At the height of fashion for anxiety about modern life Gabriel Tarde publishes a short fictional entry, Underground Man. The sun, that great image of external benevolence and illumination, is gone. Society fearfully at first passes into a new era of troglodytism. Finding their illusion of dependence upon natural resources dissipated, the new cave-dwellers discover that the problem of survival has been transformed. The people are finally confronted with invention as “pure social experiment”: creativity in the service only of how to get along with each other without excuses, without alibis, and especially without the crutch of exploiting or sacrificing nature. The key to modern life has become both simpler and more complex, as it now revolves less around the enablements and constraints brought by our power to extend our actions over against nature symbolized by the term technology, and more around the dynamics and vicissitudes of sociability, a “strange ideal” to “touch one another at each and every instant through multiple communications” (Tarde quoted in Lazzarato 2006, 181; see also Clark 1969, 57, in Tarde 2011; Toews 2013).

I intend to bring Tarde's theoretical perspective and his theory of modern sociability—one of the keys to his thought—into sharper relief by contrasting him specifically with Simmel. Simmel's article, “Sociability” is seminal in sociology and sets a standard against which to illuminate Tarde's contribution. The two thinkers were contemporaries, aware of and responsive to each other's work. I will draw widely from the relevant works of both thinkers as I will demonstrate the centrality of sociability for both thinkers and draw a fundamental contrast in order to highlight what is specifically significant about Tarde's view of this phenomenon. As we shall see, Simmel views sociability as a mechanism with essentially one purpose, that of unifying people through behaviors modelled on art and play.