Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, Tarde's sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. This volume asks what an alternative social science might look like. The debate / Gabriel Tarde & Emile Durkheim -- Imitation-returning to the Tarde-Durkheim debate / Bruno Karsenti -- The value of a beautiful memory : imitation as borrowing in serious play at making mortuary sculptures in new Ireland / Karen Sykes -- Tarde and Durkheim and the non-sociological ground of sociology / David Toews -- If there is no such thing as society, is ritual still special? on using the elementary forms after Tarde / Joel Robbins -- One or three : issues of comparison / Timothy Jenkins -- The height, length and width of social theory / Alberto Corsin Jimenez -- Faith, reason and the ethic of craftsmanship : creating contingently stable worlds / Penny Harvey & Soumhya Venkatesan -- Tarde's idea of quantification / Bruno Latour -- Gabriel Tarde and statistical movement / Emmanuel Didier -- Tarde's method : between statistics and experimentation / Andrew Barry -- Intervening with the social ethnographic practice and Tarde's image of relations between subjects / James Leach -- Tarde on drugs, or measures against suicide / Eduardo Viana Vargas -- On Tardean relations : temporality and ethnography / Georgina Born -- Pass it on : towards a political economy of propensity / Nigel Thrift