Gabriel Tarde was originally a member of the legal profession. For a long time he was examining magistrate at Sarlat. His works on sociology and criminology revealed him to the public. He was appointed head of the Statistical bureau at the Ministry of Justice, a post in which he was able to obtain first hand the most precious documents for his social studies. Later he was elected to the chair of modern philosophy at the College of France, then he was elected member of the Academy of moral and political sciences in the philosophical section. He died in 1904.

Tarde wrote a great deal. His flexibility of spirit and style add charm to his work on technical subjects. In criminology his principal works are: "The Philosophy of Punishment", "The Professional Criminal", "Comparative Criminality" (1898);—then come the political works, such as "The Transformation of Power" (1899). His "Transformation of Law" dates from 1894. His study in social psychology entitled "Opinion and the Masses" appeared in 1901. His most celebrated work is perhaps "The Laws of Imitation" (1900) which was preceded by his "Social Logic" (1898) and his "Universal Opposition" (1897).

According to Tarde the social phenomena proceed from individual inventions which in their turn are the offspring of imitation: the latter is for Tarde a capital factor in social life. Original ideas or inventions germinate ceaselessly in the social milieu, but only some, either by their superior adaptability or through the peculiar authority of their inventor, are accepted by the public as a whole. Sociology is thus reduced to a Psychology of the processus of invention and imitations. This explains why the great effort of Tarde has been to discover the "Laws of Invention". Thereby he has given in sociology a preponderating place to the individual, and the accidental, and has thus separated himself from the most general tendencies of thought in our times which are those of Comte.

The style of Tarde is abstract but supple. This fragment of future History forms a kind of exception to his general work which is very abstract. Tarde reveals himself in it one of the masters of literary French. The style is picturesque, intense, broad, even periodic, novel in respect to the thought, and entirely classical in its purity.

Joseph Manchon.