At the close of the nineteenth century, Gabriel Tarde held an enviable position within the nascent but still restricted community of sociologists (Valade 1989). Tarde's works were widely read, and they sparked much discussion among those who, like Alfred Espinas and René Worms, were striving to make sociology a true scientific discipline. Auguste Comte of course, had signed the birth certificate of this discipline half a century earlier but Tarde, in contrast to his great rival Émile Durkheim, was not at all inspired by the founder of positivism, unless it was to contradict him. Instead it was Antoine Augustin Cournot, at least in his philosophical writings, who served Tarde as a kind of intellectual guide (Martin 2002). Hence the originality of Tarde's sociology, the intention of which, as revealed in much of his works, was to link the homogenous and the heterogeneous—like and unlike—in a strict relationship of reciprocity that evokes some aspects of Hegelian dialectic. What struck him in particular, in the panorama of history, was the picture of the man who makes and unmakes himself in contact with others, and the picture of a society that is constantly being reshaped by the invention, imitation and subjectivity of social players.

Such a stance, which ran counter to the positivism of his time, was of course unlikely to attract many readers to the author of Les Lois de l'imitation, but it may help explain his intellectual legacy, which was tortuous to say the least. In 1970 the philosopher Jean Milet, in the most important book yet devoted to the thought of Tarde, had this to say about his legacy: “History commits some strange injustices. It has been particularly harsh on Tarde. This man was hailed by his contemporaries as one of the great thinkers of his time […]. Yet a few years after his death that same man fell into an inexplicable oblivion. A shroud of silence settled over his work. For the last 50 years, mention of the very existence of this great sociologist and philosopher was to be found in only a few studies and articles, often moreover of foreign origin” (1970, 13). Even Raymond Aron, who wrote a great deal on the history of sociology, did not see fit to include Tarde in his gallery of intellectual portraits.