ABSTRACT
Tarde was the senior figure in the encounter with Durkheim evoked in Chapter 3. It is easy enough to construe their meeting in terms of a conflict, with either the younger man gaining the victory, which is the standard sociological account, or Tarde emerging ahead, as the present revisionist re-telling suggests. Yet, in order to bring Tarde back into play as a contemporary resource, a new perspective is required, one that escapes from setting the two to face each other in the sociological ring, a re-match after Durkheim was felt to have eliminated the challenge of Tarde a hundred years ago. Instead of a contest, we are concerned with questions of interaction and adaptation. This is already to bring a Tardean term into play, but it is not foreign to Durkheim’s approach either.
