Time and History in Gabriel Tarde’s Sociology

Abstract

The last decades have shown an increase of interest in the work of Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), leading to the growing appreciation of the importance of one of the most celebrated French sociologists of his time, as well as one of the major criminologists. In this paper we will concentrate on one aspect of Tarde’s work that hasn’t been accounted for in the renewal of interest in his writings: its particular understanding
of the temporality of human life.

In the following pages we will seek, first, to demonstrate the place of this problematic in his production, sketching the more salient aspects of his treatment of time, and second, to contrast it with the understanding of time in Durkheimian sociology. In order to do so, we will place both authors in the wider context of the transformations that the treatment of temporality was then undergoing in both sociology and the historical sciences.