Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La recuperación de la figura de Gabriel Tarde: la "neomonadología" como fundación alternativa del pensamiento psicosocial

2006; Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2445-0928

Daniel Caballero López, Tomás Sánchez Criado,

Psychology Research and Bibliometrics

Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) is considered to be one of the founding fathers of social psychology because of his contribution to the studies on social suggestion, propagation and imitation as essentially interpsychological phenomena. The purpose of this article is to show some of the ways in which Tarde’s thought has been recovered and to analyze in which theoretical debates and discussions his writings have been vindicated. In recent years this has happened mainly for two reasons: a) different microsociological approaches in social psychology and sociology have made use of it in order to oppose to holist and collectivist theses; b) currently, thanks to the «symmetrical turn» in social studies of science and technology, which try to explain the constitution of the social as a not anthropocentrically-centred product of heterogeneous associations. This last movement, curiously, has emphasized a text by Tarde recently reedited in 1999 (Monadologie et Sociologie), in which he develops a critique of anthropocentrism and a underpinning of the indetermination of action, matters which would displace the consideration of the historical importance of Tarde in social psychology beyond the common interpretation of his famous debate with Emile Durkheim (between 1893 and 1904) in terms of an opposition between individualism and sociologism. In fact, from this text, Tarde’s thought acquires a new perspective and appears as a trial to make a singularity-centred social science, which goes beyond the common distinctions between social-natural and micro-macro, and which connects to current discussions in the social sciences.