In a coincidence too happy to be properly counted as one, Gabriel Tarde has been republished in recent years under the imprint Empêcheurs de penser en rond – which is, let's admit, an easier thing to say than to be. In effect, the empêcheurs will be sufficiently eccentric with respect to their time, improper for them from the point of view of History (they will found no ‘school’), in order to become actively untimely in our own … It is, then as now, an affair of tendencies and relations. Let's pose a general rule, whereby it is necessary to end badly (historically speaking) in order to return – in order to properly become.

Thus, in the sociological field, it is supposedly known that Tarde was the unfortunate adversary of Durkheim in his role as heir to an ‘individualistic’ and ‘psychologistic’ tradition that was incompatible with the methodological requisites of the new science or with the vision of founding a ‘scientific morality’. To object – as the accused Tarde himself did, continually – that this was decidedly not the case since, on the contrary, it was a question of an ‘interpsychology’ and of an ‘inter-mental’ (or ‘inter-cerebral’) psychology investing the Social, the logic of the social, on the basis of trans-individual Relations, so that the latter might better endow the former with a power of invention that exceeds the Individual on all sides and that projects society to the rank of a collective brain, to object that the “desire of association” is composed in an immanent fasion… all of this would be pointless (Tarde himself never ceased to define every individual subject as the always provisory integration of an innumerable number of differentials, or ‘individual variations’).