An influential French sociologist and criminologist, Gabriel de Tarde. The novel Underground Man, which was released in 1905, was created to illustrate de Tarde's belief that a person is a product of his or her social surroundings. In the novel, the sun's extinction drives humanity below, and as the migrants tunnel ever-deeper, views drastically shift.
There are three parts to the book. In the first, de Tarde cynically describes how man struggles to create a utopia; in the second, the sun becomes red, the water turns to ice, and airborne nitrogen and oxygen flakes start to fall. The survivors begin creating massive crypts after becoming convinced that heat and electricity may be extracted from the earth's core. They establish a friendly, artistic society here beneath the ground, complete with incredible labor-saving devices that allow them to concentrate on producing works of art. The conclusion of de Tarde's story is that man may transcend his own fundamental character under the right circumstances.
Gabriel Tarde was a French sociologist, criminologist, and social psychologist (born 12 March 1843; died 13 May 1904). He believed that little psychological exchanges between people are the foundation of sociology.
He was hired as a contemporary philosophy professor at the Collège de France in 1900. He was therefore the most well-known contemporary opponent of Durkheim's sociology. He corresponded with members of the newly established criminal anthropology in the 1880s, particularly Enrico Ferri and Cesare Lombroso. Tarde eventually rose to prominence as the top criminologist from a "French school."
Among the ideas, Tarde pioneered were the collective mind (which Gustave Le Bon picked up and refined) and economic psychology, where he foresaw a lot of contemporary trends. Émile Durkheim's work received harsh criticism from Tarde at both the methodological and theoretical levels. Durkeim and his disciples scorned and immediately disregarded his ideas as "metaphysics," and they went on to mainly create sociology as a "science."
He criticized Cesare Lombroso's formulation of the atavistic criminal theory. As part of a larger process of repetition compulsion, Tarde underlined the criminal's propensity to go back to the scene of the crime and repeat it. He emphasized the value of the creative role model in society and claimed that "genius is the power to generate one's own children."
