GABRIEL

See also:

• GABRIEL TARDE (1843–1904)

TARDE (1843–1904)  , French sociologist, was born at Sarlat (Dordogne) in 1843 . Entering the legal profession, he was for some time a juge d'instruction in his native town, becoming afterwards head of the statistical department of the ministry of justice . He also held the professorship of modern philosophy at the College de France in Paris, and was elected a member of the Academie des sciences morales et politiques in 1900 . Attracted to the study of criminology by the opportunities of his profession, he gradually built up for himself a reputation as an acute observer of the phenomena of the subject, while at the same time he made striking and original deductions of his own . Special reference may be made to his theory of " imitation " as outlined in Les Lois de l'imitation (1890), and further elaborated in Logique sociale (1895) . He also wrote L'Opinion et la joule (1901); Les Transformations du droit (1894); Les Transformations du pouvoir (1899); L'Opposition universelle (1897) and Psychologie economique (1902; Eng. trans., Social Laws, 1899) . He died in Paris in 1904 . See bibliography of. the sociological writings of Tarde in M . M Davis, Psychological Interpretations of Society (Columbia University Press, 1909) ; also A . Matagrin, La Psychologie sociale de Gabriel Tarde (Paris; 1910) .