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Interesting thing, looking for forefathers of academic disciplines. While researching on French classic sociologist Gabriel Tarde, I came across two contemporary social scientists who independently claimed Tarde to be their intellectual ancestor. One of them was Bruno Latour, founder of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the other Paul Marsden, social psychologist with an interest in memetics. Both gentlemen advocate the recognition of Tarde as the forefather of the theories they develop or work with. The interesting thing is that these theories represent paradigms situated on the opposite sides of the front lines of so called “science wars”.

It was Latour who was defending the French intellectual ethos in the aftermath of the “Sokal Affair” (by writing refutations and presenting Sokal with the bottle of wine from his family’s winery on some occasion). If natural scientists don’t dismiss Actor-Network Theory instantly on the grounds that it contains no meaningful statements, i.e. it is gibberish, they tend to view it as an ultimate example of the imperialism of social sciences in their efforts to provide alternative explanations for scientific and technological activities. On the other hand the theory of memes, supported by Marsden’s paper, is a nightmare of most humanists, since it reduces the vast diversity of cultural objects and processes to a handful of concepts imported from the hostile area of evolutionism.

The fact that supporters of both points of view turn to the same source of origin and manage to make their cases can mean at least two things. Perhaps the fact that two paradigms are hostile toward each other does not just necessary mean they are contradictory. Or maybe if you just dig deep enough into somebody’s work you will be able to use it to support anything, especially when the original author cannot annotate his books anymore.

And what was the reason I was researching on Tarde in the first place? Why, he is the forefather of diffusion of innovations, one of my PhD’s main topics.

+ Science Wars (by Wiki)
+ B. Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social”
+ P. Marsden: “Forefathers of Memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation”