The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde
The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

Author: Robert Leroux

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0857281887

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‘The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde’ offers the best contemporary work on Gabriel Tarde, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Tarde students and scholars alike. ‘Anthem Companions to Sociology’ offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde
Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde

Author: Sergio Tonkonoff

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-02-13

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1003851320

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This book offers a new introduction to the thought of Gabriel Tarde, highlighting the continuing relevance, and even the novelty, of both his general theoretical approach and many of his specific analyses. Showing that Tarde elaborates a comprehension of the social that was received with difficulty in his time but is increasingly akin to ours, it demonstrates that the infinitesimal sociology offered to us by Tarde provides a framework through which we can understand a whole range of social phenomena. With attention to social networks, public opinion, innovation, diffusion, virality and virtuality—all of which were topics addressed by Tarde himself—the author clarifies and elaborates upon Tarde’s central theses on the multiple, differential, infinitesimal and infinite nature of both the social and the subjective. An examination of the importance of a figure whose work looked ahead to our own age, Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde will appeal to scholars and students of social sciences and social theory with interests in contemporary social thought.

The Social after Gabriel Tarde
The Social after Gabriel Tarde

Author: Matei Candea

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-14

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 131731221X

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Gabriel Tarde was a highly influential figure in 19th century French sociology: a prolific and evocative writer whose understanding of the social differed radically from that of his younger opponent Emile Durkheim. Whereas Durkheimian sociology went on to become the core of the social scientific canon throughout much of the 20th century, Tarde’s sociology fell out of the picture, and he was remembered mostly through a few footnotes in which Durkheim dismissed him as an individualist, a psychologist and a metaphysician. The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom ‘every thing is a society and every science a sociology’. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as "an alternative beginning for an alternative social science". This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like. This second edition has been expanded to include, alongside the original chapters, two key essays by Gabriel Tarde himself - Monadology and Sociology and The Two Elements of Sociology, as well as a significantly revised and extended introduction by the editor.

Gabriel Tarde
Gabriel Tarde

Author: David Toews

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-06-09

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1000570398

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This book presents the core ideas of early sociologist Gabriel Tarde and suggests a new pathway for sociology based on his foundational work. Rejecting anthropocentrism, Tarde highlights the contrast between the natural and the artificial, uniquely emphasizing the positive significance of the artificial in an age in which people have come to distrust it profoundly. Recovering Tarde’s theory today in the context of contemporary as well as classical scholarship and recognizing how it fits with such phenomena as quantum physics and digital media, this book develops the concept of the cosmological imagination as the context for a critical Tardian analysis of artifice that can bring together what we know about our contemporary future-oriented global societies. How we know the universe, our place in it, the place of other animals and objects in it, our global socialities, our human claims of power and privilege within it, are pointed questions Tarde asks as he wonders whether a future temporality conducive to constant artifice has become our normal human way of life. Considering our ambivalence about modern products and modernity in general, our thinking about the future, and our tendency to forget what nature used to signify in its presentation of problems beyond our control, such as illnesses and epidemics, Gabriel Tarde: The Future of the Artificial demonstrates the reasons for which we need to return to Tarde’s work to rediscover its relevance for public debate as we seek to think through the new era and its societies in which culture and nature are no longer distinct. This book will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in our digital age, new sociologies of materials and objects, neomonadology, and the thought of Gabriel Tarde.

Retrotopia
Retrotopia

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-03-06

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1509515356

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We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state—a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not died. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia. The emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf between power and politics that is a defining feature of our contemporary liquid-modern world—the gulf between the ability to get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign state. This deepening gulf has rendered nation-states unable to deliver on their promises, giving rise to a widespread disenchantment with the idea that the future will improve the human condition and a mistrust in the ability of nation-states to make this happen. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human condition—though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, the contours of which are examined by Zygmunt Bauman in this sharp dissection of our contemporary romance with the past.

Echoes of Gabriel Tarde
Echoes of Gabriel Tarde

Author: Elihu Katz

Publisher: USC Annenberg Press

Published: 2014-05-16

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 9781625174222

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Originally published in 1898, Gabriel Tarde's essay "Opinion and Conversation" can be read as a series of propositions about the interaction of press, conversation, opinion and action, anticipating today's "deliberative democracy." Exploring these themes in a hyper-text "dialogue" with Tarde, Elihu Katz, Christopher Ali, and Joohan Kim ask what we know better or different 100 years later in this book. The aim is not only to reawaken attention to Tarde's text, but to assess the progress of communications research in its light. The e-book's format makes it possible to access the essay as a series of propositions, foreshadowing contemporary concerns with issues such as agenda setting, public opinion formation, the diffusion of innovation, the two-step flow of communication, the role of the press in nation-building, new media technologies, the normative role of media in a democracy, media events, and the like. The e-book includes an analytic Introduction, a biographical postscript and the first full English translation of Tarde's essay. Long overlooked, "Opinion and Conversation" deserves to be canonized as foundational for theories that link mass and interpersonal communication, especially in the age of social media. Authors are Elihu Katz, Distinguished Trustee Professor of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Christopher Ali, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Virginia, and Joohan Kim, Professor of Communication at Yonsei University in South Korea. Louise Salmon of the Sorbonne (Paris 1) contributed the biographical note.

An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World
An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World

Author: Alberto Corsín Jiménez

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0857459120

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Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.

Decoding the Social World
Decoding the Social World

Author: Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0262343460

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How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences. Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences—offering the solution to a social paradox that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Communication has always been the force that makes a collection of people more than the sum of individuals, but only now can we explain why: digital technologies have made it possible to parse the information we generate by being social in new, imaginative ways. And yet we must look at that data, González-Bailón argues, through the lens of theories that capture the nature of social life. The technologies we use, in the end, are also a manifestation of the social world we inhabit. González-Bailón discusses how the unpredictability of social life relates to communication networks, social influence, and the unintended effects that derive from individual decisions. She describes how communication generates social dynamics in aggregate (leading to episodes of “collective effervescence”) and discusses the mechanisms that underlie large-scale diffusion, when information and behavior spread “like wildfire.” She applies the theory of networks to illuminate why collective outcomes can differ drastically even when they arise from the same individual actions. By opening the black box of unintended effects, González-Bailón identifies strategies for social intervention and discusses the policy implications—and how data science and evidence-based research embolden critical thinking in a world that is constantly changing.

Echoes of Gabriel Tarde
Echoes of Gabriel Tarde

Author: Elihu Katz

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781625174215

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Originally published in 1898, Gabriel Tarde's essay "Opinion and Conversation" can be read as a series of propositions about the interaction of press, conversation, opinion and action, anticipating today's "deliberative democracy." Exploring these themes in a hyper-text "dialogue" with Tarde, Elihu Katz, Christopher Ali, and Joohan Kim ask what we know better or different 100 years later in this book. The aim is not only to reawaken attention to Tarde's text, but to assess the progress of communications research in its light. The e-book's format makes it possible to access the essay as a series of propositions, foreshadowing contemporary concerns with issues such as agenda setting, public opinion formation, the diffusion of innovation, the two-step flow of communication, the role of the press in nation-building, new media technologies, the normative role of media in a democracy, media events, and the like. The e-book includes an analytic Introduction, a biographical postscript and the first full English translation of Tarde's essay. Long overlooked, "Opinion and Conversation" deserves to be canonized as foundational for theories that link mass and interpersonal communication, especially in the age of social media. Authors are Elihu Katz, Distinguished Trustee Professor of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Christopher Ali, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Virginia, and Joohan Kim, Professor of Communication at Yonsei University in South Korea. Louise Salmon of the Sorbonne (Paris 1) contributed the biographical note.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication
The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication

Author: Kate Kenski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-06-23

Total Pages: 977

ISBN-13: 0199793484

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Since its development shaped by the turmoil of the World Wars and suspicion of new technologies such as film and radio, political communication has become a hybrid field largely devoted to connecting the dots among political rhetoric, politicians and leaders, voters' opinions, and media exposure to better understand how any one aspect can affect the others. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson bring together leading scholars, including founders of the field of political communication Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, Doris Graber, Max McCombs, and Thomas Paterson,to review the major findings about subjects ranging from the effects of political advertising and debates and understandings and misunderstandings of agenda setting, framing, and cultivation to the changing contours of social media use in politics and the functions of the press in a democratic system. The essays in this volume reveal that political communication is a hybrid field with complex ancestry, permeable boundaries, and interests that overlap with those of related fields such as political sociology, public opinion, rhetoric, neuroscience, and the new hybrid on the quad, media psychology. This comprehensive review of the political communication literature is an indispensible reference for scholars and students interested in the study of how, why, when, and with what effect humans make sense of symbolic exchanges about sharing and shared power. The sixty-two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication contain an overview of past scholarship while providing critical reflection of its relevance in a changing media landscape and offering agendas for future research and innovation.