the attitude of another individual, as the symbolic interactionists say(Mead, 1967). However, in Tarde’s view, the point is to understand how this relation isinspired and governed by a specific monadic schema, not by some general drive to con-sensus. Individuals who embrace the monadic desires end up sociable, and adherent to

similar (though never totally identical) beliefs, whether this takes the form of conflict oranother form of interaction.What Tarde contributes is a unique and completely novel insight into what could be

termed the precarious sociability of scientific inquiry, which permeates the problem of anyordering activity in general and the existential situation of the individual in a modern soci-ety. There is an irreducibly non-social and unsociable moment, which is meaningful and is prior to sociability and which continues to guide individuals as they go about their businessof choosing when and where and with whom to be sociable. Sociability defines much of theactive life of individuals who alone, and then together, are in thrall to the perspective sup-

 plied by a monadic order, like members of a chess club who are drawn together by the orderof the game. The monadic order defines the limit of their sociable impulses; once the gameis over, they go on their way. Such separation is of course not anti-social in any way.Sociability is not exhaustively explained merely by a membership which encourages indi-viduals to be sociable with each other and/or anti-social toward those who may conflict ordiffer by degrees with them. Social membership is a result, not a condition, of sociability.The actions of actors are not ‘socially explained’ by marshalling and categorizing sociableversus anti-sociable elements in their behaviour; nor can we speak of anyone as having aninherently sociable impulse which he or she then deviantly disavows. The origin of thesocial, in its plural, originary, monadic points of order, is ‘extra-social’ (Tarde, 1903: 80).

This would not prove to be a popular idea in the twentieth century. Rather, Durkheim’sidea that social membership is a given and automatic was to prevail in sociology(Durkheim, 1982: 130). In the prevailing view, spurning another’s attentions or turn-ing away from another is always a disavowal. In my research into the influence of

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multi-tasking behaviours on the self influenced by digital media (Toews, in press), I havefound it impossible to rely on such an idea; social theory has to be rethought for our newera. So much of sociology has been built upon this premise of association as, deep down,obligatory, despite the growing evidence to the contrary. It is well known that many social

ordering processes in human affairs, like the instituting of a set or rules or laws, or thefiguration of a social object as sacred, may be articulated in terms of obligation. However,others, like the diffusion of certain figures of speech, or the spreading engagement of peo- ple with social networking websites, may not. Some may be articulated in terms of kindsof beliefs that have little to do with obligation, repetitions that might be traced to a fear, alove, a pleasure, a wonder, or an attraction. And some beliefs that we tend to think of interms of the sociology of the sacred and of moral obligation can be described more accu-rately using other terms, as a prayer may be easily associated with a doctrine, but its disci- pline may actually arise out of a sense of wonder that connects one person with a star. For

Tarde there is nothing less social about gaining a greater accuracy in describing the rela-tions between these items, the monadic contexts and social consequences of their associa-tion. There are all kinds, large and small, of constraining, order-forming beliefs and‘passionate interests’ (Latour and Lepinay, 2010), on which humans have no monopoly.

For Tarde the essence of the problem is actually endemic in the wider context of thedevelopment of science in general. It is rooted in how many scientists have poorly grasped‘the scientific concept of the relation of conditions to result’ (p. 36). The distinction between conditions and result is of vital importance. It should be understood as a premisethat leads to inquiries into relations in a broad sense, not merely into causes. By the same

token, Tarde concedes that Leibniz’s dogma of pre-established harmony is to be rejected.He replaces it with the formula that ‘every phenomenon is a social fact’ (p. 28), the com- positions of which are contingent and multiple. Anticipating ethnomethodological theory,according to Tarde, there is as much complexity in conditions as in what they produce (p.36). In Tarde’s view, Durkheim became too enamoured of promoting a master sociologi-cal myth of origin, too enamoured of modernity as a myth rather than as a method.

Most of social theory is, in fact, rooted in the notion of one modern rupture, and in theend it is by means of contrast with the mainstream viewpoints on this rupture that Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology can best be summarized. In his book The Questions of Life 

(2002), European philosopher Fernando Savater relates the mainstream story of a human-kind undergoing modernization. It begins with humanity’s humbling, through the energyof Copernicus, who with his provocative observations and calculations finally shatteredour sense of being at the centre of a universe inwardly arranged around us by a supremecreator. Thus began a long series of indignities and sacrifices and the identity ofEuropeans as actors who go out into the world. Constant cravings for new experiences,new bridges to new lands and new sensations, the compression of the world, politiciza-tion, dispersal, an oddly shared individualism, and worry about lacking a home seeminevitable consequences of a people in thrall to their mission of growing the scope oftheir actions and their selves. It is a common, albeit Eurocentric, story of the origins ofthe modern project that all can recognize, and many have expanded upon. Its key elementis the constant fated repetition of a scene of humiliation for pretenders to irrational power, combined with the moral lesson of the need for the sacrifice and imperfection ofa social contract. For some who may now read Tarde, there will be a strange sensation of

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absence of these figures of humiliation and sacrifice. But Tarde nevertheless raises a realneed with his fundamental question: how does Leibniz’s Monadology allow us to rethinkthe nature of individuals in a way that makes them useful again to themselves, not as privileged, humanized subjects, but as actors seeking order? Can we eschew the modern

myth of sacrifice, humiliation, and the lowest common denominator, and realize a morevigorous scientific conception of active social life?

References

Cassirer E (1943) Newton and Leibniz. The Philosophical Review 52(4): 366–391.Durkheim É (1982) Rules of Sociological Method . New York: Free Press.Johansen P (2013) Contemporary rural imitation: A Tardean analysis of five Danish rural parishes.

Social & Cultural Geography 14(1): 80–102.Latour B (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York:

Oxford University Press.Latour B and Lepinay VA (2010) The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel

Tarde’s Economic Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.Mead GH (1967)  Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist . Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.Rescher N (1991) G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Savater F (2002) The Questions of Life: An Invitation to Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity.Simmel G (1903) The sociology of conflict: 1. American Journal of Sociology 9: 490–525.Smith JEH (2011). Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.

Sykes K (2010) The value of a beautiful memory: Imitation as borrowing in serious play at mak-ing mortuary sculptures in New Zealand. In: Candea M (ed.) The Social after Gabriel Tarde:

 Debates and Assessments (CRESC series on Culture, Economy and the Social). London/NewYork: Routledge, 62–79.

Tarde de G (1903) The Laws of Imitation. New York: H. Holt and Company.Tarde de G (2009) Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. n.p.: BiblioBazaar.Toews D (2008). ‘ Fin-de-siècle’ baglaminda Tardeci dusunce [The fin-de-siècle setting of Tardian

thought]. Tesmeralsekdiz  2(3): 134–151.Toews D (2010) Tarde and Durkheim and the non-sociological ground of sociology. In: Candea M

(ed.) The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments (CRESC series on Culture,

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Author biography

David Toews is Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at York University, Toronto, Canada.The first to critically discuss a revival of Tarde in the English-speaking world, he is the author of The

Valence of Social Action: Agency in Contemporary Social Life and Media (Wilfred Laurier UniversityPress, in press), which includes an extensive reworking of a number of Tarde’s ideas. His research

focuses on the problem of normal unsociability under conditions of communicative complexity,with the aim of creating a sociological theory of sociability and unsociability that is workable forthe era of digital media. His work is made possible by the support of an Insight Development Grantfrom the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.