Book Description

Excerpt from The Laws of Imitation Gabriel Tarde, whose most interesting and important book is here given to American readers, is Professor of Modern Philosophy in the Collige de France, and a member of the Institut. A true philosopher, but also a man of affairs, with wide intellectual sympathies, M. Tarde is a writer of great charm, and his influence among his own countrymen and abroad has steadily increased since he began, in 1880, to contribute to the Revue philosophique. American scholars, long familiar with M. Tarde's suggestive works, have felt that his thought should be made more accessible to English-speaking readers. Hitherto only a little book, Les Lois societies, presenting a mere outline of his philosophy, has been translated. M. Tarde was born in 1843, at Sarlat, Dordogne. After school days were over, instead of entering upon university life at Bordeaux, or Montpellier, or Paris, he took up legal studies, and presently became juge d'instruction in his native town. This office he held for nearly eighteen years, years of keen observation, but also of much solitude, of patient reflection, of the gradual unfolding of original ideas of man, of society, and of the world, which were presently to combine in a complete philosophical scheme. A born student of human nature, M. Tarde was from the first interested in that oldest of philosophical problems, the explanation of motive. He early perceived not only that motive may be resolved into terms of belief and desire, but also that it may be measured. This discovery had, of course, been made before by Bentham, Cournot, Menger, Walras, and Jevons, but Tarde's presentation of the subject in his first contribution to the Revue philosophique, on La Croyance et le desir, possibility de leur mesure, was independent and original. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."