The rediscovery of Gabriel Tarde can be understood as an attempt to respecify ‘the social’ not as something that explains certain phenomena, but the phenomenon that itself needs to be explained. This, at least, is what Bruno Latour claims in his ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social’. This week’s guest, Christian Borch from the Copenhagen Business School, is not unsympathetic to Latour’s respecification idea, but claims that his foregrounding of Tarde’s work on monadology conceals an equally (if not more) important concept, namely that of imitation.
Our brunch meeting with Christian will take place on Friday, the 7th November, at 9.00am. If you’re planning to attend, please send an email to Andreas Folkers (folkers-at-em.uni-frankfurt.de). The reading for this event is Christian’s chapter on Gabriel Tarde in The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies