ABSTRACT
This chapter compares Tarde's social monads to Durkheim's social facts. With that comparison, it seeks two additional and larger goals. First, the chapter reflects upon the idea of the sociological canon and, second, it offers some insights on why Tardian sociology has attracted international attention in recent years. Building on this second goal, the chapter suggests that, rather than treating them as curiosities, engaging with works outside the structuralist tradition can provide researchers with an alternative arena for sociological innovation. This is the case of Tarde's non-structuralist tool of the monad in Monadology and Sociology. The chapter also contends that, in Tarde's neo-monadology, one can found elements of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) sensibility: an understanding of social affairs as the result of interactive, interpenetrating monads, in which the dualism between the individual and society does not work by default. Likewise, Tarde's neo-monadology did not locate causality in structural forces, but rather in interdependence and interaction.
