Afterword: Tarde's Pansocial Ontology

1. Introduction

Monadology and Sociology (hereafter MS) is a remarkable book which has, to date, received relatively little attention, particularly in the English-speaking world. It has remained somewhat marginal to, if not entirely absent from, the remarkable resurgence of interest in Tarde's work over the last decade or so. I believe that MS has a substantial and as yet largely unrealized contribution to make to contemporary debates, and hope that this translation may contribute in some way to the actualization of this possibility.

This afterword, therefore, is not primarily historical. It will attempt neither to situate MS in Tarde's oeuvre or in its historical time and place, nor to trace the pathways of his re-emergence from the shadowy realm of once-lauded thinkers, although much useful historical work remains to be done along these lines.¹ The uncanny combination of the familiar and the strange which strikes the contemporary reader of MS will here remain unexplained. Rather, the primary goal is to try to establish a niche for Tarde's theory in our current philosophical ecology, and briefly to indicate some potential applications. To this end, however, a certain degree of exegesis and constructive systematization will be required, which I hope will not detract too much from the charm of the text itself.

The perspective taken will be primarily philosophical rather than sociological, and more particularly metaphysical orontological,² in the sense of seeing MS as offering an encompassing theory of the make-up of reality. The immediate reason for this hermeneutic choice is purely circumstantial,³ namely that the great majority of work on Tarde, especially that published in English, has been primarily focused on his significance for debates within the social sciences;⁴ his place in the sociological canon now seems assured, while some work is still required to establish a place for his thought in a philosophical context.

The possibility of the choice, however, is perhaps revealing. As I will argue, the fact that MS, 'the most metaphysical of the works of the most philosophical of sociologists',⁵ can be read, and offer a wealth of productive insights, from either perspective, is deeply rooted in the theory it elaborates. If monadology, in Tarde's hands, is a metaphysics premised on the idea that the bonds holding reality together are essentially social, then the sociology he invokes is one which has burst its bounds and overflowed to the point where its most natural comparators are metaphysical. My hope, then, is that Tarde's thought may help to productively corrupt the illusory purity of the philosophical standpoint, at the same time as it dismantles the constellations of sociological good sense.

Notes

1. A (rather jaundiced) history of Tarde’s reception in 20th-century France can be found in L. Mucchielli (2000) ‘Tardomania? Réflexions sur les usages contemporains de Tarde’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, vol. 3, pp.161-184.↩
2. The term ‘ontology’ is not strictly appropriate, since it refers to the study of being (Greek ōn, ontos), while Tarde argues that the principle of reality is not being but having. However, it has the advantage of being broadly familiar in both philosophy and, increasingly, social theory to refer to any theoretical characterization of the nature of reality. One alternative would be to coin a new term, ‘echontology’ (from ekhōn, -ontos, having), but its (entirely fortuitous) resonances with ‘echo’ and ‘ecology’ would be distracting, if in some ways rather appropriate.↩
3. For a more considered account of the relation between philosophy and sociology, see D. Toews, ‘Tarde and Durkheim and the non-sociological ground of sociology’, in Candea, The Social, cited below.↩
4. This said, the secondary literature on Tarde even within the social sciences is still not very extensive. Two major collections are available in English: M. Candea (ed.), The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010; and the special issue of Economy and Society edited by A. Barry and N. Thrift (Economy and Society, vol. 36, no. 4, 2007). See also D. Toews, ‘The new Tarde: Sociology after the end of the social’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 20, no. 5, 2003, pp. 81-98; D. Toews, ‘The renaissance of philosophie Tardienne’, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 8, 1999, pp. 164-173. The single most useful work on MS in English to date is B. Latour, ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social’, in P. Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, London, Routledge, 2002, pp. 117-132.↩
5. É. Alliez, ‘Tarde et la problème de la constitution’, in G. Tarde, Monadologie et sociologie, Le Plessis, Institut Synthélabo, 1999, p. 9.↩