Gabriel Tarde On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers

by Gabriel Tarde, Terry N. Clark (Editor), Morris Janowitz (Foreword by)

Overview

Gabriel Tarde ranks as one of the most outstanding sociologists of nineteenth-century France, though not as well known by English readers as his peers Comte and Durkheim. This book makes available Tarde’s most important work and demonstrates his continuing relevance to a new generation of students and thinkers.

Tarde’s landmark research and empirical analysis drew upon collective behavior, mass communications, and civic opinion as elements to be explained within the context of broader social patterns. Unlike the mass society theorists that followed in his wake, Tarde integrated his discussions of societal change at the macrosocietal and individual levels, anticipating later twentieth-century thinkers who fused the studies of mass communications and public opinion research.

Terry N. Clark’s introduction, considered the premier guide to Tarde’s opus, accompanies this important work, reprinted here for the first time in forty years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226789798
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/15/2010
Series:	Heritage of Sociology Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	332
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Gabriel Tarde(1843–1904) was one of the founding fathers of sociology. Terry N. Clark is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

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On Communication and Social Influence

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By Gabriel Tarde, Terry N. Clark

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1969 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-78979-8

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CHAPTER 1

SOCIOLOGY 1898

At the moment sociology is in vogue, succeeding in the predilections and preoccupations—be they spontaneous or suggested—of the serious public and indeed even the ordinary public. This attraction should not displease those who, like the author of this article, think of sociology simply as collective psychology, if it really is all that simple. But if this vogue, this allegedly unexpected success ought not surprise them, perhaps it should concern them. It is not difficult to forsee that the adventuresome spirits, the conquistadors of this new world, who are more fit to ravage than to explore, will jump into this new and already rather clamorous science, whose very name was proscribed until just recently but now is found on covers of so many books and journals. And there are still other dangers to be feared: its obvious complexity and indetermination, the hopes and fears that it raises, a danger too in those who expect it to solve their most urgent social problems; and also, for some of its most disinterested theoreticians, those most indifferent to practical consequences, the excess of faith which sometimes leads them to raise sociology so high that they cause it to lose contact with reality. It seems then that the time has come to circumscribe this new field of study with exactitude, to show how it has been cultivated until now and how it should be developed, what has been sought and what has been found, and what fruits we may expect to gather from its cultivation.

In the stories of our ancestors, when a child was born, all the fairies assembled around its cradle and each gave it a talisman with which it could perform miracles. At present when a science is born or even begins to announce its arrival, a certain number of philosophers encircle it, each bringing his own method for it to follow with the assurance of the greatest success if its rules are applied promptly and with perseverance, as if it were a method or program of discoveries of which a nascent science is most in need! It is in discovering things and as they are discovered that a science learns its own best way to discover; if this is not the last thing a science discovers, it is certainly not among the first. Or rather, each researcher has his own method, individual and almost intransmissible, and the science advances as a result of the conjunction of these diverse methods and often of their conflict. What a new branch of knowledge most needs to grow is a bud which, for some unknown reason, sprouts somewhere; in other words a good idea, which will be the seed of new knowledge and will continue its development according to a hidden logic. But a single idea does not suffice; it is necessary to have several ideas in succession and in combination. The first idea in the case of sociology was born in Florence or Venice as far back as the Middle Ages. It consisted in counting and measuring social facts, though only a few of them at first. The first sociologist, without knowing it and without wishing it, was the first statistician, who set the example of looking at societies from the wrong side, so to speak, from their quantitative and measurable side and not from the right side, the qualitative and incomparable side. The essential subject of a science consists in quantities, similar things which repeat themselves, and the relationships of these quantities (which are themselves repeated) whose quantitative variations correlate.

Men must have begun by numbering in this way things whose similarity was most evident, such as the same type of merchandise or pieces of silver or gold. Thus was formed, by degrees and for the economists' use, the idea of Value, which had great advantage over the jurists' idea of Right, over the moralists' idea of Good, over the aestheticians' idea of Beauty, even over the idea of Truth espoused by the theologians and the authoritarian philosophers, who see Truth as something which either is or is not, having no intermediary degrees; over all these ideas Value had the advantage of being a true social quantity whose rise and fall are a matter of daily observation and have a special measure—money. Such was, along with many obvious inferiorities (palliated in vain), the superiority of the economic point of view over the juridical, artistic, moral, theological, and metaphysical points of view for the scientific observation of the social world. In vain does political economy now look askance at its daughter sociology; the latter will not have the ingratitude to forget that it is the economists who, gaining acceptance in the long run for their way of thinking despite the obstinate resistance of jurists and moralists in particular, prepared the ground for the sociologists' constructions. They had the great merit of indicating the true path to the sociologists, who were usually wrong to deviate from it. They discovered, or thought they had discovered, the laws of value, the laws of production, exchange and distribution of various values, and spoke of them as the physicist speaks of laws of production and communication of motor forces, as laws applicable in all countries and at all times, in every society, whether real or just possible. These pretensions were eminently scientific, since no science exists except by formulating laws of this scope. They founded a sort of social physics, narrow and precise like the social physiology which others, long afterward, tried to establish, but the success of the latter was shorter lived, and although its apparent breadth was greater, it had less true depth. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. As the economists conceived it, society was not an organism but, what is clearer, an astronomical system whose freely linked elements, each gravitating separately in its individual sphere, only influenced each other externally and at a distance. The insufficiency of this conception could have been concealed even longer if it had not been uselessly limited to being a static model of society. Then, without abdicating its mechanical character, it could have tried sketching social evolution. Nothing prevented reconciling the very sound idea of constant and universal laws with the no less necessary idea of succession of stages. This is an idea which the jurists, those great enemies of the economists, took from the historical development of Roman law and which they could have taught the political economists long before the Darwinian transformists.

Political economy was not born just from the idea of introducing numeration and measurement into social facts, but even more from the idea of bringing the comparative method to them. The conjunction of these two good ideas in this new field made it the most fruitful of all the other so-called "moral and political" sciences. One could define it as comparative industry, and in this respect it takes its place among a group of sister sciences: comparative grammar, comparative mythology, comparative legislation, comparative art, comparative politics. But it should be noted that, although the degree varies, in these sciences or half-sciences the truly scientific character is much less marked than in political economy. This is because the stamp of numerical precision which distinguishes political economy is missing, and because the rules that the others confusedly draw from facts are not clear like those of political economy but remain enslaved to these facts, which they summarize rather than explain. However, since this imperfection is without doubt only temporary, these various disciplines, like the economic gymnastics of thought, have all concurred in the advent of social science. And among its distinct sources social science must count all the successive good ideas by which, between languages, religions, bodies of law, arts, and governments until then considered heterogeneous, successful rapprochements were tried and inaugurated.

Another good idea, despite the abuse that has been and is still made of it, is to use the tales of those who have traveled among the barbarians and savages either to extend the area of previous comparisons or especially to inform us about the prehistory of civilized peoples. The starting point in this case is the frequently (though not always) verified hypothesis, supported by archaeological excavations, that the stages of development at which many savages have become fixed are the stages which have been traversed by advanced peoples. It is well known with what fury the hasty "pre"-sociologists of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu in the lead, pounced on the anecdotes and even the nonsense tales of travelers, but primarily as a change from the classical historians and to extend their idea of humanity in space rather than to push human history back in time. It was left to our century to attempt, with an unhoped-for success, this jump back in time.

II

As early as the beginning of the century, everyone felt that the time had come to condense into a living synthesis the scattered fragments of social science grouped under the vague name of "moral and political sciences," which were alien to each other and even more alien to the harmonious group of the natural sciences. It was necessary to end their double incoherence by coordinating them and incorporating them into universal science. The attempts made in this direction were to remain sterile until the appearance of a master idea which would bind the scattered straws into a single sheaf. Shall we say that this idea came to light the day Auguste Comte formulated his famous law of the three stages—theological, metaphysical, and positivist—which, from whatever point of view one chooses, human development is compelled to traverse? A polemic on this subject arose between John Stuart Mill and Littre. Mill denied that the great founder of positivism had brought sociology to the point at which one can say that a science is truly constituted. For Littré, Comte's constituting of sociology resulted from the law in question. Who was right? I am afraid it was Mill. Can it be said that biology existed from the time, certainly long ago, when it was discovered that all living beings are subject to the "law of ages" and without exception pass through the successive stages of childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, unless a violent death interrupts this course? And this law of ages is general and profound in quite a different way from the law of the three stages.

On the other hand, insofar as it is valid, the law of the three stages was infinitely more difficult to discover. If our life, compared to that of other animals, was so short that we could not see these others one after another come to life, grow, age, and die, the sage who, from induction based on observation and intelligent research, first discovered the frequency and universality of this succession of stages in the animal world would be rightly admired as the author of a great and fruitful generalization. Would not his law of ages be reputed one of the fundamentals of physiology? In relation to human society, we individual humans are what in my hypothesis man is to the lives of animals. Hence we would readily concede that Comte's principle is one of the basic social laws if its scope were as general and its truth as certain as its author believed. Unfortunately, its application is limited to the intellectual development of societies. But even in this area it is not without exception and extends, moreover, neither to their economic nor to their aesthetic development.

Nor are the transformations of languages explained, or those of religion, all of whose phases remain in the first of the three stages. How then could Littré claim that by forming such a vague and incomplete law Comte did for sociology what Bichat did for biology in discovering the elementary properties of living tissue? As Mill pointed out, it is just these elementary properties of social tissue that are missing from the work, otherwise so substantial, of the Master of the positivist school.

Was Mr. Spencer more successful when he picked up an ancient metaphor, developed and enlarged it, pushed it to its extreme (until even he recognized its inadequacy) and in so doing classed social bodies among living bodies? Would we say that this thesis concerning the social organism is one of those good ideas which the new science could not do without and that, as a basis at least, it has had a certain fruitfulness? I believe it was simply a deceptive last resource, a life-saving but rotten branch clung to by those who believed it was impossible to bridge the gap between nature and history without it. It must therefore disappear as soon as some other conception appears which is able, as it were, to naturalize humanity. Social science was established not by comparing societies to organisms, but by comparing them to each other from their many linguistic, religious, political aspects. At the last International Sociological Congress, which took place in Paris in July 1897, this question was treated in depth and ended with the complete rout of the social organism. No one was able to show a single advance in social science stimulated by this way of thinking, and it is easy to see the errors in social science that it introduced or suggested: the tendency to empty rhetoric, to substitute entities for realities, such as "the soul of crowds"; the need to subject social development to a single tyrannical series of phases comparable to the embryonic series; finally the lack of intelligence about the most truly social sides of societies, language and religion, for which there are no analogues in the organic being—hence the tendency either to belittle them or to eliminate them from sociology altogether. Thus we may explain the somewhat scornful protest of the racial historians, even the philosophical ones, against the new science presented to them in this guise.

Let us therefore consider this so-called theory as no more than an abortive attempt, an unsuccessful attempt at classification. At the very most, one may grant Mr. Espinas that, the social organism aside, there is still room for a certain social vitalism, or rather for a certain national realism, and that the reality of "social life" is not in doubt. To be sure, but the problem is its meaning; is not this "social life" only a resultant of individual lives related socially, or is it something else? In the first sense it is only a poetic expression; in the second, a mystical idea.

Auguste Comte set forth a law concerning the hierarchy of sciences which, if it were true without exception, would fully justify the support sociology asks of biology. In his view, all the sciences from arithmetic to social science, passing via mechanics, physics, chemistry, and the science of living things, are ranked by the decreasing simplicity and generality of their subjects, the lowest ranks having the simplest and most general subjects. It follows that each science must lean on the one immediately below it, and not vice versa, since the lower science studies those elementary realities whose more complex groupings are encompassed by the higher one. For example, a knowledge of chemistry is indispensable to the physiologist, whereas the chemist, even one concerned with organic substances, can do without a knowledge of natural history. Now all this is true, but on one condition: that the successive realities—the subjects of the successive sciences—be superimposed like geological formations of which the highest is most recent and could have been formed only through a transformation or a combination of lower preceding layers. Let us suppose, however, that at a certain level of this scientific stratification there appear entirely new facts comparable to the hot springs of high mountains, which, cutting through all the lower layers, rise up from beneath even the lowest solid layer of earth. And grant that the appearance of consciousness, of the self, on the highest levels of the living world is a marvelous spring of this sort: can the science concerned with this phenomenon, which is not reducible to surrounding or preceding ones and is, though the highest, only conditioned but not engendered by them, can this science be regarded as having a more complex and more special subject than all the others? On the contrary, it may be highly probable that, revealing a hidden reality, perhaps the simplest and most lofty of all sciences, psychology, has more to teach its lower sisters than vice versa. And this would also be the case for sociology if there were any reason to think that the social phenomenon—which is essentially psychological—is itself more general than it seems.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction by Terry N. Clark

I. THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY

1. Sociology
2. Economics and Sociology
3. Sociology, Social Psychology, and Sociologism
4. A Debate with Emile Durkheim

II. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF SOCIOLOGY

5. Basic Principles
6. Invention
7. Opposition

III. THE LAWS OF IMITATION

8. Logical Laws of Imitation
9. Extra-Logical Laws of Imitiation
10. Process of Imitation

IV. PERSONALITY AND ATTITUDE MEASUREMENT

11. Belief and Desire

V. METHODOLOGY, METHODS, AND QUANTIFICATION

12. Empirical Bases of Sociological Theory
13. Quantification and Social Indicators

VI. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

14. The Origins and Functions of Elites

VII. SOCIAL CONTROL AND DEVIANCE
15. Criminal Youth

VIII. COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR

16. The Public aand the Crowd

IX. PUBLIC OPINION, MASS COMMUNICATIONS, AND PERSONAL INFLUENCE

17. Opinion and Conversation

BIBLIOGRAPHY