Evolutionary metaphysics and pragmatic sociology: law, habit and evolution in Gabriel Tarde and Charles Peirce

Abstract

This article seeks to consider Gabriel Tarde's sociology, highlighting a connection between his sociological metaphysics, the anthropological sociology itself and his practical and metaphysical applications of statistics. We observe how the overlapping metaphysical and sociological fields, including the Monadology predicated on the idea of mutual, repetitive possession and its focus on the probabilistic character of reality, forms the background for the elaboration of his anthropological sociology where humans possess one another imitatively by constituting shared pragmatic postures. In turn, this repetitive condition leads us to a way of deploying statistics, both in the empirical and metaphysical spheres. As such, statistics becomes an entry point for understanding the relationship between the metaphysical and pragmatic dimensions of Tarde's thought.