the debate between Tarde and Durkheim

Now this looks interesting.

Comments

3 Responses to "the debate between Tarde and Durkheim"

Wesley Moore said... Monday, January 26, 2009 11:40:00 AM

i posted the Benjamin/modernism reader - it is divided between secondary papers about Benjamin's aesthetics with some more postmodern stuff thrown in (zizek's book "ridiculous sublime")

what is this about durckheim? i can't read the paper.

Keith said... Monday, January 26, 2009 12:48:00 PM

Odd, I'm not having problems with the pdf. Here's the description from the article:

"A momentous debate concerning the nature of sociology and its relation to other sciences took place between Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales in 1903. Unfortunately the only available record of the event is a brief overview which English readers may find in Terry Clark's 1969 edited volume On Communication and Social Influence (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).

The present recension of the debate, therefore, is based on a script consisting of quotations from the works of Gabriel Tarde and
Emile Durkheim, arranged to form a dialogue."

There is apparently a podcast video available of this being acted out by Bruno Latour, Bruno Karsenti, and Simon Schaffer from March 14 2008 at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/47/

Wesley Moore said... Thursday, January 29, 2009 12:24:00 PM

apologies, it works fine now. this is a really compelling debate on both sides. i studied Durkheim as an undergrad while researching Mauss and the gift economy. not sure if i agree with him here however. The Latour re-enactment sounds pretty cool also. I've been going over We Have Never Been Modern recently - I was discussing the problematic 'standard description' of modernism, or the definition you get in popular anthologies or reference sources.


"All our writing - for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone - would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come." - Maurice Blanchot

Contact: keith.tilford@gmail.com

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