Imitation, opposition and innovation of social forms: Finitude and infinitude in Gabriel Tarde’s Social Laws

Abstract

In this text I present a selection of fragments of the book ‘The social laws' by Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), published originally in 1898 and translated into Spanish at the beginning of the 20^th century. After a long time condemned to oblivion Gabriel Tarde has been reinvigorated in recent decades for the pantheon of social sciences, even reaching the point of becoming a very relevant author for Actor-Network Theory (no less than Bruno Latour has turned him into ‘ANT's ancestor'). However, I believe that the recuperation of Tarde's works could lead us to far more interesting discussions than a new mythic of ancestral figures. In this introduction I press for a more direct approach to Tarde's writings, something which might allow us to go beyond any presentist use of a historical figure to prop up a ready-made theory for mass-consumption. For this reason, I would like to propose to focus on Tarde's very own descriptions of the ‘laws' of social life, made out of -potentially infinitesimal- social forms which repeat and differentiate -something he refers as the processes of imitation, opposition and innovation-. In that vein, I would like to mention some contemporary critical appraisals of those formulations in terms of ‘laws' or Tarde's treatments of the scale of the social -where special attention is put on the relation he establishes between the finitude and infinitude of social forms-.