ABSTRACT

In this chapter I consider the relational nature of Gabriel Tarde’s social theory and propose that Tarde proffers an analytics that can productively be taken to anthropology and history. My contention is that we find articulated in his relational sociology the germ of a methodology that has subsequently been overlooked: one that, at its most abstract, concerns itself both with spatial relations and transformations and with temporal relations and transformations. If circulation – in the sense of spatial diffusion and distribution – has recently been a theme of social theory (Lee and LiPuma 2002; Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Heiser 2005), its intimate articulation with temporality has been less discussed. But in Tarde, we might say, the spatial and the temporal dynamics of the social occupy a single conceptual gesture. To develop my case I begin with perhaps the best-known example of this feature of his thought: his focus on the dynamic relation of imitation.