The Influence of Gabriel Tarde on the Development of Japanese Sociology in the Early Twentieth Century

The purpose of this paper is to examine Gabriel Tarde’s influence on the development of Japanese sociology in the early twentieth century. During this period, Tarde was an opinion leader of French sociology with his famous opponent, Émile Durkheim. After his death in 1904, Tarde’s presence in the French academic community declined gradually, while Durkheim earned a reputation with his collaborators known as “Durkheimian school.” Unlike Durkheim, a professor at the Sorbonne, Tarde did not have his own students at the Collège de France, where lectures were open for everyone. It may be one of the main reasons for Tarde’s decline, as some historians of sociology think.

However, there were many foreign sociologists in the audience of his course of modern philosophy at the Collège de France. One of Japanese sociologists who attended Tarde’s course, Shotaro Yoneda (1873-1945), became the first professor of sociology at the Kyoto Imperial University. Yoneda established his sociological theory based on Tarde’s “inter-psychology.” In 1913, Yoneda co-founded the Japanese Institute of Social Science with his colleague at the Tokyo Imperial University, Tongo Takebe (1871-1945), who also attended Tarde’s course. Yoneda’s earliest disciple, Yasuma Takata (1883-1972), a preeminent sociologist and economist in Japan, not only borrowed Tarde’s idea for his “Power theory of economics,” but discussed Tarde’s imitation theory for his system of formal sociology. Therefore, in this paper we propose to demonstrate that the impact of Tarde’s sociology was more important in Japan than in his home country.