ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the fundamental principles around which Gabriel Tarde builds his approach to social life. His perspective, elaborated towards the end of the 19th century, is remarkably displaced from the theoretical frameworks that would dominate social sciences and humanities during the following century. One of the main reasons for this is that his philosophical starting point is not Kant, Hegel or Marx, but rather Leibniz. Tarde considers it completely inconvenient to separate sciences from philosophy, and elaborates a rigorous (neo) monadological social theory based on the ideas of difference, relation, force, movement, possibles, infinitesimals and infinite. He then produces an infinitist conception of the social articulated around an ontology and an epistemology of infinitesimals and their associated concepts.
