Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde

REINTRODUCING GABRIEL
TARDE
This book offers a new introduction to the thought of Gabriel Tarde,

highlighting the continuing relevance, and even the novelty, of both his general
theoretical approach and many of his specific analyses. Showing that Tarde
elaborates a comprehension of the social that was received with difficulty in
his time but is increasingly akin to ours, it demonstrates that the infinitesimal
sociology offered to us by Tarde provides a framework through which we
can understand a whole range of social phenomena. With attention to social
networks, public opinion, innovation, diffusion, virality and virtuality—
all of which were topics addressed by Tarde himself—the author clarifies
and elaborates upon Tarde’s central theses on the multiple, differential,
infinitesimal and infinite nature of both the social and the subjective.
An examination of the importance of a figure whose work looked ahead
to our own age, Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde will appeal to scholars and
students of social sciences and social theory with interests in contemporary
social thought.
Sergio Tonkonoff is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical

Research Council of Argentina, and Senior Professor of Sociology at the
University of Buenos Aires. He is the author of From Tarde to Deleuze and
Foucault: The Infinitesimal Revolution.
Reintroducing . . .
The ‘Reintroducing’ series offers concise and accessible books that remind us
of the importance of sociological theorists whose work, while constituting
a significant and lasting contribution to the discipline, is no longer widely
discussed. With each volume examining the major themes in thought of a
particular figure and the context in which this work came about, as well
as its reception and enduring relevance to contemporary social science, the
books in this series will appeal to scholars and students of sociology seeking
to rediscover the work of important but often neglected sociologists.
Decoloniality, Intersectionality and the Schreiner Theoria

Liz Stanley
Reintroducing Ferdinand Toennies

Christopher Adair-Toteff
Reintroducing Harriet Martineau

Pioneering Sociologist and Activist
Stuart Hobday and Gaby Weiner
Reintroducing Marcel Mauss

Christian Papilloud
Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde

Sergio Tonkonoff
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Reintroducing/book-series/RCST
REINTRODUCING
GABRIEL TARDE
Sergio Tonkonoff
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First published 2024
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-05398-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-05397-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19738-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197386
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CONTENTS
List of f igures ix
Introduction: Hypothesis about an oblivion and

remembrance plan 1
Where to locate Tarde’s work? 2
Three classical readings and a (neo) baroque one 4
Multitudes in heaven and Earth 6
The problem of the social and its pure sociology 9
1 Infinite and social theory 13

Infinitesimals or differentials 15
The labyrinth of the continuum 18
Leibniz’s universe 20
The composition of the infinite 22
Towards an infinitist social theory 24
Micro-mega 28
2 Individual, society and social field 31

From society to individuals 33
From points to lines 36
The social as skein, the individual as wool ball 39
Beliefs and desires as infinitesimal social forces 42
Infinitesimal sociology 44
viii Contents
3 The social as contagion, creation and fight 48

Social hypnosis (not everything is wakefulness with
eyes wide open) 50
Contagion lines and social epidemics 53
Opposition, conflict, struggle 55
The social as a field of struggles 56
From doubt to war 59
Invention as social relation (and as engine of
history) 61
Adaptation: difference and integration 63
Contingency and necessity/virtuality and actuality 65
Great and small/chance and reason 67
4 Sociology of flows and ensembles 71

The logic of social contagion 73
Social logic and persuasive syllogisms 75
Non-logic laws of imitation 78
The world within the home and vice versa 82
Social ensembles or systems 84
Social intelligence and general will 87
A science of intensive communication 89
5 The continuity of multitudes 93

The crowd 96
The multitude as paradigm and laboratory 98
The individual, the crowd and its leaders 100
The corporation 102
The public, the mass media 106
Evolution and metamorphosis 109
Appendix: Cartographical note 113

Tarde in Paris 116
Tarde in North America 121
Back to France 125
Acknowledgements130
Bibliography131
Index138
FIGURES
1.1 Infinitesimal. John Wallis’ notation 15

1.2 Number Pi 17
2.1 Eight inventions spreading in the social field 40
5.1 Continuity and metamorphosis of social formations 111
INTRODUCTION
Hypothesis about an oblivion
and remembrance plan
This book aims to reintroduce the work of Gabriel Tarde. It seeks to retrieve
Tarde’s figure by showing how his peculiar way of approaching social reality
may be of interest today. Tarde is a theorist of the contagion of social beliefs
and desires, and one of the first social thinkers to conceptualise masses and
publics and to analyse their dynamics. He was also one of the first sociolo-
gists to draw attention to the role of inventions in social life and to deal with
the social world in terms of flows and networks. Moreover, he has explored
the nature-society relation in a non-traditional manner, certainly more orien-
tated to see continuity rather than separation between both of them. We aim
to highlight the enduring relevance of this general theoretical approach and
of many of his specific analyses.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Gabriel Tarde was a world-leading
pioneer in social sciences and humanities. At that time, his sociological, psy-
chological and philosophical ideas gained great visibility and interest. How-
ever, his work was later forgotten and his name was barely mentioned in the
history of social thought. Some of his main concepts survived in the work
of other thinkers whom he influenced, such as R. Park, W. James, F. Boas,
H. Bergson, and, closer in time, G. Deleuze, M. Foucault and B. Latour, that
is authors who are either part of the canon of different disciplines or that are
at least unavoidable references in them. During most of the 20th century,
Tarde was not that lucky. His works stopped being published and his name
barely appeared in books of history of social sciences next to broad exposi-
tions about those whose works were considered real classics: Comte, Spencer,
Marx, Durkheim and Weber, just to name the most important ones.
So, what happened with Tarde? And what happens today? Why is his
work difficult to access and scarcely distributed nowadays, in spite of the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197386-1
2 Introduction
increasing contemporary efforts to retrieve it?1 And more profoundly, why

does his perspective seem difficult to be understood, despite the relative
simplicity of its structure? To approach this epistemological difficulty and
explain his institutional oblivion we may also ask: which human science does
the Tardean perspective belong to? Is it sociological or psychological? Is it
located in an intermediate place, like social psychology? Is it rationalist or
irrationalist? Individualist or holistic? As it does not seem to be a perspective
with a macro approach, is it then a micro sociology? The fact is that Tarde’s
perspective does not fit well in any of these classical classificatory grids. That
maybe the reason why he was not, and still isn’t, part of the mainstream
of social sciences, even when the history of social thought has reserved an
honourable nook for him, alongside others such as Simmel, Veblen or Mead.
Where to locate Tarde’s work?

Tarde wrote important works that can be smoothly considered as sociologi-
cal from the point of view of the usual disciplinary distribution. His most
famous book, The Laws of Imitation (1890), seems to prove this easily. The
same is valid for a more extensive and less known book: The Social Logic
(1895). But he is also the author of many other texts which, according to
that very same distribution, should be characterised as criminological, philo-
sophical and political. Examples of this are Compared Criminality (1886),
The Possibles (1874) and The Transformations of Power (1899), respectively.
Things become stranger when we come across his Penal Philosophy (1890a)
or the two thick volumes of Economic Psychology (1902), books that from
the very title announce unusual mixtures for the mental habits prevailing
among us. It will be said that there is no need for exclusive belongings and
that these texts feed—and are fed by—economy and psychology, criminology
and philosophy. But it should also be added that the sociological perspec-
tive always dominates in them and that the same can be affirmed regarding
the rest of the works that compose the vast Tardean corpus. Thus, to com-
plete the sample, The Universal Opposition (1897) may be included, a
notable work where philosophical, logical, psychological and sociological
considerations are intertwined without interruption.
If we have to decide which discipline these texts correspond to, we may
start to perceive how decentred they are regarding the grid that has organ-
ised social sciences since its modern foundation. They are difficult to classify
within the departmental structures still in force nowadays. From this point
of view, they seem to be mixing approaches, topics and problems that should
remain separated—or, at least, subordinate to the others through a clear dis-
ciplinary criterion. This maybe the reason why they have been considered too
psychological for sociology but not enough for psychology; very sociological
for philosophy and very philosophical for economy and so forth.
Introduction 3
It can be objected that this question about the disciplinary belonging

(and suitability) of Tarde’s works is a bit anachronic because these were
written in a moment when all social sciences were delimiting their objects
and competence, and vying to achieve their citizenship in the scientific and
academic milieu. All this implied a redistribution of the borders of the pre-
viously existing disciplines, including philosophy and biology. But the key
is that, already for his time, these texts were awkward not because of their
peculiar idiosyncrasy but because of their paradigmatic eccentricity, as we
will seek to discuss in this reintroduction. Our main purpose is to recon-
struct the general point of view of Tarde’s sociology, focusing on the basic
features of its conceptual grammar, its methodology and its vocabulary.
Since Tarde has not given a proper name to his paradigmatic perspective,
we propose to call it “infinitesimal sociology”. We will see that infinitesi-
mals along with difference, multiplicity, contingency, integration and the
infinite are its major philosophical and epistemological principles. We will
also see that imitation, invention and opposition, as well as ensemble,
logic and teleology, are its main operative concepts. Articulated together,
those principles and concepts weave the fabric of each of the works writ-
ten by Tarde—including his novel Fragments of Future Histories (1896)
and his Tales and Poems (1879). This paradigmatic approach, which can
be characterised as neo-baroque, requests for those mixtures that are
sometimes unbearable for classical thinking and the disciplines under its
orbit.
The difficulty to classify these texts and their digressive style, altogether
with thematic variety, have often aroused accusations of eclecticism. Many
times, they were even denied any scientific citizenship, placing them closer
to the literary essay than to rigorous knowledge. Since their publication
until today, the question around Tarde’s works is not only about the sci-
ence they belong to, but whether they actually belong to science.2 These
disqualifications may be surprising if we suppose that the establishment and
reproduction of the canonical scientific models and their institutional cor-
relates are pacific processes. There are always victims in this kind of process.
However, we should at least expect intellectual honesty here, because the
main issue was to define what the scientific study of the social entails. This
was the main concern of Tarde’s aforementioned works, and of all the oth-
ers he wrote.
It is crucial then to know what a social science is for Tarde and what kind
of object the social is according to him. In doing so, we will see that the
misunderstanding and the attacks he suffered in his time were not casual,
as it was not his relegation or oblivion during almost the entire 20th cen-
tury. And, more importantly, we may better understand his particular way to
address the study of the social, make visible his work’s profound consistency,
as well as the reasons why he insists on calling it sociology.
4 Introduction
Three classical readings and a (neo) baroque one

There were indeed serious readings of Tarde’s work that did not resort to
pure and simple disqualification as a way to avoid the problem that they
aroused at the foundational moment of social sciences, and to some extent
still do. Among them, we may distinguish three ideal-typical positions that
can be considered biased, partial or even wrong. The first one critically reads
Tarde as a social psychologist and it is perfectly represented by Durkheim
and his disciple Bouglé. Durkheim (1951, 1975) finds in Tarde everything
from which sociology should detach itself if it seeks to become an auton-
omous science—in the first place, psychology and metaphysics. Because it
refers to—and depends on—the individuals, the concept of imitation would
make Tarde’s sociology lose its object. With it, Tarde would hide what he
should discover: the sui generis reality of the social and its systemic or holistic
character. In the same line, Bouglé (1905: 313) argues that, in Tarde’s view,
“everything proceeded from and returned to the individual: the individual is
the first and the last stone of the building; the alpha and the omega of the sys-
tem”. As we will later see in detail, the individual is fundamental here but she
is not a foundation, and imitation is more a social relation than an attribute
or an individual activity. In fact, the line and not the point—the relation and
not the terms—are the alpha and the omega of the Tardean system.
A second way of reading Tarde’s sociology has understood it as a proto-
type of individualist sociology—placing it the line of Weber, Homans and
others. This reading, close to the aforementioned but without the respective
reproaches, is present in R. Boudon (1979, 2000), who sees in Tarde a pre-
cursor of rationalist methodological individualism. According to this, Tarde
would argue that every social phenomenon is made of conscious and situated
individual actions, largely guided by anticipation and rational calculus. Bou-
don (1971) links the notion of imitation to the notion of interaction, with
which he seeks to relieve the former from its psychological charge. With this
he discovers that there is a logic of social action in Tarde (an aspect of his
sociology still neglected), but he individualises it, giving it a prevalence of dif-
ficult justification. All in all, this reading reveals its own atomist assumptions,
ignoring that, for Tarde, the logic in question is an inter- or trans-individual
one, and that the individual is always a compound of beliefs and desires.
In the third place, we find Tarde’s perspective characterised as a social
psychology. It was understood in this way in some of its early receptions
in the United States, but not only there. Also Jean Millet, whose excellent
monograph published in 1970 should be highlighted, writes in 1972:
he (Tarde) believes in the originality of the “social fact” and, in conse-

quence, in the possibility of a new science aimed at studying them. He calls
himself, and feels as an authentic sociologist. But if we, more willingly,
Introduction 5
speak of social psychology—as he himself invited us to do—it is to high-

light that for him every social reaction is and remains authentically psycho-
logical in nature. It would be individual consciousnesses which will give
birth to social realities. Social life will be essentially an “inter-psychology”.
(Milet, 1972: 76)
However, as Millet knows, the opposite is also true: in this inter-psychology

social realities are what give birth to individual consciousnesses. The solution
to place this perspective in the “intermediate” space of social psychology
prevents an understanding of the actual radicality it entails. As the other two,
this interpretation is dependent upon the classical duality individual-society
and the knowledges that would correspond to them (psychology and sociol-
ogy respectively). The formidable weight of these traditional polarities and
their robust philosophical and epistemological reasons manage to dominate
even the most subtle and careful readings. They lead one to believe that if the
conceptual device elaborated by Tarde does not fit well any of both sides of
the polarity, it will be then placed between both poles—keeping them intact.
Understood in this way, social psychology appears as the waste of classical
epistemological distributions. A (sub)discipline, with its own field but sub-
ordinate and marginal, that would have to address restricted phenomena
that would be themselves marginal: imitation, inventions, multitudes, social
epidemics, collective deliriums, conversation, crime and so forth. Tarde has
taken care of them broadly.
However, it is vital to underline that the core of the Tardean enterprise is
the foundation of a science of the social—and not this or that (psycho) social
particular manifestation or region. In addition, one of the peculiarities of this
science, as Tarde does understand it, is to challenge the concepts of individual
and society as they are presented within the dominant scientific and philo-
sophical traditions—and also outside them. It should be also added that his
perspective questions the discontinuity between psychological and sociologi-
cal phenomena, as well as between social sciences among themselves—and
between them and philosophy.
It is then possible to argue that the three reviewed descriptions of Tarde’s
work ultimately fail to characterise it because they talk more about the clas-
sificatory and normative grid with which they work than about what they
actually seek to describe and evaluate. They are different, even opposite, per-
spectives which are ultimately complementary because they all work within
the framework of the classical scientific paradigm, that is to say, that which
Tarde aims to reform and even to subvert. Such is at least the hypothesis
that guides this reintroduction. It argues that Tarde is the founder of a par-
ticular way of comprehension of the social and subjective world, singularly
decentred both from holistic and from individualist paradigms that would
6 Introduction
dominate the scene during almost the entire 20th century. Therefore, Tarde is
not merely departmentally misplaced. He does not fit the disciplinary distri-
bution that still weighs on scientific practices, because he does not respond to
the most profound and transversal epistemological distributions that organ-
ise them, namely atomism-totalism, agency-structure and micro-macro pairs.
If this is true, social sciences have had enough reasons to “forget” Tarde.
Multitudes in heaven and Earth

One of the wonders of scientific knowledge consists in showing that things
are not what they seem. That is, making explicit that behind the multiple
diverse phenomena presented to the senses, there are underlying processes
of a reality unknown to us until we discover its existence and laws. Thus,
astronomers inform us that, despite appearances, stars do not revolve around
a motionless Earth. To know this, there was the need for instruments that
broadened human abilities of observation and measurement, but there
was also a need for “the lens” of mathematics and physics—not to men-
tion philosophy. Therefore, the telescope, orbit calculation, the concepts of
space, time, force, mass and acceleration, together with the idea of the infi-
nite, allowed for the knowledge of what truly occurs both in the sky and on
Earth—since the same laws govern planetary motion, the tides, cannonball
trajectory and apples.
This summary, elementary as it is, allows us to see the enormity of New-
ton’s feats. Concluding the efforts of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, New-
ton’s work shaped the modern “celestial mechanics”. It also established some
of the main features of the model of science we call classical. Above all, it is
a quantitative, exact and predictive knowledge based on the assumption that
nature, despite its apparent disorder, presents regular behaviours and follows
precise rules. Here, the universe is a deterministic and determined machine,
where there are no whims or hazardous facts. Therefore, by knowing its laws
and initial conditions to its phenomena, we can predict everything that will
happen both in the sky and on Earth.
Tarde asserts the existence of regularities, cycles and patterns, both in the
natural and in the social worlds, and assumes that it is the task of science
to account for this fact. What he does not accept by principle is that this
regularity be the only real aspect for life in society, and for the rest of nature.
In his view, scientific knowledge is to take visible phenomena as the basis
for seeking their concealed laws, discovering their secret mechanisms. But it
must be done in ways that will not discard the ideas of multiplicity, heteroge-
neity, mutation and contingency along the way. Each of these terms alludes
to fundamental characteristics of the real (including social reality), and a sci-
ence which cannot account for these will lose track of its object. And this is
Introduction 7
because, for Tarde, reality does not only seem to be plural, diverse, changing
and hazardous, but also actually is.
In order to acknowledge this, it is necessary to substitute the telescope for
the microscope and plunge into the realm of the infinitely small, revealing its
dynamics. This is so because everything would be made of an infinity of tiny
forces, imperceptible at human scale. They are the ones which actually rule
the world in all its manifestations. Thus, we read,
Physical or vital, mental or social, differences which open up to the clear

surface of things cannot elevate further than their deep dark internal bot-
tom, of these invisible infinitesimal agents which ally and dispute eter-
nally, and whose regular manifestations must not make us believe in their
identity, in the same way as the monotonous whistling of the wind in a
faraway forest must not make us believe in that its leaves are alike, as they
are all dissimilar, all diversely agitated.
(Tarde, 1898: 90)
The assumption here is that the plurality and motion of the visible world
has its origin in a swarming multitude of minuscule, different forces which
associate with one another as much as they combat and disregard them-
selves, as well. Therefore, a special sensibility for the infinitesimal is required
here. This implies, among other things, that the overabundant and whimsi-
cally detailed writing with which Tarde elaborates his scientific texts does
not (only) depend on his taste for literature and speculation. At a deeper
level, there is an epistemological problem at stake. Classical science is driven
by a will of absolute clarity—the same can be said of philosophies and arts
kindred to it. In them, lack of clarity pertains just to a stage of knowledge;
still, as long as it is aimed in the right direction, it is sure to become accurate
sooner or later. In (neo) baroque science and philosophy, like the one held
by Tarde as model for his sociology, all clarity obtained can only be relative.
Here, as in Leibniz’s metaphysics and in Rembrandt’s painting, the chiaro-
scuro reigns: darkness and light succeed one another rhythmically and end-
lessly, always mediated by an infinity of hues. This never-ending succession
of masses of heterogeneous clarity, in continuity with masses of shadows and
masses of darkness of diverse tonalities, does not take place exclusively on a
bidimensional plane. It must also be conceived in depth, in the direction of
the infinitely small. Also in this sense is clarity relative, as is simplicity. This
implies, among other things, the impossibility of finding ultimate, homoge-
neous and separate elements, no matter how deep we can go towards the
tiny and detailed. To go towards the minuscule, to the detail of things, is to
forever find more details within the detail. It is also to find that the detail is
“intertwined everywhere”, as Leibniz wished.
8 Introduction
Thus, we find it relevant to include here a nested quotation, one in which

Tarde refers to Poincaré saying:
I could resort here to the high authority of Mr. Poincaré who, in the 1900
International Congress of Physics, stated that the very simplicity of New-
ton’s Law was perhaps only apparent and illusory. “Who knows—he
argued—if this law is not the result of some complex mechanism, of the
clash of some subtle matter driven by irregular movements. . . . Undoubt-
edly, if our research means became more and more penetrating, we would
unveil the simple underneath the complex, then the complex underneath
the simple, then again the simple underneath the complex, and so on,
without getting to predict which will be the last cycle . . .”. This alleged
shift to and from simplicity and complexity, regularity and irregularity, on
the superimposed layers of phenomena, from the infinitesimal to the infi-
nite, is a very deep vision to which we are led by the consideration not only
of physical facts but also of social ones. This vision in itself constitutes a
rhythm, perhaps a vague one, but of no minor importance because of that.
(Tarde, 1902: 131)
This is not about renouncing scientific knowledge, nor about the search
for clarity. It is about formulating a non-reductionist knowledge whose
starting point are differences and relations, given the fact that it would not
acknowledge any ultimate, simple, homogeneous and separate elements.
Neither would there be immutable elements. Thus, total and final clarity,
the perfect definition of things, implies its denaturalisation by paralysis and
simplification. The (neo) baroque knowledge in question is, instead, consti-
tutively asymptotic, due to its fidelity to diversity, movement and connec-
tion, in a universe which is not only infinite but also infinitesimal. For this
reason, when observing the stars in the sky, this perspective does not find
perfectly circular, regular, uniform orbits of perfectly spherical bodies. Apart
from verifying the elliptic path of “deform” planets, it can also assume that
they are irregular upon close inspection, and contingent in the long run. And
this is so because planets—like everything else—are immersed in an infinite
field of infinitesimal forces without any pre-established centre, direction or
harmony. This turmoil of intertwined vibration and variation is more akin
to Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” than to the graphic schemes of our elementary
education. And the same happens in all other realms of nature—including
human societies.
Tarde expects us to marvel at the social world’s multiplicity and dynamism
every time we look at it—as he does. He hopes we do not ignore the lush
diversity of sociality in its uneven details and its chaotic emergence of singu-
lar events. The question is to understand that social life’s being—or better,
Introduction 9
becoming—is plural, heterogeneous, changing and eventmental. Everything

here is a moving multitude, or to be precise a multitude of multitudes. That is
why “picturesque” is the term used by Tarde to describe the social landscape.
The problem of the social and its pure sociology

The sphere of what Tarde has often called “pure sociology”, and we would
call “social theory” today, is the field of the fundamentals of the sciences of
the social. The fundamental concepts of these sciences are elaborated there,
and this implies also formulating their main methodological guidelines. It
actually relates to producing the necessary tools for the carrying out of spe-
cific research on the different processes of social life in its concrete historical
developments. But this cannot happen without the support of a general per-
spective on whatever the social is, and the ways to its knowledge. Therefore,
to formulate a distinctive vision of the social and to articulate it conceptually
is an intellectual deed. The task has a certain divine character. There is no
omniscience here; it is a matter of getting to know facts. However, it is neces-
sary to (re)create the social world by means of models which represent it in
its most basic and important characteristics. This recreation never happens
ex nihilo; it always implies a background, the philosophical and scientific
traditions in which the thinker is necessarily inscribed—so as to continue,
renew or subvert them. Formulating a social theory in the way in which
Marx, Spencer, Weber, Durkheim or Tarde have implies the elaboration of a
syntax, a vocabulary and a series of hypotheses to understand how the social
world is produced, reproduced and transformed. That is to say, it implies the
formulation of a paradigmatic point of view. None of the founders of social
sciences has rejected that task, and it can be said to have taken them much of
their monumental efforts.
In Tarde, this operation is not restrained to the social world but rather
expanded to the whole universe. What appears in other great thinkers as an
implicit, non-thematised substratum, is evident here from the start. Unlike
Durkheim, to name one of them, Tarde is not philosophobic. His writings
show a smooth back and forth between philosophy and human sciences.
His philosophic and scientific premises can be condensed without risking
distortion in the popular phrase “there are no two people alike”. This is his
starting and ending point. And this compels him to formulate the question
on the social as follows: how could unity of the multiple ever be possible, if
the multiple is heterogeneous and changing? In Durkheim, for instance, the
problem is the opposite one. His starting point, more or less implicitly, is
on similarity not on difference; therefore the question haunting his sociol-
ogy is rather the opposite: why and how did we lose unity? And how can it
be recovered in individualistic conditions? In Tarde, such nostalgia does not
10 Introduction
exist. Throughout his work, we will not find this canonical feeling of loss
implied in the passage from community to society—as it can be found in
Tönnies, Weber and Durkheim. Rather on the contrary, the future is always
better for Tarde because it involves progressive socialisation. But then, if indi-
vidual diversity and change are irreducible, how are social similarities and
regularities possible? And how are groups and institutions produced? Tarde’s
answer is: by imitation.
Tarde defines imitation as an “action at a distance” from one brain on
another. To imitate is to mirror, replicate, reflect something coming from
someone. That something is a specific way of doing, feeling or thinking; and
to imitate it is to repeat it. Thus, imitation is a relational, communicative
activity, which Tarde considers contagious. Imitation bonds, inter-penetrates
and deploys itself as a social tendency. It is therefore an associative, homog-
enising force provoking the regular repetition of similar conducts, thoughts
and feelings in a group of different individuals. These individuals, who claim
to be autonomous, are not in fact able to make use of this alleged auton-
omy. And this is because they are constantly steered by these mimetic social
bonds “compared to which the part that is attributable to their freedom is
of an irrelevant quantity” (Tarde, 1890a: 127). To put it in everyday lan-
guage, which is often welcomed by Tarde, it is a matter of social influence.
More specifically, what is at stake here is the blazing, quick force of fashion,
and the slower, no less persuasive force of custom—two types of imitation,
according to the Tardean scheme.
Making good use of the analogical method that characterises him, Tarde
will say that every instant repeats the sun’s attraction on the Earth, and that
explains the regularity of its elliptic orbit—not spared of the disturbances
resulting from the attraction of other planets. Mutatis mutandis: if every
individual initiative were beyond any form of social attraction, the regularity
shown by the annual figures for marriages, births, work activities, commer-
cial exchanges and religious, political, and aesthetic practices as well as sui-
cides, robberies and murders would not exist. Therefore, individuals cannot
be the elemental forces of social life. The sociological microscope discovers
that imitation is the transmission of beliefs and desires. These are the infini-
tesimal agents that actually weave and drive social processes, and there is a
multitude of them in every individual. What is imitable and imitated are not
individuals as such but rather (some of) the beliefs and desires they transmit.
We do not imitate an individual, nor do we do it in general. It is always a
specific idea or desire, a certain precise judgement or intention (e.g. one polit-
ical idea, one religious dogma, certain legal norm, agricultural technique,
type of love, and not others). Then, economy, science, art, religion and any
other social practice, often substantivised, are nothing but the propagation of
infinitesimal actions traced one over the other.
Introduction 11
Every current way in which we act, feel or think was at some point put
into practice by a subtle or spectacular example that multiplied by way of its
imitative diffusion. Such is the specific way in which social groups and their
institutions are born and reproduce themselves. Now, according to Tarde,
these examples originate from those precise sources he calls inventions, that
is from the creation, hazardous to a certain extent, of unprecedented ways of
doing, feeling and thinking. Countless inventions come to us from different
past times and places, making us what we are. And at each moment, social
life is bursting with innumerable inventions, most of which are tiny and
imperceptible. Each one is an unexpected bifurcation in the regular course
of things, because it brings a novelty that tends to spread as fashion and
that, if lucky, will turn into tradition. Therefore, Tarde can state that imita-
tions are social “periodical forces” (constant in magnitude and direction)
and inventions are social “directing forces” (accidental and divergent). They
prevent the closure of the historical deployment. If all imitation comes from
an invention, then “the normal derives from the accidental” (Tarde, 1882:
271). Here, the accident is not opposed to regularity or to system because it
is at the origin of both.
All things considered,
imitation theory—which involves a theory of invention—does not compel

us to thus sacrifice the social picturesque to social science, and allows us
to encompass, from the same perspective, the regular statistics measur-
ing the series or groups of similar acts, determining clearly the radiation
sphere of diverse imitations, with archaeological exhumations, revealing
the affiliation of successive inventions and drawing their genealogic tree
with irregular ramifications.
(Tarde, 1898: 58)
Another type of elementary social relation should be added to this plu-

ral landscape made of innumerable repetitions and differences: infinitesimal
opposition. It happens that social creeds, passions, needs and interests repeat
themselves in imitations or combine in innovations. However, they can also
confront each other, giving rise to competitions, controversies, crimes and
wars. From the infinitesimal point of view, struggle is then a basic modality of
social relation and as such cannot be eradicated. There is no social life with-
out a multitude of conflicts—this is one of the basic principles of this sociol-
ogy. However, there would be an imbalance between the first two forms of
social bond (imitation and invention) and the latter (opposition), since fight
would always be the middle ground between a mimetic progression and an
invention. As we will see in this book, this social science is then not naive,
but rather optimistic.
12 Introduction
Notes
1 See Toews (1999, 2003), Borch (2005, 2017), Katz (1992, 2006), Sampson (2012,
2012b), King (2016) and Tonkonoff (2017). In English, there are at least two col-
lections of articles (Candea, 2010; Leroux, 2018) and two important special issues
in journals of social sciences: Barry and Thrift (2007) and Tarde (2004).
2 See for instance, Durkheim’s (1975: 180) severe words: “The origin of our disa-
greement is elsewhere. It comes above all from the fact that I believe in science and
Mr. Tarde does not”. Following this line, Laurent Mucchielli (2000: 181) summa-
rises things in this way: “Durkheim has succeeded in embodying a certain form of
rationality—scientific rationality—that consists of methods, examples, reasoning
logics, standardised proceedings of validation and argumentation, all things that
cannot be found in Tarde, whose thought belongs more to traditional philosophy,
even sometimes to a way of writing and demonstration that is nearer journalism.
Now, in the expression ‘social science’, it is the word ‘science´”.
1
INFINITE AND SOCIAL THEORY
Nowadays it is accepted that nature is made of elements so tiny that they

escape from senses. Although imperceptible, nobody doubts their pres-
ence and their action. It is also believed that the universe is infinite. Both
statements are considered true and often trivial, despite their excessiveness.
Instead, what seems not acceptable is that all this has something to do with
the social world. In that field, if anyone seeks to use the notion of infinite,
even in a metaphorical way, this would be objected to. Isn’t society made of
individuals and groups? Aren’t the individuals and their associations finite?
And shouldn’t we say the same about the—large—set of interactions that
take place in these associations? On the other hand, whatever is presented as
imperceptible in the social-historical field because of its smallness will be seen
as irrelevant for any concept. This is not surprising in the case of those epis-
temologies in which big structures or systems are considered the stratum of
social life and the fundamental parameters of reference. But almost the same
occurs for those perspectives in which individuals are the starting points and
the reference measure. They also assume, almost unfailingly, the classical
principle, according to which big effects are due to big causes.
The latter approach is micro-reductionist: it postulates that the social is
nothing but individuals and their interactions—individuals that are conceived
as atoms which are perfectly defined and observable. At the other end of the
epistemological spectrum, holistic systemic views are macro- reductionist:
what is social will be systemic and it will depend on collective structures
which are not accessible to direct observation and that are not certainly char-
acterised because of their small size. Both positions cannot be more opposite.
Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that their main shared reference is
the human scale—whatever the magnitude of time, space, resources and the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197386-2
14 Infinite and social theory
people involved in the social processes studied. But in both perspectives an

iron finitism underlies implicitly as the infrastructure of scientific practices.
Both for holistic and for atomistic approaches, social life is obviously finite.
In most cases, this means discrete, defined, separate and actual.
It may be surprising that, by the end of the 19th century, Gabriel Tarde
explored a different way. Assuming seriously some of the ideas about the
infinite that concerned philosophy, math and physics of his time (and ours),
he made them the basis of sociology, understood as the science of the social.
Founding an infinitist social science, that is how bold and exorbitant his
intellectual gamble was. There is no doubt that such enterprise competed
with the projects that achieved the status of classics in social sciences and
humanities, all bearers of a non-thematised finitism—invisible and tenacious
for being obvious. This may help to explain why, after a short period of
celebrity and much incomprehension, Tarde’s work was relegated and forgot-
ten. The canon of a discipline is not a quiet place and it cannot be produced
without fights in which there are certainly losers. This does not imply the
exclusion of all of them. In some cases, those defeated are included in the
book of saints, although subordinately and for the benefit of inventory.
The following generations will only know them as “pioneers”, reproducing
the inherited hierarchy and the practical exclusions it involves. If this is cor-
rect, every transformation in the canon then entails a transformation in the
disciplinary basis.
Be that as it may, in the foundational moment of social sciences, Tarde
embraces the idea of infinite and makes it a key axis for the comprehension
of social life, its characteristics, configurations and dynamics. The notion
of infinitude that he introduces is linked in particular to the conception and
analysis of the infinitely small. In fact, a capital principle traverses all his
work:
Everything undoubtedly starts with the infinitely minute; and we may add
that it probably returns thither; this is its alpha and omega. Everything
that constitutes the visible universe, the universe accessible to observation,
proceeds, . . . out of the invisible and inscrutable, out of a seeming noth-
ingness, whence all reality emerges in an inexhaustible stream.
(Tarde, 1898: 68)
This premise has a philosophical and scientific value and implies a way of
understanding the world in general, and the social world in particular. It also
entails a guide to know it.
It could be said that this is like putting a chair on the head: wrong, useless,
grotesque. We are used to assume that, in social terms, everything occurs
between individuals and groups, and that none of them has nothing infinitesi-
mal (at least nothing important) or infinite (how could they?). Tarde replies
that those who fear error and ridicule should not work in the field of social
Infinite and social theory 15
sciences, or of any other science. He anticipates that the most dynamic vec-
tors of physics, chemistry and biology will move forward in the understand-
ing of nature by the route of the microscopic, and he proposes sociology to
do the same. However, he warns that atomism is not the way. He does not
deny that everything that exists is made of minuscule, potent and dynamic
elements; but he rejects the hypothesis of their ultimate indivisibility and sim-
plicity. He also denies that such elements are separated from each other, and
that they are completely determined and actual. Therefore, he rejects the met-
aphysics of particles that informs Newtonian sciences and he advocates for
a relational and living universe, a universe loaded of virtualities. That is to
say, the universe as it is conceived by Leibniz’s metaphysics and explored in
his mathematics of infinites and his dynamic physics. With this background,
Tarde invites natural sciences to take the sociological model because he hoists
another fundamental principle: everything is a society. Everything, namely
human groups, but also the individuals that make up them, as well as bodies,
cells, molecules, atoms and stars. This also implies that everything is in rela-
tion to everything and that nothing is separate. And even two more premises
are on the basis of this infinitesimal sociology: nothing is identical to itself or
to anything else, and nothing is never still.
To comprehend adequately Tarde’s sociology, it is essential to address these
general principles, even when they appear strange. This will avoid redirecting
this sociology to other well-known, and maybe stronger, fundamentals that
are alien to it—or, better yet, hostile. His perspective remains distorted every
time that the baroque impulse that feeds it is recovered by any classical syn-
taxes (whether rationalist, empiricist or dialectic). It is precisely the introduc-
tion of the infinite and the infinitesimals in the social and subjective field that
prevents Tarde’s sociology from adjusting to usual disciplinary distributions.
Infinitesimals or differentials
It can be said that if 1/100 is the hundredth part of something, then an infini-
tesimal is the infinitieth part of it. For that reason, the English mathematician
FIGURE 1.1 Infinitesimal. John Wallis’ notation

John Wallis, who introduced the notation ∞ as the symbol of the infinite in
1655, represented the infinitesimal as one over infinite.
An infinitesimal quantity is an extremely tiny quantity compared to 1/2,
1/3, 1/4, 1/8 and so forth, but it is not 0. It is therefore important to highlight
its extraordinarily small character. In fact, infinitesimals are imperceptible and,
at least in mathematics, their insignificance enables them to be underestimated
when convenient. However, this very same miniscule character turns them into
the path to the resolution of a great number of both practical and theoretical
problems in very varied realms: infinitesimal calculus is a major tool in phys-
ics, chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine, architecture and so forth. That
is why Tarde, and some others, believed that the “key of the entire universe”
is in infinitesimals and in the particular micro-logic that accompanies them.
Wallis’ notation remarks that size is not the only thing at stake here: the
reign of infinitesimals is as minute as infinite. A certain perplexity is then
inevitable: how to reach the infinitesimal part of something? Once we enter
this vertiginous slope, the indefinite division clause will prevent us from stop-
ping. Every time you think you have found the smallest part of what is pre-
sented as entire, it is possible to advance to an even smaller one, without ever
reaching the last term. The infinitesimals are then beyond the usual measures
of everyday life; they are “incomparably small”—with respect to whole num-
bers, for instance. But they are also unreachable as discrete, fixed and final
elements. For that reason, Leibniz named them unassignable and Newton
qualified them as evanescent. This is equivalent to stating that it is not pos-
sible to assign them a precise localisation, or a clear definition.
In view of this, it is possible to understand why so many scientists and
philosophers mistrusted these strange entities. Some rejected them (Berkerly,
D’alambert) and some others took them carefully (Newton and sometimes
Leibniz). There were also some who worked to replace them for mathemati-
cal concepts that were considered more rigorous (Weierstrass, Dedekind,
Cantor, Russel). However, it was precisely this spectral, dynamic, impercep-
tible and inexhaustible character of the infinitesimals that magnetised the
philosophical and scientific thought of Leibniz, Spinoza or Maimon. Closer
in time, and for the very same reasons, they were recovered by Tarde as
well as by the already mentioned De Biran, Cournot, Bergson and Deleuze.1
Another unavoidable reference in this constellation of infinitesimal advocates
is the American philosopher and scientific Ch. S. Pierce. They all understand
that infinitesimals and their associated concepts apprehend somehow the
relational, procedural, micro-genetic and infinite character of everything that
exists. They seem convinced that, whatever the technical difficulties may be,
the infinitesimals manage to penetrate the basic plot of the real, which is
made of innumerable, subtle and fluctuating forces differentially integrated.
That is why, each of them in his own way, has sought to deploy the episte-
mology and the ontology that the infinitely small contain or inspire. And they
did so with the ambitious objective of refounding philosophy and sciences on

infinitist and infinitesimal principles.
The extreme smallness and fugacity of infinitesimals make them not only
invisible but also impossible to imagine and very difficult to conceive. That
is to say that they do not only escape from our senses and require a change
in the scales and in the usual parameters of perception and measurement.
They also require a language and some mental operations capable of address-
ing their singular way of being—or, better yet, of becoming. Concentrating
exclusively on their size can lead us to believe that they are ultimate micro
elements of which things are made: minuscule and punctiform entities to
which everything can be reduced, being themselves irreducible. Nevertheless,
infinitesimals do not fulfil those requirements, at least not for the tradition of
which Tarde participates. Here, what is infinitesimal is not small, but rather
infinitely small, where the adverb indicates a paradoxical relation of propor-
tion (incomparably small), as well as a continuous operation of divisibility
(perpetually divisible). It also indicates a permanent process of variation and
co-variations in a context of moving relations. Infinitesimals are variable or
differential magnitudes that are never isolated because they are necessarily of
a continuum.
The continuum in question is likely to be extended endlessly and to be par-
celled without limits. That is to say, it can be enlarged indefinitely through
the addition of a new part and divided endlessly in smaller and smaller parts.
That is why it is considered to be infinite and to contain the notion both of
infinitely small and of infinitely big. Thus, for instance, an additional number
can always be added to a numerical continuum, which gives an unlimited
extension to it. But it is important to mention that the distance between
any two whole numbers of the continuum is also unlimited because infinite
rational or fractional numbers fit between them. And the same is valid for
each of the micro-intervals that separates each of the fractional numbers—
this is an endless process that tends to zero but that never reaches it. And as
we know there is more. The continuum is populated not only by an infinity
of whole numbers, and by an infinity of rational numbers between each of
them, but it also contains numbers that are themselves infinite. Here, we
find the so-called irrational numbers: non-periodical infinite decimals, that is
decimals made of a perpetually irregular series or, so to speak, of a varying
FIGURE 1.2 Number Pi

and heterogeneous series. The basic example is given by number phi in the
infinite continuum of whole numbers.2
The labyrinth of the continuum

It is important to remember that numbers are the paradigm of unity, exact
determination, discontinuity and separation. That is to say, the opposite of
continuity. For that reason, it may seem contradictory to speak of a numeri-
cal continuum. In any case, even if we accept to call any infinite series a
continuum, it may be asked whether its elements are discrete or not. A large
scientific and philosophical tradition will respond affirmatively to this key
question because it understands that a continuum, be it numerical or of any
other kind, is nothing but a sum of discrete parts. Therefore, its divisibility
should end in ultimate elements (unities or points). These elements can be
infinite in quantity, but they are indivisible and defined. A finitist conception
of the infinite results from this (the atomism). This conception is opposite to
the infinitist perspective of the infinite according to which a real continuum
cannot be made of discrete elements. Here, a continuum is not separated,
does not have gaps or holes and may be indefinitely divided without losing
its nature. That is why it can be said that any true continuum has intensive
properties.
According to this latter perspective, the infinitesimals are the “ultimate
parts” of a continuum of this type. But, for the very same reason, they can-
not be conceived as defined, fixed or irreducible elements. Rather, they are
continuous or, better yet, micro-continuous. That is, miniature continuums.
Therefore, they must be treated as non-punctual and linear components, in
turn inhabited by an infinity of endlessly decreasing micro continuums—
unable to reach zero or nothingness. These infinitesimals then imply the idea
of micro-linearity but also of overlapping and interpenetration. That is why
Pierce (1976) could assert that a line is continuous and does not have points,
or that the principle of the excluded middle does not apply in those points.
This means that the alternative, according to which the points are either sep-
arated (and they are then points) or together (and they are no longer points),
does not apply to a continuum. The points in question are interpenetrated
to some extent, so we should speak of infinitely small lines which are inter-
twined and continuously variable. One of the best examples to see this is the
flow of time. Any unit of time, no matter how small it is, will always be made
of that strange material (time) and it may be divided into smaller units that
have the same character. Therefore, we may not speak of a partes extra partes
relation between them and we should rather think of micro-lines of duration
intertwined in soft transitions, that is to say, with an intensive or variant and
interpenetrated character.
Now, one of the historical difficulties of mathematics (and philosophy) is

to deal with the difference that separates two types of apparently heterogene-
ous realities: numbers and magnitudes. Numbers are traditionally defined as
units of multiplicities and are considered discrete entities. In contrast, mag-
nitudes are conceived as continuous realities in the usual sense of this term.
How to relate discrete entities and continuous magnitudes? Or, in more gen-
eral terms, how do extensive realities and processes, which cannot be divided
ad infinitum without losing their character, relate to intensive realities and
processes characterised by an endless divisibility? The infinitesimal calculus
invented by Leibniz (and by Newton) in the 17th century can be located in
the coordinates of this problem and interpreted as an answer to it. Present-
ing calculus in this way enables us to underline the extraordinary nature of
the operations it inaugurates—derivation and integration—and to perceive
the speculative power it contains. Derivation or differentiation and integra-
tion are distinguished from traditional mathematical operations (addition,
subtraction etc.) because they do not pursue a precise determination of quan-
tities or of relations between quantities. Rather, these operations analyse pro-
cesses of variation, change and movement. Therefore, it is here fundamental
the idea of continuum as well as the idea of variable magnitude and depend-
ence between magnitudes, summarised in the concept of function.
From the Leibnizian point of view, derivation or differentiation is the oper-
ation of determination of finite quantities considered as relations between
two infinitesimal quantities. Its reverse—integration—entails the determina-
tion of finite magnitudes considered as the sum of an infinitely large number
of infinitely small quantities, that is to say, the infinite sum of infinitesimals.
As a result of this, calculus can be seen as a synthesis of the discrete and the
continuous, and the infinitesimals can be understood as bridges between the
finite and the infinite.
All these translations are counterintuitive for the mental habits forged
along the centuries of finitist domain because they invert the traditional prev-
alence of the finite over the infinite and the discontinuous over the continu-
ous. But they also invert the prevalence of the big over the small, of the point
over the line, of rest over movement and identity over difference. Here, the
infinitesimal is not only a bridge but also a realm of generation or source.
For that reason, Tarde (1895: 28) asserts: “The source, reason, and ground
of the finite and separate is in the infinitely small, in the imperceptible: this is
the profound conviction which inspired Leibniz”. And he continues: “Every-
thing comes from the infinitesimal and everything returns to it; nothing in the
sphere of the finite and complex—a surprising fact which nobody is surprised
at—appears suddenly, or dies away. What should we conclude from this, if
not that the infinitely small, in other words the element, is the source and the
goal, the substance and the reason of all things?
Leibniz’s universe
The postulate of the infinitude of nature has had major consequences. It
implied the passage from a geocentric and finitist view, in which the idea of
the complete and hierarchically ordered whole prevailed, to another one in
which the never-ending space prevents the setting of a centre and finding of a
symmetric order for all things. To use the classical formula of Koyré (1957),
it implied the passage from a closed world to an open and endless universe.
This change is crucial but it is still insufficient for the perspective that con-
cerns us because the ontological and epistemological key of the infinitesimal
revolution lies on the statute given to that infinitude. In this regard, there are
two fundamental and alternative directions. On the one hand, the concep-
tion of an infinite universe made of atoms and void, where matter is only
potentially divisible. This is Demócrito’s view and, to some extent, Newton’s.
On the other hand, the idea of an infinitely big universe where everything is
potentially endlessly divisible, but that is also actually divided into infinite
parts. This is Leibniz’s and his progeny’s vision. According to this point of
view, if we recognise the infinite extension of the cosmos and also its poten-
tially infinite divisibility, we are still halfway. The key point lies in conceiving
time and space, but also movement, matter and bodies, made up of interior
infinitudes. In order to have a vivid idea of this, it is worth quoting, once
again, Leibniz’s famous text (1986):
(§ 66) Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a

world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. (§ 67) Each
portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like
a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every
animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond. (§ 68)
And though the earth and the air which are between the plants of the gar-
den, or the water which is between the fish of the pond, be neither plant
nor fish; yet they also contain plants and fishes, but mostly so minute as to
be imperceptible to us. (§ 69) Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile,
nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance,
somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one
would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the
pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves.
This text summarises the Leibnizian point of view, showing how fantasti-
cal it may be for modern scientific and philosophical common sense. Leibniz
asserts that the universe is actually infinite and that there are living forces in
the smallest portion of matter—including seemingly inert inorganic matter.
Therefore, everything is alive and there are worlds within worlds, all of them
chained and proliferating interminably. In order to better understand these
statements, it is important to underline the main characteristics of the concept

of monad and to remember that, for Leibniz, the monads are the substances
of which everything is made. He says that they are simple, immaterial, infi-
nite in number and that each one is different from the others; there are no
monads alike. Moreover, he conceives them as centres of forces that, for the
same, are centres of action. Everything that exists, acts: this is a key principle
in this infinite and infinitesimal universe. Driven by this interior force, mon-
ads continuously transform themselves: everything that exists changes con-
stantly. Perception is another constitutive trait of monads, as well as appetite.
Both are given to all the substances that constitute the world, be they physi-
cal, biological or psychic forces. At a proper physical and metaphysical dis-
tance, we will realize that everything is alive; everything perceives and wants.
However, to perceive and to want does not mean being aware of it. The
conscious perception—the apperception, in Leibniz’s language—is kept for
superior monads (spirits); all the rest perceive in an unconscious way, like
in a “profound dream in which we do not dream”. Finally comes the most
well-known characteristic of these monads: they are closed and windowless.
The matter, all bodies and the extension in general are then understood
as composed, and not only divisible but also actually divided ad-infinitum.
There is also an infinite multitude of simple, indivisible, un-extended and
dynamic substances that act on their own. However, the Leibnizian key is
the postulate that there is continuity between both infinitudes and that this
continuity takes place because force is “the soul” of matter. Leibniz’s basic
operation consists of identifying substance with force and making it capable
of acting in order to later interpret the extension as a propagation of that
vis primitive, that is to say, as a force that extends. Accordingly, he asserts
that “the notion of extension is not complete in itself, but a reference to
something that extends, of which it is diffusion or continuous replication”
(Leibniz, 2009: 432). This is the way in which the force that perceives and
wants is present in every corporeal mass: through its diffusion, it forms the
extensions. As simple substantial unities, as un-extended metaphysical points,
the monads are the immaterial principle of configuration of material bodies
and they are also the cause of their constant movement and variation. That is
why Leibniz says that every body has life, understood as an active force, that
is as a spontaneous conatus or tendency, with autonomy and a particular
purpose. This force always seeks to unfold itself and will have “full effect” in
this deployment if it is not prevented by a contrary tendency.
As a result of all this, we have an image of the universe turned into an
extraordinary tumult of innumerable infinitesimal incorporeal agents in
which an infinity of composed bodies emerge as “well-founded phenomena”.
Everything that exists is then dynamic, overabundant and swarming, like
a limitless city or jungle. Everything is made of an immense multitude of
moving multitudes that are communicated by soft transitions, without gaps

or separations—including human beings.
With this, Leibniz separates from Descartes’ metaphysics and Newton’s
physics. His philosophy is a general critique to the spirit-matter dualism, and
to the mechanistic conception of the world. While Cartesianism relied on a
concept of matter as extension (or corporeal substance) and of human spirit
as conscious thought, Leibniz questions these definitions for their limited
character. As stated, for Leibniz matter is not substance but rather extension
and expression of the real substance, which is force—hence, his physics is
dynamic. He also adds that the life of the spirit is not only found in con-
sciousness; it rather extends unfolding and retreating in a myriad of small
unconscious perceptions. These small perceptions are the ones that, as infini-
tesimals in mathematics, “make the infinite express itself in the finite” (Cou-
turat, 1902: 67).
The composition of the infinite

It is then neither difficult nor unusual to affirm that Leibniz’s doctrine
reveals itself atomist despite its principle of universal continuity and its non-
conventional style.3 Accordingly, and following a socio-political analogy,
it can be asserted that his universe is a conglomerate of liberal individuals
enclosed in themselves, whose unique possibility of relation is external and
additive, even mechanical. But this is not the case at least because, as we have
seen, the substantial elements in question are not particles but rather forces,
which offers a dynamic framework to any of the relations between them. It
is equally true that the configuration of the set (or the society) of monads
constitutes a crucial problem in this theoretical system. Leibniz’s responses
to the main difficulties of his own starting point are the most original and
characteristic aspects of his philosophy—as well as the most weird ones. In
short, that starting point is the simplicity without parts, the characteristic dif-
ference, the infinity quantity and dynamism, as well as the immaterial charac-
ter of the substances that make up everything that exists. Therefore, the key
monadological problem is that of the composition or unity of the infinite and
infinitesimal multiplicity of forces or simple substances that may be called
souls, lives or spirits—because they perceive, want and act.
The direct reciprocal action between monads is inadmissible for this theo-
retical model. As monads are simple and closed, nothing can go in or out
of them. Nevertheless, as long as they perceive, there would exist an inter-
expressive, specular or mimetic connection between them through which
each one reflects the others. Perception is here defined as the expression of
the multiple in the one or as the representation of plurality in unity. And
due to the principle of continuity, this representative connection of every
monad does not only occur with this or that one, but with all the rest. Thus,
something really fantastic happens: the multiple nests in the absolutely sim-
ple or, in other words, each one hosts the infinite somehow. Each monad is
the “living mirror” of the universe which it expresses from its particular and
unrepeatable point of view (Leibniz, 1986: 74). This implies that every sub-
stance or soul is individualised given its place inside an (infinite) network of
unrepeatable positions. It also implies that the whole universe is expressed in
each monad but in very different grades of clarity—leaving absolute clarity
and distinction only to God.
But each monad acts from that particular position or perspective and, due
to the same principle of continuity, each action has universal consequences.
Every action, no matter how small, extends to infinity as much with regard
to places as with regard to times, radiating so to speak throughout the
entire universe, and being conserved for all eternity. So, . . . the actions of
souls which are always conserved, and even the action of each soul is con-
served in each soul because of the conspiracy and sympathy of all things,
the world being fully complete in each of its parts, albeit more distinctly
in some than in others.
(Leibniz, 2011: 154)
In its simplicity and closure, each monad receives a multitude of affections

and participates in a multitude of relations, its life and its actions being insep-
arable from those carried out by all the other monads. Here “everything is in
everything”, as in the philosophies of Giordano Bruno and Pascal, and in the
epistemology of complexity. This means that simple parts cannot be thought
of outside the (infinite) totality or set that they configure. But it also means
that each monad is a different and autonomous world (a micro-cosmos) that
expresses the whole universe from a particular point of view. This universe,
however, is nothing but the infinite multitude of monads taken in all their
states and phenomena.
Now, following its own “internal law”—that is the cause of every action
in its interior—each monad does not produce a relational chaos, but rather
enables coordination with all the others. And, for Leibniz, this occurs in the
best possible way. Such is his principle of universal harmony or, what he also
called “the hypothesis of agreement”. This hypothesis argues that monads
or souls inter-reflect and act unfolding their own trends, but their coordina-
tion comes from God since all of them are the expression of their creator.
God, primary and perfect substance, unit of all units, has the character of
“sovereign intelligence” in whose mind exists an infinity of possible worlds.
Through the operations of a combinatory calculus, this supreme monad has
created the existing universe following the criterion of the greatest variety
in the greatest harmony. In its infinite goodness, the Divine Monad would
like everything living as possible in Its infinite mind (essences) to exist in the
created world. However, not every possible essence is composable with all
the others, precisely because of the criterion in question. Accordingly, there is
a very close relation between pre-established harmony, possible essences and
real existences: ‘to exist is nothing other than to be harmonious” (Leibniz,
1914: 97).
The harmony of the monadological universe then depends on an eternal,
infinite and thoughtful being that created what exists with the simplest means
and the greatest variety of effects, in order to ensure the possible greatest
diversity and concordance. As a multitude of existing multitudes, the world
is the effect of the combinatory harmonisation produced by the Full Cause
or the Principle of Reason, which is God. Because of this Monad of monads,
the world is one even when it unfolds in infinite active subjects. Each of these
subjects reflects in all the rest in very different ways and contains in herself
everything that happens—not only now, but also ever and forever. This is
another extraordinary consequence of this model of the world. Here, every
substance
expresses, although confusedly, all that happens in the universe, past, pre-
sent and future, deriving thus a certain resemblance to an infinite percep-
tion or power of knowing. And since all other substances express this
particular substance and accommodate themselves to it, we can say that
it exerts its power upon all the others in imitation of the omnipotence of
the creator.
(Leibniz, 1908: 15)
As a result, the existing universe is nothing but the harmonic integration

of the infinity of different monads that multiply it in an infinity of points of
views (because they perceive) and becomings (because they act and want).
If there are no monads created exactly alike, it is because each one has an
unrepeatable position in the universal harmony. Therefore, it would not be
correct to affirm that there exists exact similarity between two substances for,
without their difference, they would be the same thing. Such is the Principle
of the Identity of Indiscernibles, according to which everything that exists is
individual and characteristic—two perfectly similar can only be (inexisting)
abstractions.
Towards an infinitist social theory

When elaborating the basis of a science of the social, a key problem lies in
defining the statute and basic characteristics of the social group (of any scale)
as well as of the elements that make it up. Or, to put it in other words, the
problem is ultimately that of the unity of the multiple. Understanding Tarde’s
sociology, or any other, is above all to comprehend the particular way in
which this question is presented and seeks to be solved. Unlike most of the
social sciences of his time—and ours—Tarde argues that the social multiplic-
ity is infinitesimal. Now we are aware that this means micro-linear, unassign-
able, variable and intensive. This leads him to a radical redefinition of what
is usually considered both a social group and its elements. Tarde addresses
the statute of the whole and the parts of the social in a framework that is not
finitist but rather infinist. Therefore, his sociology is neo-baroque and not
classical.
Tarde’s sociology depends on a renewed reading of monadology and,
broadly speaking, it can be read as a translation of its infinitist and infini-
tesimal logic to the social and subjective field. However, the fact that this
Leibnizian syntax operates as an infrastructure of his theoretical discourse
does not imply that Tarde accepts it completely without making important
reforms. He summarises the keys of his rereading in a series of program-
matic slogans scattered in different texts.4 To the already reviewed principle,
according to which everything departs from (and goes back to) the infini-
tesimal, another crucial premise must be added: difference is the alpha and
the omega. According to this version of the Principle of the Indiscernibles,
that in Tarde has maybe a more salient role than in his German master, it is
essential “to identify the essence and end of every being with its characteristic
difference, that is to say, in giving the difference as an end in itself”. “The
initial and final term is always difference, the characteristic, the bizarre and
inexplicable agitation at the basis of all things, which reappears more clearly
and sharply after each successive effacement” (Tarde, 1895: 101). But how to
put into practice these singular ontological principles when addressing social
life? Which general conception of the social and of the ways of knowing it
are requested or permitted?
According to Tarde, these principles imply, in the first place, a micro-
genetic and micro-analytic requirement: everything that appears in front of
us as a defined and stable totality must be aimed at the multiplicity of the
historically specific micro-processes that sustain its duration. Moreover, we
should register the evolutions that configuration constantly has. This is valid
for any social compound, that is to say, for what we call society and its
functional equivalents (culture, civilisation, group), as well as for its mor-
phological correlates (nation, region, city). It is also true for what is usually
called social institutions (government, law, science, religion). It is not a mat-
ter of ignoring the differential traits of these social configurations, but rather
of conceptualising them in general terms and interrogating what they really
are—or, better yet, what kind of reality they have (Tarde, 1901a).
To this, Tarde responds with the following: every social reality is psychic
or, even better, inter-mental. That is its basic statute. In particular, he argues
that everything that is social is made of beliefs and desires that, repeating as an
echo, go from an individual to another, intertwining and in inter-expressing
them. Beliefs and desires are not simply microscopic; they are infinitesimal,
that is minuscule, dynamic and expansive, but also non-assignable, micro-
linear and infinite. And this in at least three main important senses: due to
their unlimited capacity to combine, to their intensive character which makes
them susceptible to infinite infinitesimal variations of grade and because of
their unlimited deployment vocation. These minute, evanescent, active and
effective forces propagate interpenetrating and inter-reflecting the minds (and
bodies) they pass through. These fluxes of faith and passion form associa-
tions of very diverse scales and contents. Empires, States, big metropolises,
tiny towns; religious groups, political parties, professions and crafts; finan-
cial markets, universities, youth gangs: every social association is a network
of inter-mental relations that communicate individuals, resembling them and
driving all in a certain direction.
This assertion of the psychic character of social reality may lead us to
believe that this is a conception of the social in which individuals are its
basic constituents, especially if we understand monadology as a metaphysical
atomism or we suppose that, conceiving it in this way, Tarde identifies social
monads with individuals. But this is not the case. In Tarde’s reading, Leibniz’s
great hypothesis certainly implies the reduction of matter to spirit and leads
us to the “prodigious multiplication of purely spiritual agents of the world”
(Tarde, 1895: 309). This point of view may be esoteric, but Tarde finds it
working in the most advanced vectors of natural sciences when they follow
the path of the microscopic to reveal the mysteries of the world. Pulverising
everything that seems sturdy and made of one piece in a human scale, science
discovers a multitudinary nebula of minuscule, active, specific and different
elements, thus atoms in chemistry and physics, cells in biology, viruses and
bacteria in medicine. But this is only the first step. It is also necessary to
spiritualise the corpuscles discovered. That is, it is necessary to treat them
as (micro) forces, and not as particles—and most natural sciences actually
do. Social sciences should follow the same direction if they want to compre-
hend social life in its dynamics. However, in this field, the real forces are not
individuals as such, but rather beliefs and desires that live and act in each of
them—most of the time, in an imperceptible way. Such is Tarde’s main (neo)
monadological hypothesis and the basis of his infinitesimal sociology.
In Tarde’s microscopic view, the human individual is already a set—
or, better yet, a society—configured by a multitude of very diverse infini-
tesimal forces, in accordance with the Renacentist and baroque tradition
that discovers the cosmos as an endless chain of worlds within worlds.
Here, every individual is conceived as a micro-cosmos beating in intimate
relation with the macro-cosmos that contains and constitutes her. Hence,
like Pascal and Leibniz, each individual is for Tarde a means or passage
between two infinites: the infinitely large and infinitesimal ones. Among
other things, this means that the past and the future of the universe is
wrapped or folded in every individual. And this is because each individual

is a specific point of arrival of the cosmic evolution in its infinite and inter-
related series. She also constitutes the instance as from where new series
(re)start and will influence all the rest. Therefore, Tarde (1890a: 86) argues
with lyricism that
it is not enough to say that I have been the inevitable confluence of so

many evolutions of the past; It is necessary to say that an immense range
of causal evolutions forever unfolded in the future emanates from me.
I am the point of intersection of this double infinity; I am the focus of this
double convergence.
If the aforementioned interpretation is correct, we should then affirm that

when Tarde attributes an infinitesimal character to all the basic components
of nature, it means that he conceives them as intertwined micro-linear forces.
According to this, the physical world would be then made of waves, flows or
currents, and the particles that populate it should be conceived as intersec-
tions of these waves or currents. Analogue considerations are applied to bio-
logical life and, following Tarde’s line, Bergson (1991) speaks of elán vital
or vital current. However, the key of a social science in this context is, in the
first place, the treatment given to the psyche and the socius in terms of forces
and relations of forces, that is to say, as immaterial and active agents that are
not punctual but rather linear or vectorial. As well, both psyche and socius
should be included in the inventory of the existing natural cosmic forces and
understood in continuity and feedback with all of them—although without
losing their specificity. Regarding the difficult problem of the priorities and
distributions of the psychic and the social forces in such cosmic kaleido-
scope, Tarde seems to argue that while human mental capacities are near
biology (in the brain), the individual psychic field does not precede the social
field, but is rather configured in it. Accordingly, every individual is necessar-
ily a “social individual” and is associated with all the rest from the beginning
and forever.
Thus, each one is the singular intersection of a multitude of physical,
chemical, biological, psychological and social forces. Tarde (1895c: 240)
may write that “our self lights up, like an electric flame, at the meeting point
of two different and combined currents, the vital and physical current on
the one hand, the social current on the other, the first hypo-psychic so to
speak, the second hyper-psychic”. Certainly, each of these currents, or type
of current, is multiple and each component of that plurality is a force that
propagates following its own trend and seeking to unfold it without limits.
That proliferating agitation of forces is integrated in singular and relatively
harmonic compositions, that may still be called individuals as long as they
are understood as multilinear (or baroque) ensembles.
In Tarde’s words,
the states of the soul taken in all their concrete reality [are the] meet-
ing point at the same time of all the actions of external nature and of all
the influences of the social milieu, multiple crossroads where a thousand
physical forces and a thousand historical currents cross for the first and
the last time, currents of ideas, feelings, examples of all kinds, customs and
fashions, which in the form of the words of a language, of the rites of a
cult, of the procedures of right, of national or local customs mark the indi-
vidual soul with their seal and in return receive a new impression from it.
(Tarde, 1898: 25–26)
Micro-mega
Regarding human groups and their institutions, they should also be under-
stood as ensembles of heterogeneous currents of beliefs and desires dif-
ferentially integrated. It is important to underline that, even though they
are psychic currents in continuity with cosmic life, they are strictly social.
Although Tarde understands that there is no (Cartesian) hiatus between
body and soul, or between nature and culture, he also asserts that there
exist irreducibly social forces. Such things are passions and dogmas, interests
and principles—that is to say, beliefs and desires—which are always social
because they are born in the inter-psychic relation and they later propagate
as mental epidemics that reach the most diverse numerical, geographic and
temporal scales. According to Tarde, nothing is psychologically more similar
or sociologically more communicable than faith and passion, convictions and
volitions. Each current carries specific ways of doing, feeling and thinking
that strive to unfold and has an own and characteristic reasoning (or logos)
and purpose (or telos). Therefore, each current differs from the rest and is
opposed to many others, disposing to destroy them if possible. Nevertheless,
regularity and reproduction, as well as the organised composition of diverse
trends, take place, producing polyphonic assemblages that we know with the
name of societies, groups or institutions.
As we have seen, if in Leibniz’s model all substances or souls are correlated
in such a way that each one adjusts to all the rest following its own laws, it
is so because such correspondence has been pre-established by an instance
that coordinates all of them (God) since the beginning of the times. Tarde’s
perspective is neo-monadological because, among other things, his model
of reality no longer has that guarantee. This transforms the world in an off-
centred field of forces dominated by contingency. Nevertheless, this does not
lead to the abandoning of the principle of universal harmony because, also
for Tarde, to exist is to harmonise. But the harmonic conjugation of physical,
psychic or social vectors is no longer presupposed. It is rather a trending and
contingent state that is always achieved in a partial, provisional and unstable

manner. Here, the composition or alliance between monads occurs by the
reciprocal penetration and the contingent propagation of their appetites and
perception—or desires and beliefs to use Tardean vocabulary. This makes
the opening of the monads’ windows necessary. In Tarde’s model, a force
unfolds by possessing others, assimilating and subordinating them, which
implies a constant presence of innumerable tensions. This gives conflict a
greater importance than in Leibniz’s system. Moreover, this implies that the
inter-correspondence between monads is not total but rather partial and in
grades. Therefore, the assemblages they make up are always “more or less”
concordant or “not very much discordant”.
As Tarde conceives that social reality is inter-psychic, he does not hesitate
to speak of social spirit as the equivalent of society or social group. How-
ever, with that concept he does not refer to a (dialectical or organismic)
totality which transcends individuals. The social is not located “beyond”
the singular human bodies, but rather passes through and intertwines them.
In light of Spencer’s and Durkheim’s favourite metaphors, he says that if
society resembles an organ, this would be a brain. And this because of its
reticular and cooperative shape as well as because of the mental functions
it has: “Society is, or every day tends to be, only one big collective brain
whose little individual brains are the cells” (Tarde, 1895c: 151). Certainly,
it is then possible to talk about a social mind, but instead of affirming that
society has a mind, we should better say that it is nothing but that mind,
understood as a field of psychic and cooperative (micro)relations which are
neither located in a unique centre nor totalised in a regular and defined
perimeter.
Accordingly, social life in its configurations, evolutions and vicissitudes
would be made of thousands upon thousands of minuscule and potent forces
that, going from one mind to another, produce an immense multitude of
entangled acts, thoughts and feelings. These forces propagate mimetically
through contagion, forming currents and producing associations or groups.
At the same time, composing and organising themselves, they configure
social systems or institutions which they continuously overflow, establishing
new and diverse relations. Here, integration is not totalisation and the real
is just a case of “the possible”. As infinitesimal forces, each belief and each
desire always go beyond the societal configuration they make up, nourish
and mobilise. That is to say, they exceed the composition they comprise,
weaving other relations not included in the first ones. Or, to put it in Tarde’s
words, tissues overflow organs everywhere. But each belief and desire always
carries an infinity of possibles and is capable of countless combinations with
other different beliefs and desires. This means that the field of current social
relations is open to new actual relations and is, at the same time, inhabited
by a field of potential relations that are also part of.
We can see then that in Tarde the real agents of social life are neither indi-
viduals nor groups or societal systems, but rather the multitude of beliefs and
desires of which all of them are made. This implies at least three main ques-
tions: that social monads are not individuals but rather the beliefs and desires
that inhibit and constitute them; that those social agents are smaller, more
varied and variable than the individuals they make up and unmake; and that
they are, at the same time, larger or, better yet, more extensive. This is because,
as they are inter-mental, they always go beyond each individual, working at
least between two of them. But also because, when they propagate, they form
infinitesimal lines of relation of local, regional and planetary scales.
Therefore, the social exists and it is nothing but the multitude of all the
mirroring individuals that, immersed in nature, interact with each other.
However, as we have argued, these are compounded individuals in whose
interior a multitude of (mirror?) neurons interact and, inside them, the social
multiplicity penetrates, reflects and interacts and makes the individuals act
with themselves and with each other.
After all, this phenomenon is much less exceptional than it seems; Is it that
the individual, even when alone, is not moved, without our knowledge and
without his knowledge, by an invisible and innumerable multitude, that of
his ancestors, his countrymen, his educators, whose combined influences,
stored in his brain, . . . they wake up startled and all together at certain
moments, a true swarming and fermenting inner crowd under one skull.
(Tarde, 1892: 291)
Notes
1 For a contemporary defense of infinitesimals both in philosophical and mathemati-
cal terms, see the concise and beautiful article written by Bell (1995). For a history
of calculus, see Boyer (1959).
2 The Argentine writer J. L. Borges, another Leibnizian, illustrated this by imagining
a book of sand. It is a finite volume which seems to contain an infinite number of
pages: “He told me that his book was called The Book of Sand because neither the
book nor the sand has a beginning or an end” (Borges, 1977: 13).
3 That is for instance the case of Russel (1971: 134) who asserts that “In spite of the
law of continuity, Leibniz’s philosophy may be described as a complete denial of
the continuous”.
4 In Tarde’s vast work, there are a few texts where Leibniz’s philosophy is explicitly
thematized. In addition to the extraordinary essay “Monadology and Sociology”, it
is important to mention Les Possibles, La Variation Universal and, largely, “Beliefs
and Desires”. Except for Les Possibles, published posthumously, all of them are
compiled in Essais et Mélanges Sociologiques in 1895. For a philosophical com-
ment on Tarde’s neo-monadology, see Debaise (2008), Alliez (1999), Montebello
(2003) and, particularly, Milet (1970). For an analysis on the relation of Tarde with
contemporary social theory and its impact in the works of Deleuze and Foucault,
see Tonkonoff (2017).
2
INDIVIDUAL, SOCIETY AND
SOCIAL FIELD
At the end of the 19th century, Tarde sought to establish the basis of a sci-
ence of the social that is singular still today. He aimed at formulating a series
of general principles, theoretical concepts and research methodologies which
have difference and change both as starting and arrival points. That is to say,
a science that, drawing from the tumult and the phenomenal variety of the
social world, is capable of addressing the units, similarities and durations that
can be found in it, without losing its constitutive plurality, heterogeneity and
dynamism. Instead of postulating structures and systems that homogenise
diversity making it irrelevant (totalism), or instead of affirming a multiplic-
ity of individualities that makes nominal every group (atomism), this science
of the social pursues an alternative that is able to think of the conjunction
of what is multiple and different, but without homogenising it. And even as
important as this, without fixing it in static frames and assuming that when
there is permanence, there is no change—and vice versa.
According to Tarde, the intellectual framework that will enable this feat
is the thought of infinitesimal difference and its compositions. The develop-
ment of this perspective is found in Leibniz’s philosophical wake and in an
epistemology orientated by analogies taken from the differential and inte-
gral calculus.1 It is then a (neo) monadological and infinitist perspective able
to produce a “quiet revolution” in social sciences because it leads to dis-
cover that variety, fluctuation and incompleteness are the primary charac-
ters of social reality. And the same is true for the field we call subjective or
individual—and also for the rest of nature. This involves the production of
concepts and methods that can address the picturesqueness of the social as
its main trait, rather than considering it as an appearance to dispel, as a mist
that covers its reality, which would ultimately be neat, stable and defined.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197386-3
32 Individual, society and social field
This revolution starts when “the essence and end of all being is identified with
its characteristic difference” (Tarde, 1895a: 416), and when that difference
is characterised as infinitesimal, that is as minute, continuously variable or
moving, and as necessarily plotted in relation to a multitude of other differ-
ences of the same type. However, this is only the first movement because the
infinitesimal differences are liable to integrate in relatively durable composi-
tions. The revolution is then completed when those compositions are concep-
tualised as incomplete working units, which are only partially homogeneous
because they involve different elements with different origins and rhythms.
Neither the notion of society, with its totalising load, nor the notion of
individual with its corpuscular bias, is appropriate enough for this sociology.
The notions of structure, system, mechanism and aggregate, and their respec-
tive metaphors—the building, the organism, the machine and the set—are
not appropriate either. In order to carry out his program, Tarde formulated
a syntax based on a relatively reduced number of concepts intended to be
alternative to these classical perspectives. On the one hand, he proposed imi-
tation, invention and opposition as the keys to an infinitesimal approach to
the social field (another fundamental concept). They configure the domain
of a “differential sociology”, that is a sociology of differences and variations
oriented toward the study of the repetition, interference and conjugation of
beliefs and desires as “elementary, innumerable and infinitesimal” (Tarde,
1898: 35) social forces. On the other hand, he developed what we can call
“integral sociology”, that is a sociology of the moving compositions pro-
duced by these elementary forces.
On that path, Tarde resorts to hydraulic, electro-magnetic and epide-
miological metaphors that are characteristic in his theoretical language. He
elaborates the important concept of flow, current or social ray, and he seeks
to address social life and its vicissitudes in terms of an enormous multiplic-
ity (a field) of vibrations, contagions or imitative propagations that deploy,
intertwine and fight each other. For the same purposes, he also uses tex-
tile and musical metaphors (threads and wefts and ensembles), altogether
with other figures related to the world of mimesis (mirrors and echoes) and
dreams (somnambulism). Most of these images belong to the baroque tradi-
tion, and Tarde recreates them to convert them into means of apprehension,
description and (micro) analysis of the socio-historical and subjective world.
Moreover, he adds what is perhaps his most original and promising contribu-
tion: the metaphor of the brain. As we have already seen, in this sociology
the brain is both the fundamental organ engaged in social relations and the
general model of the social.2
All this will not make the notions of individual and society—nor the
notion of system—disappear. However, these concepts will be significantly
reformulated when advancing in an infinitesimal comprehension of social
life, which requires a series of successive movements. Firstly, a revalorisation
Individual, society and social field 33
of the picturesqueness of the social, of the exuberance of its variety, its details
and singularities, as well as of the profusion of its accidents and variations,
is required. Once this affinity with the chaotic is acquired, it is necessary to
advance from that tingling mass of phenomena towards the individuals taken
in their relations and specific socio-historical practices. This will make visible
a series of similarities, regularities and associations that may be addressed
as of the double sociological hypothesis of imitation and invention, with-
out assuming the macro-entities that explain them. Looking closely, we may
see that the concordance between different individuals and the organisation
of their reciprocal relations do not depend on an objective spirit, mode of
production or collective consciousness that transcend and encompass them.
Actually, a certain way of doing, feeling or thinking originates in a specific
individual, at a given moment and place, and thence propagates, repeating
from one individual to another one, associating and resembling them.
If we stopped there, this would be an individualistic perspective, as Dur-
kheim (1951), Blondel (1928) or Lukes (1968) has considered. But analysing
the relations between individuals micro-sociologically is, although essential,
still insufficient. Tarde understands that there is a social reality and that indi-
viduals are its consequences rather than its causes. He argues that this reality
is psychic and that it is found within individuals because it passes through
them in the form of (collective) currents of opinion, faith, passion, truth and
necessity. The social is therefore not psychological but “inter-mental”. It is
also often imperceptible. It is made of a multitude of micro-flows intertwined
with an infinity of possible forms of social relations. This is a psychosocial
field in which every individual is formed and transformed, and the same is
true for every type of groups and institutions.
For that reason, Tarde (1895: 34) affirms that sociology is the “solar
microscopic of soul”. Such a scientific device starts its research with these
or those concrete individuals, with their beliefs and desires and specific prac-
tices, but it does not find ultimate and private psychological elements there.
Sharpening the gaze, it will reach a bundle of minute social rays or waves that
run forming relational lines of local, regional and planetary scale. Micro-
mega: such is the paradoxical dimension of the social, its size and also its
statute. Let us see.
From society to individuals

The notion of society is a primary epistemological obstacle for an infinitesi-
mal perspective of the social, at least when it is burdened with totalist conno-
tations and macro-sociological assumptions. Society as a unitary and centred
entity, which is well defined in its boundaries, does not exist in Tarde’s view.
There is nothing such as a social totality different from individuals and sepa-
rated from others societies—and from nature. And the same is true for social
history, understood as a process with a single trend or unilinear evolution.

When Tarde rejects these alternatives, he has in mind Hegel’s theory of his-
tory, Marx’s understanding of society and economy and the sociologies of
Comte, Spencer, Worms and Durkheim. However, these critiques apply for
any macro-sociological holism, including functionalisms, structuralisms and
systemisms from the 20th century.
All these macro-perspectives work stepping away from the level of imme-
diate interaction between individuals and they observe social groups from
a big distance. Then, they see some (few) far-reaching systems strongly
coordinated with each other, working behind the multiform bustle of eve-
ryday social life. They are perspectives that understand society as a closed
entity with clear limits, involving a large number of people, processes and
resources, and whose implicit reference is the modern nation-state. Such tel-
escopic social sciences only know the Market, the State, ideologies, religion
or language as great homogeneous structures or systems of notable internal
consistency.
Tarde calls these epistemological points of view panoramic, because they
lead to dealing in block with the multitude of associations, regularities and
similarities that effectively shape the social world. He also believes that these
views tend to substantialise these associations because they refer to them
as entities (the system) that somehow pre-exist its components. Therefore,
the use of these global nouns—the State, the Market, the Nation and so
forth—hides what needs to be discovered. Namely, the varied multiplicity of
(linguistic, religious, moral, economic) processes from which each of these
associations is made of, as well as the differential genesis that characterise
them and the mutations that constantly transform their configuration. A more
detailed approach towards the social field will show that there is nothing like
economy, religion or science in the abstract, neither in uniqueness nor in
exclusivity. Thus, in a given social space, we will find certain religious dog-
mas and rites practised by certain individuals that exist altogether with other
religious practices with a different origin, evolution and characteristics than
the first one. This would be a trivial remark if Tarde did not generalise it as
a key theoretical-methodological principle. Everything that is social is plural
and specific. The social never exists as an unitary organisation, nor does it
exist in general or in the abstract. And this is also valid for all the practices
that populate the same social space at that same moment: the government,
production, Law, science, art and so forth. Those terms can only designate
collective and specific ways of doing, feeling and thinking, each of which has
a characteristic modality and, no matter how widespread it is, it always exists
along with others of the same kind.
Some of these practices can be a minority, but they are far from irrelevant.
And this for both sociological and ethical reasons. To consider insignificant
practices carried out by a few individuals is a prejudice close to ethnocentrism
and intolerance. But it is also an epistemological (and political) mistake

because it ignores that every social action, no matter how minute it may be, is
always in relation to others that affect and by which it is in turn affected. Such
macro-sociological prejudice also ignores the premise that socio-historical
dynamics are not ruled by the laws of mechanics, according to which only
great causes produce great effects. Furthermore, it leads to analysing socie-
ties, their institutions and their majorities as if they were born already made.
At least for Tarde, the key is that the opposite is true: every minority can be
the seed of future majorities, no matter how bizarre its social practices may
seem today. Moreover, he considers that everything important in history has
begun not in a minority group, but rather in a singular individual.
What we call social practice, and also social process or interaction, has a
precise definition in Tarde’s sociology. It is the imitation of an invention—or,
to say it in his philosophical language—the repetition of a difference. All
social practices we strive to transform into nouns (politics, economy, family
etc.) are nothing but an “accumulation of actions modeled on each other”
(Tarde, 1882: 272). They are a multitude of specific copies systematically
repeated by a certain, although variable, number of people. Therefore, every-
thing that is social happens between individuals, and has also its source in a
concrete individual. It is there where we should look—always minuscule and
relative—for the beginning of social things, regardless of the size they have
reached when investigating them. The Christian, Buddhist or Mohammedan
religion, Marxist ideology, Euclidean geometry, Newton’s law of gravitation,
Bentham’s panoptic, Fordist production line are inventions where the names
of their creators are visible. These are innovations originated each in a spe-
cific field, in certain places and on certain dates. They were produced by par-
ticular individuals and they later propagated imitatively, intertwining in their
path other individuals that incorporated and repeated them. The same occurs
with the countless, big or small, inventions that do not carry with them the
sign of their author. However, this is not because they are the result of general
entities like a society, a culture or an epoch, but rather because their inventor
was forgotten or ignored.
A first definition of what a social group—or a society—is, emerges from
the aforementioned: it is an “organization of imitativeness” (Tarde, 1890:
91). That is to say, an association woven by the imitation of certain ways of
doing, feeling and thinking that, regularly repeated by a number of individu-
als, produces specific similarities between them. What is repeated, organising
social relations, is nothing but a moral, religious, legal, technique, scien-
tific or culinary invention once produced by a certain individual, that later
branched in an imitative series of the most diverse scope. To understand
this, it is important to highlight that the concept of invention has a very
wide, although not imprecise, sense for Tarde. He considers in this manner
“all renewing initiatives that, bringing at the same time new needs and new
satisfactions to the world, propagate or tend to propagate by imitation . . .,

more or less quickly, but with a regular step, like a light wave or a family of
termites” (Tarde, 1882: 271).
All this is at stake when Tarde asserts that everything social is individual
and also accidental. Or, what is the same, that the track of social dynamics is
always eventful and that human history is, always and constitutively, unpre-
dictable. Contingency rules over social life precisely because the configura-
tions and directions it assumes depend on the chance of inventions and its
propagations. Tarde understands that the discovery of an innovation, what-
ever the type, may take place in any individual even unintentionally. But
still in those who seek it in a tenacious and qualified way, this may happen
or may not. Its contingent character is then irreducible. On the other hand,
even when the repetitions become habits or customs, solidifying themselves
and acquiring an enormous inertial strength, they can also be interrupted. Its
individual reproduction can be stopped and they may be replaced by others
or none at all. Likewise, this will depend on the contingence of social encoun-
ters because each one is exposed to countless inventions that can modify her
behaviours, emotions and/or thoughts, turning them into new habits and
customs.
All this makes each individual extraordinarily important for social life
in its historical becoming. If what we call institutions or social systems are
nothing but multiplied and regular repetitions, and if there is nothing (collec-
tive consciousness, absolute spirit or mode of production) that can support
them beyond those individual repetitions, then those systems may or may
not reproduce in each individual. Accordingly, each one becomes the pos-
sibility of a transformation in the historical course of the systems she repro-
duces, being even the occasion of their dissolution. Moreover, social systems
vary in an infinitesimal way in each individual, because nobody repeats a
social guide identically. And, as important as that, an invention that may
be the beginning of a different imitative series can be produced in anyone,
modifying the matrices of relation with the others and with oneself that are
in force—sometimes for a very long time. Thus, Leibniz in philosophy and
mathematics, Luther in religion, Picasso in art, but also the first peasant who
refused to greet her feudal lord, or the first woman who entered university.
From points to lines

The double value that the individual has in Tarde’s infinitesimal perspec-
tive can be then observed. On the one hand, the individual has a capital
sociological role. Everything that is social happens in and between indi-
viduals, so they have a fundamental socio-historical role. It can no longer
be said that without this or that individual things would have been the
same in general terms, especially because things are never ‘in general’.
We must say why things happened in one way and not in another, and in
this each individual counts. This is not only important in cases in which
“big individuals” make big decisions (Caesar crossing the Rubicon is the
model here). Any action, idea or passion may have immeasurable conse-
quences due to the imitative character of social relations.3 On the other
hand, in methodological terms, the individual is a privileged access way for
socio-historical analysis, precisely because she helps to avoid thinking in
general terms and she forces us to address the networks of specific relations
in which she is immersed. The individual is then an antidote against macro-
sociological reifications. If reification is the action of converting something
into a thing, Tarde sees that this operation works in the comprehension
of the social as collective consciousness (Durkheim), as organismic sys-
tem (Spencer) or as dialectical totality (whether Hegelian or Marxist). In
his view, these macro perspectives are substantialist because they postu-
late entities that, from the top or from the depths, command the relations
between individuals. In response to this, Tarde claims a sociology of the
event in which the individual has a fundamental role. However, he knows
that the individual can also be a reification—this time, an atomist reifica-
tion. For him, the political theories of Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau and the
political economy of Smith and Ricardo are remarkable examples in this
regard. Rejecting supra-individual entities and disaggregating the social in
interactions between concrete people, these classical micro-reductionisms
follow a suitable direction. Nonetheless, their approach is not infinitesimal
enough because they do not address entirely the (social) relations that con-
stitute the individuals themselves. Methodological individualism is still a
panoramic view of the social since it offers a corpuscular perspective that
considers individuals as separated, homogeneous and stable totalities. And
it is still substantialist because it considers them as the ultimate elements,
as the building bricks, of the social.
Tarde understands that if we get closer to this question we will see that,
instead of preceding and producing social relations, the individual is one of
their major results.4 Nevertheless, this does not bring us back to the postulate
of the priority of society and its macro-structures—especially because they
would not exist. Tarde shares with Marx, Comte, Durkheim and with many
others Bonald’s statement according to which it “is society that constitutes
man, that is, forms him by social education” (quoted by Lukes, 1968: 119).
But the problem lies in knowing what society is, as well as in determining
the specific mechanisms of that individual formation, its modalities and also
its duration. For Tarde, the key of both issues is above all in the concept of
imitation. He asserts that this is the major mechanism of formation of subjec-
tivities and, at the same time, the mode of production of human groups. It is
also the reason for their structured but variable permanence over time, that is
to say, the reason for what from afar is often seen as their identity.
The first thing to be underlined here is that what Tarde speaks of imi-
tation does not refer to the activity of a single individual who copies oth-
ers from the interiority of her faculties, just like a subject in front of an
object. Rather, imitation is the social relation in which the subjectivity is
built as a socio-psychic configuration of relative coherence and determina-
tion. Tarde (1890:92) claims that “one is not born, but becomes similar”,
and this becoming similar to oneself can only occur by reflecting on others
and resembling them. Such specular relations happen, most of the time, not
only unconsciously but also in an inverted way, like a good mirror: “Having
nothing more than suggested ideas and believing them spontaneous: such is
the illusion typical of a sleepwalker, and also of the social individual” (Tarde,
1890: 98). And what is valid for ideas is also valid for feelings, tastes and
dislikes. According to Tarde, we are a plexus of reflexes and echoes of the
most diverse acts, words, gestures and states that are transmitted by others
and that we reproduce, always making variations to some degree. We would
then be living and imperfect mirrors.
This social influence that forms subjectivity does not cease in adulthood
and the mimetic character of the psyche does not decline either. From birth to
death we copy actions, thoughts and feelings from others. We interiorise them
as memory, we transform them into judgement and will and we put them
into practice as habits. These mimetic relations are therefore not limited to a
psychogenetic period (childhood), nor to a specific institution (family, school).
Everything is pedagogical, all the time, for the mirroring-individuals we are.
Permanent mimesis is limited neither to face-to-face interactions nor to pre-
sent time. It is an “action at a distance”—sometimes very long in space and
time. We copy everything that has been produced by near and far, known and
unknown individuals in very diverse times and geographies, and that reaches
us through an imitative series of individuals that have repeated it. Accordingly,
every student of mathematics who learns calculus is linked to Leibniz

through a special series of successive teachers who have learned calculus
before him. Each person who pronounces the word sociology is linked
through a very particular chain of successive mouths or pens with Auguste
Comte, the first to forge it. This observation is applicable to all imitated
innovations.
(Tarde, 1902a: 568)
We may add something very important with this: imitation is a type of

relation that can be characterised as linear or, better yet, as micro-linear. It is
an “inter-mental” action that intertwines those who protagonise it, producing
a certain continuity between them. In it, individuals inter-reflect and inter-
penetrate themselves, most of the time in an imperceptible manner. Moreo-
ver, imitation is a contagious way of communication that propagates from
an individual to another with variable speed, intensity and extension. One of

the most specific and important concepts of this sociology is then imitative
current, flow or ray: “I understand by lightning the linear series that unites
the first author of an idea, a word, a product, with the successive propagators
of that idea, word or product, until reaching a considered imitator” (Tarde,
1902a: 568).
It can be seen that this way of referring to the social is somewhat cumber-
some and perplexing. On the one hand, it orientates to identify each interven-
tion and each imitative series, and, if it were possible, each inventor and even
each imitator.5 On the other hand, and at the same time, it employs the con-
tinuist concepts of social current, flow or ray. Enumeration work will reveal
itself indispensable and perplexity may attenuate when understanding that
this (baroque) style depends on a (neo-monadological) syntax that requires
it. This syntax establishes that relations—lines—precede and constitute the
terms—points—and thus every point is the result of an intersection of lines. It
also proposes that those terms are never simple, isolated or neutral, precisely
because they are made of a legion of specific linear relations. Nor are they
passive because alterations capable of interrupting or modifying the course of
the relational lines are produced in them all the time. This may have unpre-
dictable and wide-range repercussions due to the universal connections of
all things. Accordingly, infinitesimal sociology should necessarily be micro-
historical, detail-oriented and differential as well as widely cartographic,
universalist and integral, hence the lengthy, punctilious but not punctualist,
enumerations that Tarde sometimes elaborates, the broad historical periods
he needs to browse and the apparently weird operation of valorising continu-
ous social flows and individuals at the same time.
The social as skein, the individual as wool ball

The aforementioned leads to another concept which is essential in the syntax
of this infinitesimal sociology, but which is maybe under-theorised: the social
field. As we have seen, here society could not form individuals because soci-
ety does not exist in general or in unicity. Instead, there would be an undu-
latory and plural field made of an immense multitude of different mimetic
rays whose sources are the countless inventions from which they propagate,
following specific directions and carrying their own modes of subjectivation
and association. Far from being a homogeneous totality (the society), made
of global subsystems (the economy, the culture etc.), this field is then woven
by a detailed plurality of imitations that, repeating from an individual to
another, forms specific flows: for example moral, religious, economic, legal,
scientific, culinary, family, sexual currents. Each of them is socio-historically
singular. This means that they have different geographic and temporal ori-
gins, and that they carry different modes of relation, comprehension and
FIGURE 2.1 Eight inventions spreading in the social field
sensibility (worlds). It also means that they run at unequal rhythms, that
they have dissimilar intensities and that they reach varied geographical and
temporal scales.
Therefore, what from a macroscopical distance appears as a block (soci-
ety), requiring systemic and synchronic treatments, is shredded and historised
but it is also pluralised and particularised in a multitude of heterogeneous
historical fabrics (the social field). Every social thing—ideas, emotions, acts,
relations, institutions, artefacts—is now transformed into a specific creation
among many others, which is propagated, transporting its differential geneal-
ogy and its characteristic dynamic. Each way of doing, feeling and thinking,
as well as each socially circulating object, has its peculiar force and its dis-
tinctive purpose and logic. But this is not all. Each of us, in her apparent uni-
formity and consistency, is made of a myriad of imitative currents originating
from the most diverse sources and directed in the most diverse directions.
And, for the same reason, each one is always intimately communicated with
a multitude of, alive and dead, human beings made in the same kaleidoscopic
manner. So what we may still call ‘individual’ in order to keep a traditional
reference is not simple, indivisible and separated in any sense. In an infinitesi-
mal scale, the individual rather reveals as the, never very coherent, integra-
tion of social forces that configure and exceed her.
A consequence of the aforementioned is that what can be imitated and
what it is actually imitated is never an individual as such, an entire individual,
since such a thing would not exist. Far from being structured as a com-
pletely defined totality, every subjectivity functions as the open and vari-
able configuration—the integral—of countless dynamic imitations. And this
applies both to those who copy and for those who are copied. Furthermore,
we never imitate in a global way, but rather in detail. What is copied and
transmitted are psychosocial models, that is always specific, more or less
precise, forms of action, intellection and/or affection. Those, and not other
things, are imitated inventions if we look at them closely and in their socio-
logical functioning. For that reason, when Tarde refers to them in the con-
text of their diffusion, he calls them moulds, clichés or, simply, examples (he
could have also called them information and even algorithms). Hence, labour
is neither copied nor propagated in general, but rather, “the art of carving
flint, taming the dog, making a bow, . . . fermenting bread, working bronze,
extracting iron, etc.” (Tarde, 1890: 47). This applies to the (always social)
forms of love and friendship, to feeding, fashion, art, science and so forth.
When replicated and internalised, these detailed models produce self-sim-
ilarities (individuals) and, when propagated, they give rise to associations
(groups, societies), as well as to regularities in certain shared ways of doing,
feeling and thinking (social systems or institutions).
Each individual participates, at the same time, in different types of lines
of relation, but no one participates (directly) in all existing lines. And, even
more important, each one is simultaneously part of different groupings,
which implies that every individual is a regular carrier of practices, thoughts
and feelings that are never very consistent with each other if we look closely.
Accordingly, someone can be considered and consider herself Scottish and
English at the same time, can be a Catholic and do not reject abortion or
drugs, can support macho and feminist perspectives in different topics and
to varying degrees, can endorse racist immigration policies and neo-Keynes-
ian economic recipes. Those who are passionate about systemic coherence
will see in this signs of mental inconsistencies or typical contradictions of
our post-traditional time. However, Tarde claims that the principle of the
excluded middle is not the main operator of social and subjective articula-
tions, and that the tight coherence of collective values does not exist in
Modernity, but it did not exist before and will not come in the future either.
Due to the multilinear and polygenic character of the social field, no system
configured therein will be able to be completely coherent, closed and stable
and to have an unilinear evolution.6 Among other things, this is an invita-
tion to rethink the dominant narrative, inside and outside social sciences,
according to which past times were organic, well cohesive and homogenous.
Every social field is woven by countless infinitesimal repetitions of innu-
merable past and present inventions that propagate in different directions
and with different scopes at the same time. Therefore, it is necessary to con-
ceive it as a thick intersection of imitative radiations among which countless,
both conflictive and creative, interferences are produced. From this point of
view, social history can no longer be described as a unique drama developed
in successive stages, but rather as “a tangled skein, or rather, as a confused
mix of multicoloured skeins” (Tarde, 1898: 61) that deploys according to
different temporalities. This “confusion” proceeds from the lack of unique
direction and the overabundance of those radiations within the same social
field. It is important to underline that radiations themselves do not have to
be necessarily confusing and most of the time they are not (they carry precise
models). Moreover, we must highlight that, within that socio-historical mare-
magnum of dynamic differences, lasting social and subjective configurations
effectively occur. However, they are not the result of organismic or dialectical
systems, but rather arise as more or less coherent integrations of variable and
heterogeneous relations (i.e. as ensembles).
The remarkable plasticity of these integrations, as well as the associative
and subjective power of the flows that compose them, proceeds from the par-
ticular material from which they are woven: beliefs and desires. In fact, that
is the proper level of the social. Beliefs and desires are the real components
and agents of social life—Tarde will say that they are its force and its sub-
stance.7 It is the inextinguishable dynamism of these microscopic forces that
gives an impalpable materiality to the social.
Beliefs and desires as infinitesimal social forces

There is then one last micro-analytical movement which does not deny what
we have exposed until now, but that rather specifies and expands it. Social
models which are invented and imitated are composed of psychic elements—
such things are beliefs and desires. Also at this point it is necessary to resist
the return of atomism, a habit that persists in reinstating the imaginary of
particles. Beliefs and desires in question are certainly psychic forces. How-
ever, they can’t be understood as merely internal or subjective—nor as much
less punctiform and separated. They are rather micro-linear elements inter-
laced in an intensive continuum. That is to say, they are strictly infinitesimal.
Tarde (1895: 240) has a conception of the psyche according to which beliefs,
desires and sensations are “the unique elements of the soul”. All subjective
processes would then be made of these three basic components and their com-
binations. The first ones include ideas, principles, precepts and judgements;
the second ones include passions, interests, purposes and projects. Beliefs
manifest themselves as faith, conviction or reasoning; desires as will, inclina-
tion or intention. Regarding sensations, Tarde says that they are qualitative,
unique and irreproducible impressions which extract their actual psychologi-
cal value from beliefs and desires that give them meaning and value. Sensa-
tions are then ephemeral and change from an individual to another, while the
capacity of desiring and believing is the “same in everyone”. This is because
all human bodies would have the same faculty to believe and desire, and their
psychic life would function according to the same basic operations. These
basic operations are affirmation and denial when referring to beliefs, attrac-
tion and repulsion in the case of desires. Each of these operations is subject to
variable degrees of intensity, and a continuum exists between both extremes.
For the same reason, psychic life is made of chiaroscuros, and one can per-
fectly speak of semi-beliefs and semi-desires. In the wake of Leibniz, Maine de
Biran and Cournot, Tarde understands that ideas, passions and perceptions
are distributed in a line which goes from clarity and distinction to confusion
and darkness, passing through an infinite grey range. Moreover, he claims
that there are different degrees of consciousness, and that there are degrees of
the unconscious too. However, in every case it is a matter of reversible con-
ditions: desires and beliefs that inhabit us may turn, in grades and without
interruption, from a conscious state to an unconscious one—and vice versa.
The same is valid for the clarity and the distinction of their contents, as well
as for the (positive or negative) sign of their dynamic. This means that the
volitional attraction and repulsion regarding the same object are fluctuating,
as well as its intellectual acceptance and rejection. Finally, beliefs and desires
may combine themselves in innumerable possible ways, and to an innumer-
able degrees. As a result, all systems of ideas and feelings that are configured
by them can far exceed the principles of coherence required by classical logic,
and they often do so.8 The fact that they harmonise diverse forces does not
imply that they are consistent systems.
From the aforementioned derives the enormous creative potency of beliefs
and desires, as well as their power to propagate. But there is also a negative
condition for both things to occur. Neither beliefs nor desires are determined
by the biological necessities of the human body or by the schematisms of an
innate reason. Nor are they bound by a Law of culture that is universal in
its contents—the prohibition of incest, for instance. All this implies that, by
right, but also in fact, anything can be believed or desired. It also implies that
interests, convictions and volitions that make up the (intra)psychic life are
necessarily received by others, and that they have a formative and structuring
value as well as a transformative influence that never ends. The
wills and beliefs through which we imagine simply coveting and consider
pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, what we actually believe as such;
These wills and beliefs are not individual but social, that is, suggested
to the individual . . . through his ancestors or his contemporaries, by the
atmosphere of his country and that of his century.
(Tarde, 1891: 457)
At this point, one may ask if social life has necessities and/or reasons that
work as the foundations of socially circulating values, interests and tastes
that the individual receives and makes her own. The answer Tarde gives to
this crucial question is negative because he understands that social life is
psychic too. Since it is fundamentally made of beliefs and desires, the previ-
ous considerations are also valid for it: like individuals, groups can believe or
desire anything. There is no biological or rational (or theological) basis for
common beliefs and desires, nor for the social practices and the institutions
they mobilise, shape and sustain.9 Monotheism or polytheism, democracy or
monarchy, monogamy or polygamy, modern or postmodern sciences: there
are no extra-social reasons for the transmission and institutionalisation of
certain shared convictions and passions, and their establishment as dominant
values, truths and practices. It is vain to search for more certain truths or
fairer values hidden behind those prevailing in a social field for more or less
long periods of time. It simply happens that many other truths and justices
are less extended in that very same field, and that many more (an infinity) are
possible, ready to be actualised, that is to say, ready to transform in reality
through their combination in new inventions and their further contagion in
imitative propagations.
Beliefs and desires are then the actual infinitesimal agents of social life.
Both social and subjective reality are made of their incessant diffusion, com-
position and opposition. They are also the cause of the constant mutations
that are registered at every moment in social and personal life. For the same
reason, it is important to conceive that both individuals and groups are made
and un-made in a most primary field, which is however social. This is a
heterogeneous, non-centred and polyrhythmic field made of an innumerable
multitude of inter-mental forces. These immaterial and contagious micro-
vectors, prodigal in actual differences and future possibilities, configure
as models of action, intellection and affection, and propagate as flows or
waves, spreading their visions of the world and their forms of organising
social relations. But, as we know, they also interfere with each other in two
ways: they conjugate giving place to new models that will in turn propa-
gate, or they clash in opposition, producing contagious conflicts, capable of
acquiring the most diverse intensities and scales. And all this happens at the
same time. Systematicity, transformation and social conflict do not occur
in large homogeneous blocs, nor in successive stages ruled by the principle
of mutual exclusion (where one is produced, the other one is displaced or
suspended). They rather happen in a simultaneous, multiplied and dynamic
manner. Tarde also wanted to assess this when he speaks of social field or,
more often, of social life.
Infinitesimal sociology
According to Tarde, the ensembles of similitudes, regularities and concord-
ances between individuals, which lead us to speak of the existence of societies
and groups, are due to the presence of similar and precise ideas and pas-
sions in each of these individuals. However, these similarities in desiring and
believing do not refer to the equality of their biological needs, nor are they
the corollary of an innate reason, common to all of them. They do not result
from profound or transcendent collective symbolic structures that configure
them either. Rather, they derive from the imitative propagation of models
of interaction, intellection and affection that, spreading from one brain to
another, shape psychosocial currents which are capable of establishing spe-
cific correlation and correspondence links. For that reason, it is not excessive
to affirm that nations, ethnicities and families, but also industrial or financial
corporations, religious congregations, political parties and criminal gangs,
would be nothing but intermental networks of familiar, national, economic,
religious, political and criminal beliefs and desires respectively.
The approach of this sociology towards any social group is then demanding
and is orientated to discern each of the individuals that integrate it and also
to differentiate the different types of relations that are established between
them. However, its ultimate goal is not the individuals and their relations,
but the flows of faith and passion that guide these relations and intimately
communicate those individuals with each other and with themselves. Only
by identifying and following those flows in their concrete socio-historical
paths, catographing their extensions, measuring their intensities and speeds,
describing their characteristic dynamics and effects, can sociology access the
specific level of the social. This sociology should not be then characterised as
micro but rather as infinitesimal. This approach discovers that the singular
configurations that we call individuals are the result of processes of integra-
tion of a myriad of social beliefs and desires that have turned into personal
memory, judgements and habits. Moreover, it allows us to see that individu-
als are bio-psychosocial ensembles living in continuity with the psychosocial
field and the rest of nature. Far from being the coherent and well-defined
entity we like to imagine, every individual always works interpenetrated with
the others, and overflowed by them. This transforms her into a hesitant and
intermittent configuration that is done and undone in an imperceptible way
several times a day. According to Tarde, every individual is entangled with
the others through two types of imitative current that are distinguishable
for their intensity and their velocity, and not for their contents. One is the
process of slow repetitions which is known with the name of institutions and
customs; the other one is the process of rapid and intense imitations that
Tarde calls fashions—and that include the fickle fluxes of public opinion,
social mood and collective emotions.
Similar considerations are valid for social systems. For the point of view
inaugurated by this sociology, these are nothing but the iterated repetition
of certain specific ways of feeling, thinking and doing. Far from any tran-
scendence or substantialisation, they simply consist of ensembles of models
(inventions) whose regular repetition works as social memory that coor-

dinates behaviours, exchanges, roles and values in a certain group of indi-
viduals. The so-called institutions (law, the government, morality, religion,
science), all customs and habits (cooking, dressing, dwelling), as well as each
of the manufactured material objects (utensils, tools, machines) and each of
the thought immaterial objects (numbers, words, theories) are innovations
originated in specific fields, in certain places and dates, in particular indi-
viduals. Or, more precisely, they are groups of inventions that were linked
by successive scientific, political, religious inventors, whom Tarde sees as
coordinators—and transformers—of previous inventions.
Considered in this way, social life shows itself differentially multiplied in
an extraordinary variety of specific human creations that repeat and propa-
gate in a myriad of precise imitative series, series or flows that deploy with
the most diverse extension, that get stuck in conflicts or that integrate in
new inventions that will branch to create in turn new social worlds. There
would be nothing such as a homogeneous and global society, a defined and
coherent system of systems, a continent with all social interactions. Instead,
what emerges is a landscape of innumerable associations woven by singu-
lar mimetic currents that are neither necessarily coherent between them nor
equally encompassing. This occurs in such a way that the national associ-
ation (the society) does not coincide with the religious one, nor with the
economic, scientific, artistic, ones. Each of these modalities of relation is
regulated by distinctive beliefs (or meanings) and desires (or aims), whose
complete concordance in a fully equilibrate machine is not possible—and, at
least for Tarde, it is not desirable either. If units exist, they will be, here as in
every place, partial, open and dynamic.
Notes
1 In France, authors such as Cournot, Couturat and Brunschvicg were part of this
philosophical and epistemological impulse, which was continued by Bergson and
Deleuze (maybe Tarde’s most important heirs in the 20th century). In North Amer-
ica, Pierce’s work is also on this Leibnizian path and, in Germany, Leibniz’s devel-
opments were taken by H. Weyl and, in a different way, by H. Cohen and Cassirer.
2 Tarde argues that the comparison of societies with organisms understood as totali-
ties can be advantageously replaced by the analogy with that singular part of the
organism since “society is or tends every day to be only a large collective brain
whose small individual brains are the cells”. Sampson (2017) has developed these
Tardean lines of thought by carrying out an original analysis of current societies
in terms of “neuro-cultures”. Along with him, and in concordance with Lazzarato
(2002), Terranova (2012), Parikka (2007) and others, has developed a research
field whose guiding threads are the links between affect, contagion, neuro-sciences
and digital networks in the era of “neuro-capitalism”.
3 Bergson (1955: 333) writes that Tardean sociology gives us a keen sense of our
responsibility “by showing us how the least of our initiatives can blossom into
incalculable consequences, by revealing how a simple individual gesture, falling in
the social milieu like a stone in the water of a pond, shakes it entirely with imitative
ripples that always widen”.
4 Some key figures of contemporary social thought, such as Deleuze, Foucault and
Latour, heavily borrow from Tarde’s work, hence the importance of Tarde for the
contemporary current called “relational sociology”. On this see Tonkonoff (2018).
5 For this reason, Latour (2002: 123) claims that the statistical and methodological
tools with which Tarde dreamt of, and that are necessary for undertaking his sociol-
ogy, arrive with the Internet because they enable tracking exactly “any rumour, any
news, any data, any purchase and sale”. The devices and techniques that today we
call big data “are tracking, before our eyes, just the type of data that Tarde would
have acclaimed” (Latour, 2010: 160).
6 “The aspiration of the social state to be an entirely logical system with the elements
that compose it is never satisfied more than in part, and we see why: it happens
that it was not born abruptly, from a single block, but it was formed little by little
by inter-mental actions, by intersecting imitative radiations, and it continues to be
elaborated by incessant changes, by the exchange of examples and ideas with the
surrounding societies, formed, they also, due to the incomplete fusions of conta-
gious individual influences” (Tarde, 1895c: 79).
7 “My ideas on imitation could not be separated from my ideas on beliefs and desires:
they form a block. Not satisfied with words, I do not admit imitation but imita-
tion of something, and the substance, the force, transmitted from brain to brain by
imitation, is a belief or a desire” (Tarde, 1890: 12).
8 “Our consciousness is constituted in such a way that it entails an infinitude of state-
ments opposed to negations, an infinitude of desires opposed to repulsions and that
have exactly the very same object” (Tarde, 1898: 74).
9 About one century after Tarde, Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) would speak of
imaginary self-institution of society. However, one of the main differences between
Castoriadis (and other post-structuralist authors) and Tarde’s social theory is the
“flattening” and the radical decentralisation of social “imaginary significations”.
In Tarde, beliefs and desires circulate through lines or, better yet, through a-centred
networks, while in Castoriadis they still seem to have an ontologically unfounded
but socially in force-centre. At this point, Castoriadis is closer to the tradition that
goes from Durkheim to LeviStrauss’ and Lacan’s structuralism than to the (neo)
monadological perspective, even though the latter is not absent in his work. In
contrast, Deleuze’s and Latour’s poststructuralism is completely in tune with the
Tardean perspective.
3
THE SOCIAL AS CONTAGION,
CREATION AND FIGHT
The term mimesis is the Greek precursor of the Latin term imitatio, and is as
old as philosophy, to say the least. It has played an important role in meta-
physics, ethics and aesthetics and has also been a key notion in Western theo-
logical thought and Christian morality. Besides, it has had a relevant role in
certain modern sciences such as biology and psychology. However, the wide
range of meanings acquired in these various fields makes it difficult to assert
that this is always the same concept. In view of this fact, Tarde claims that it
may have been more accurate to invent a neologism. He chooses, however, to
speak of “imitation” and defines it as follows:
What is imitation? It is an action at a distance of a special kind exerted by

one brain on another, a mental impression given or received which is so
propagated by a mode of contagion quite different from that transmission
of periodic movements which occurs when two chemical substances are in
contact with each other. . . This mental impression has two characteristics:
first, it is an impression, an exact reproduction of the verbal articulation,
of the religious rite, of the ordered act, of the idea taught, of the industrial
or artistic process learned, of the inoculated virtue or vice, of the model of
which it is a copy, of the cliché of which it is an impression—turned into a
cliché in its turn. Secondly, it is essentially mental, spiritual, psychological.
Hence the impossibility of expelling psychology from social science.
(Tarde,1898a: 49)
This quote comprises all that is involved in the Tardean concept of imita-
tion, its description, implications and proposals, that is a relational under-
standing of the social action and the assertion of its psychic nature and linear
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197386-4
The social as contagion, creation and fight 49
character. If we wish to measure the scope of this definition, it is useful to

compare it with Max Weber’s considerations on social action as a start-
ing point of his comprehensive sociology. Basically, it is an action with a
subjectively meant meaning (Subjektiv gemeinter Sinn), carried out by an
individual who is oriented toward other individuals’ doings. In this respect,
Weber (1978) differentiates himself from Tarde and Lebon by stating that
it is neither an “action by influence” nor an “action of the masses”. Weber
seems to consider these two types of behaviours as merely automatic or reac-
tive actions. In his view, social action refers to the action of others, while it
also bears (value, rational, instrumental, affective or traditional) meaning,
and the individual who performs it is aware of it. Therefore, the motivation
of the behaviour becomes crucial, but another crucial factor is that it must be
“meant” or possessed by the actor.
Tarde’s infinitesimal sociology also gains its entry point to society through
individuals. It also sees social action as something other than mere reflex—to
copy a yawn is not the same as to copy a greeting. Both actions are, indeed,
human mirrored actions, but the former is basically biological and the latter
is imitative or social. Imitation is always driven by meaning, but if meaning
were considered merely subjective, its main traits would be lost. It is certainly
true that there is more reflex than reflection in an imitative action, but it is an
“inter-spiritual” reflex. This implies, among other things, that it transports
a meaning which we never own. It also means that this action is already a
relation—even if not reciprocal, in which case we would need to talk about
inter-relation. Consequently, Tarde does not need to resort to a second con-
cept (social relation), whereas Weber does. In Tarde, relation is primitive and
included in the notion of imitation as “inter-mental action at a distance”. The
subjectively meant meaning may exist, no doubt, but is not indispensable to
the social action to happen. Plus, in any case, it is always a product of the
imitative relation before becoming a producer of new actions or relations.
In Tarde’s sociology, meaning is the “soul” of social action, the force steer-
ing its course either through judgement (beliefs) or through ends (desires).
Therefore, we can talk here about “sense” considered both as meaning and
direction. Imitation involves logos and telos, as well. They are the forces
that mobilise our behaviours, but they are social rather than individual or
subjective. This means that we are possessed by them, much more than pos-
sessing them ourselves. It can be argued that all this is valid for actions that
relate us to others; but individuals are more than that. Tarde would reply
positively. However, it is hard to find human actions which are not social
to some important extent, including those which can be passed as reflex or
mechanically.
In addition to this, socio-psychical forces steering social action are, in gen-
eral, unperceivable by those performing them. We are unaware of the lead-
ing power they have on our ordinary (and extraordinary) behaviour. Tarde
50 The social as contagion, creation and fight
shares with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud the assumption that it is not
possible to identify psyche and consciousness. For him, this is a huge ego-
centric illusion, typical of political and economic liberalism. And when it
comes to Weber’s sociology, it is nuanced and complex in this point since it
acknowledges as social both affective and consuetudinary behaviours. It is
also true that it demands of them a “meant meaning” to be in accordance
with his definition. Tarde, on the other hand, claims that each and every
human individual is dominated all the time, throughout his whole life, by
social forces he does not understand. This does not imply that such acts
are lacking in meaning—rather on the contrary, however, they are meanings
which can be said to be objective, impersonal or even strictly social, and
often unconscious. Consequently, the model of infinitesimal sociology is not
rational choice or hermeneutics, but somnambulism induced by hypnosis.
Social hypnosis (not everything is wakefulness with

eyes wide open)
According to Tarde, between the conscious and the unconscious there is a
relation of continuity, degree-variability and reversibility. This relation can
be understood as a continuum between light and darkness, and things are
perceived more or less distinctly by consciousness according to its localisation
in it. This continuity also allows for the imperceptible to become perceptible,
and vice versa. Thus, for instance, what started with a well-thought learn-
ing process may end up as a deaf and dumb habit. The same may happen in
reverse and we could become quite aware of our routines of automatic func-
tioning (however difficult to modify as they may be). All things said, empha-
sising too much on this reversibility factor may lead to a weak description of
the magnitude and role of the imperceptible—that is the unconscious. If we
wish to gain an adequate concept on its relationship with the conscious, we
need a more robust formulation, such as the following: conscious thoughts
and feelings are always the relatively small and finite sub-portion of a psychic
and perceptive field which is infinitely wider, and always unreachable for
consciousness. Moreover, everything that is clear to the consciousness springs
up from (and returns to) that deep-dark bottom ground. This bottom ground
is strictly limitless given the Leibnizian fact that everything and everyone is
in everything and everyone. For this reason, in every moment there is a mul-
titude of perceptions affecting us in an imperceptible way. Our body receives
impressions from all other bodies, but our “soul” cannot account for them
clearly, and therefore processes them in obscure and confusing manners—
that is as small perceptions.
Maine de Biran, a Leibnizian thinker considered by Tarde as one of his
masters, refers to these small perceptions as “an infinity of obscure impres-
sions. . ., varying in time, confusing, in turmoil, chaotic by nature” (De Biran,
2002: 82). Only some of them come out of the shadows to acquire a more
distinct, brighter outline, when an act of attention may turn them into apper-
ceptions or conscious ones. The rest remain permanently active but unno-
ticed, and only reveal themselves during sleep and through some anomalous
phenomena in which consciousness is lacking, distorted or interrupted. In
delirium, for instance, small perceptions and their sensitive chaos may storm
in, disrupting the regular action of thought and will. This may also happen
during somnambulism.
De Biran (1841: 262) offered a report on this odd phenomenon. It reads:
[S]omnambulists by no means remember anything of what they do, say

or feel during their sleep, although their actions, movements and words
enunciate that they are occupied by very clearly alive ideas or intuitions,
and that the series of their very regular, consequent actions, aimed at a
given target carry with them all apparent however deceitful signs of intel-
ligence and a clear will.
This description, which De Biran shared with most scientists of his time, was
valid both in the case of individuals who sleepwalk for unknown medical rea-
sons and in the case of those induced to it artificially by means of hypnosis.
It is hard not to see that what is enunciated here is a mystery, for sleeping is
usually opposed to wakefulness, and consciousness is said to rule our speech
and behaviour. If the sleepwalker’s consciousness is asleep while he walks and
talks, who is it that, acting and talking? It all happens as if they were two
different people, more so considering the complete oblivion brought by the
act of waking up. Is there oneself inside another, then? Judging by the alleged
lucidity in the somnambulist’s conduct, this possibility does not seem absurd,
and De Biran, among others, has it by a considerable hypothesis. But given
the fact that he wants to base all psychology upon consciousness, he orients
his answers towards an organic unconsciousness, made up precisely of small
perceptions. Even when mentioning the ideas that seem to be guiding the
somnambulist, he resorts to physiology as a field that comes in to establish
the causes of mental and behavioural processes taking place in the individual
when their voluntary attention ceases (sleeping and somnambulism) or when,
so to speak, it fails (mental alienation and delirium). Thus, if an unconscious
were to exist, it would be sensitive and vital, a purely affective one. This is
an unconscious in which small perceptions relate closely to imagination, as
happens during sleep, but it is not properly psychological—since, according
to De Biran, where there is no consciousness, there is no psychology.1
A lot is at stake then, in the picturesque figure of the somnambulist and
in the experiences of hypnotic suggestion to which part of the medicine and
psychiatry of late 19th century turned to. These comprise a series of trou-
blesome issues still problematic for the scientific world and for philosophy,
given their importance and huge complexity, that is the relation between the
conscious and the unconscious, body and mind, freedom and determination.
Tarde adds one crucial topic to this list: the relation between individual and
society.
Tarde was very interested in induced somnambulism and its problems,
but his approach was immediately relational and eminently sociological—it
does not focus on the somnambulist himself, but rather on the hypnotiser-
hypnotised pair. Tarde believes to find in this match the most perfect model
of imitative social relation, mainly since there we can find the inter-mental
social bond in its purest state, if such a thing could be said, a strictly physi-
cal relation in which beliefs and desires flow free from any interference of
the physical world or biological bodily needs. In addition, since the hypno-
tist sends simple commands to the hypnotised, there are no contradicting or
resisting beliefs or desires. Here, as in sleep and delirium, there is no distinc-
tion between the inside and the outside; therefore, any suggestion can be
experienced as real. If the hypnotiser indicates it is very cold, the hypnotised
will start shaking.
According to Tarde, this is possible simply because laboratory conditions
operate in an extreme reduction of what happens in normal social life rela-
tions. Experimental hypnosis just reduces, isolates and intensifies what was
always there both in doctor and patient, due to their nature as social individ-
uals. As everybody else, both are made of imitative relations, and “imitation
is a form of somnambulism” (Tarde, 1890a: 97), that is an inter-mental rela-
tion in which someone utters a specific directive and someone else receives
it, executing what is requested quite accurately, and often without a clear
awareness that they have been induced into doing it.
Social life differs from artificial hypnosis not by nature but by number,
variety and coherence of the suggestions involved. It also differs in that sug-
gestions are both unilateral and reciprocal. The social is a polymorph mag-
netic field made up of innumerable suggestions, where all magnetisers are
also magnetised without exception. This complex configuration of the social
field is the main cause for individuals to resist or disregard certain sugges-
tion lines and follow others. If the passivity of the somnambulist is not the
rule for individuals, it is not due to a deliberative consciousness which oper-
ates beyond imitation but rather due to the multiplicity of imitation lines
in each individual involved. These lines are at times concordant among one
another, but at others, competing against or blocking each other. Individuals
and groups intertwine and unwind themselves in this maze-like framework of
crossed hypnotisms. Artificial or induced hypnosis captures the main features
of the process while being in strict continuity with them.
The Hypnotism, this strange polarisation of the soul, is only a

simplification—just like sleep is a simplification as well. What is really
marvellous is not the dream, it is not the hypnotic suggestion, it is the

normal state of wakefulness, which is a hypnotism or a dream so prodi-
giously complicated and at the same time so harmoniously coordinated.
(Tarde, 1886: 140)
Contagion lines and social epidemics

As Bouglé (1905) pointed out early on, Tarde’s sociology is inspired and
nourished by two scientific sources that were contemporary to him. On the
one hand, the aforementioned investigations on hypnotic suggestion car-
ried out by psychiatrists such as Bernheim, Richet y Féré—and to which
Freud was close. On the other hand, Pasteur’s micro-biologic research, his
contributions to the understanding of diseases as “conflicts between minus-
cule organisms”, and his studies on the contagion of pathologies through
transmission of agents imperceptible at a glance. However, it is worth men-
tioning that although Tarde keeps the notions of suggestion and contagion
for considering them fundamental processes of social and subjective life,
he is far from following a biologist drift. Tarde never ceases to affirm that
imitation is “communication from spirit to spirit” and that the contagion
it produces is psychosocial. Passion and faith, judgements and goals are
invisible agents of easy transmission and remarkable ubiquity. They always
come from a determined focus of irradiation and, like viruses and bacteria,
they can nest in a human body, remain latent, grow and develop, modify
psychic and somatic states, and impulse non-controlled actions. They may
also propagate from an individual to another, modifying collective states
and behaviours. As actual psychosocial micro-organisms, beliefs and desires
are transmitted from one body to another one by the most diverse means
of communication, multiplying and turning themselves into real epidemics.
When speaking of contagion in this context, Tarde emphasises at least
two things: the machinal and imperceptible character of imitation (that is
to say, unintentional and unconscious), and its relational, or more exactly,
linear character. Regarding the first point, Tarde has no doubt that the body’s
biological processes have their own distinctive dynamics, among which is
reflex imitation. Nor does he doubt that soma and psyche affect themselves
reciprocally. But this means that in the realm of human imitation we should
differentiate as well as relate the mechanical copy (mimicry) and the psychic
copy (imitation). This is still to be done, but the important thing is that,
even though Tarde does not always distinguish between mind and brain, his
perspective assumes this difference for it acknowledges the existence of a
“spiritual energy”—to say it à la Bergson (1919). In this, Tarde is far from
magnetism and alienism of his time, as well as from those who today seem
to continue them from the neurosciences using other, maybe more sophisti-
cated, concepts. For this reason, one should analyse carefully in which sense
Tarde can be considered a precursor of contemporary memetics.2 The imita-

tive contagion is properly psychic: such is one of the fundamental principles
of this infinitesimal sociology. This implies that psychosocial causality has its
singular statute and is irreducible to the body’s organic processes (including
the brain). It is the causality of the model or of the social example and its epi-
demics. That is why Bergson (1955: 278) says that this “exemplar causality”
is a sui generis force that operates “where an individual invents and others
imitate her”.3
Now, a way of doing, feeling or thinking is transmitted from an indi-
vidual to another one who repeats it, but it happens that this individual
is in turn a model for a third individual who will also be copied, and so
on. Therefore, the imitative contagion forms linear series through which
beliefs and desires are propagated, weaving networks of different speed,
scope and duration. All social processes are (multi)linear processes of
inter-mental contagion, and the composition, decomposition and recom-
position of individuals, groups and institutions depend on them. The con-
cept of line then imprescindible to sociology, and according to Tarde, is
equivalent to the concept of current, flow or ray: “I call imitative radia-
tion the set of reproductions of an invention taken as focus; and that
radiation is decomposed into rays. I understand by ray the linear series
that links the first author of an idea, a word, a product, to the successive
propagators of that idea, word or product, until reaching a considered
imitator” (Tarde, 1901: 568).
Each individual then works as the guest of social micro-forces that are
the agents of contagion and responsible for much of their psychic states and
practical behaviours. Every example—that is every transmitted idea, formula,
concept, image, emotion or affection—tends here to geometric progression or
to exponential growth since each receiver is in turn a transmitter for several
individuals more. Furthermore, the contagious example becomes increasingly
stronger, more convincing and compelling as it propagates, because it feeds
from the believing and desiring energy with which each one vests it along the
way. Thus, what started as a minute idiosyncratic occurrence in an individual
can transform, through massive propagation, into an ineluctable necessity in
millions of people: “It will be clear that necessity is simply the (illusory or
not) objectivation of our superlative conviction” (1895c: 182). But this also
means that contagion is the very form of the social bond and that everything
that socially exists and functions is the result of psychic epidemics. The social
field is nothing but a manifold of epidemics of different kinds (i.e. political,
religious, financial, technological, artistic, philosophical, culinary, musical
etc.). In already institutionally and subjectively sedimented ones, the conta-
gion is slow, regular and chronic. In contrast, the new ones have a fast con-
tagion and present an uncertain future regarding their duration and roots.
In all cases, social contagion leads individual emotions, thoughts and actions
in the most effective and imperceptible way:
A man defends his public opinions in a cafe, is eloquent, illogical and

sincere. He will be very much surprised if it were proved to him that he
is a monarchist or a republican, not by virtue of the excellent reasons he
alleges, but because of family or comradely influences—in short, of per-
sonal prestige—which have acted upon him.
(Tarde, 1886: 136)
This copycatting behaviours in adult people are completely normal, rather

than deficient or pathological, and it is also at work in the most deliberative
and calculated social relations:
The sanest man, when he buys a property, when he does any business,
industrial or agricultural, yields to unsuspecting impressions; thus, he
always thinks he is doing a good operations. . . Nothing is then more
common than suggestion understood in this way; social life is made of it;
specially trade lives only on suggested whims.
(Tarde, 1886: 137)
Opposition, conflict, struggle

The usual perspectives around social conflict relate to the idea of a struggle
among irreconcilable differences. There would be a conflict whenever there is
a clash of interests, dogma or temperaments that are completely different—
and they fight precisely because of being so different. A striking heterogeneity
is often considered the main cause of social disagreements among individu-
als and groups, with violence often involved in them. Tarde challenges this
assumption and points out that they are a heavy burden on all human sci-
ences and philosophy. In his view, it is not difference but rather similarity that
causes the struggles that history constantly documents. Differences cannot
oppose one another, especially if very different, precisely because they lack
a common ground of where to confront. Therefore, to understand the phe-
nomenon of social struggles, no matter their scale or length in time, Tarde
suggests a singular concept of opposition—an opposition not to be under-
stood as maximum heterogeneity but as “a singular kind of repetition: one
of two similar things tending to destroy one another, in virtue of their very
similarity” (Tarde, 1897: 94).
Along with this idea that acute differences are the main reason behind strug-
gles, there is often the supposition that they are productive of a maximum
separation. Both assumptions depend on the principle that states identity
and unity are the basis of social groups and social harmonies. Consequently,
difference turns out to be always problematic, as it results in chaos, division
and, along the same lines, confrontation. In this frame, which could be called
ensemblistic-identitarian logic, struggle tends to be conceived as contrary to
social relation. Hobbes’ natural state, as it is the actual or potential war state
among individuals, might be the most comprehensive and pervasive theoreti-
cal model in this respect. In this frame, war and society are strictly antago-
nists, and they are ruled by a “revolving door” principle—there where one
comes in, the other comes out. In this vein, other less acute conflicts such as
murder and crime are often interpreted as “anti-social”.
Tarde, on the contrary, considers struggle as an elementary social rela-
tion. This means that even in its most destructive forms it is, above all, a
social bond—a particular form of social relation established not only among
individuals who gather to charge against some others, but also among rival
parties confronting one another. In this respect, and many others, Tarde is
very close to Simmel (1904: 490), who states: “If every reaction among men
is a socialization, of course conflict must count as such, since it is one of the
most intense reactions, and is logically impossible if restricted to a single
element”.4
The very moment this perspective is adopted, an immense multitude of
social oppositions reveal themselves, disseminated throughout the social
field. This demands for both a decentralisation of the sociological look and
a microanalysis of conflicts and their propagations. The social landscape
becomes then a constellated space, filled with struggles of different kinds
and diverse geographic and time scopes. The multitude of conflicts is nei-
ther necessarily nor usually related to one another, and there is no prime or
central conflict that could unite or subordinate them all—as could be the
case of capital-labour struggle in Marxist framework. In addition, it is no
longer possible to assume that the most spectacular conflicts are always most
important or harming, since all intervene in the general course of social life
and all involve, in one way or another, a huge number of people. Nor is it
possible to suppose that any conflict is harmful per se, let alone, to conceive
a conflict-free society.
The social as a field of struggles

In his book L’ Oposition Universelle, Tarde tries hard to define the gen-
eral concept of opposition, understanding it as a mode of relation forever
present everywhere, while at the same time attempting to classify its types
and forms. As already mentioned, it is crucial not to confuse difference with
opposition—or heterogeneity with contradiction, variation with dispute.

Here, difference is neither an opposition nor a derivation from it, quite on the
contrary. Difference is primitive both in the social world and in the natural
world (which turn out to be the same). Tarde argues that for two differences
to oppose one another, a certain similarity must exist between them; and he
claims that this similarity is produced in the way of an inverted mirroring, a
counter-reflection. Then,
when a dogma is proclaimed, when a political programme is announced,

individuals fall into two unequal classes; here are those who are enthusias-
tic about it and those who are enthusiastic against it. There is no manifes-
tation which does not recruit supporters and which does not provoke the
formation of a group of non-supporters. . . They are associated, although
they are adversaries, or, rather, because they are adversaries.
(Tarde, 1903: 17)
Therefore, the next point to bear in mind is that symmetry, or better said
counter-symmetry, is a distinctive feature of all conflictive relations. Oppo-
sites always form a pair, a duality in which one pole constitutes the reverse
side of the other, but this means that they always belong to the same genre.
To name a few examples, there are the concave and the convex in geometry,
pain and pleasure in sensitivity, good and evil in morality. There could not
be, for instance, an anti-space which was not a space of some kind, or an
anti-social phenomenon which was not social in a particular way. Thus, both
crime and law are social phenomena; they oppose one another because crime
is an anti-juridical action, but that does not make it anti-social.5 In fact, crim-
inal organisations are as social as any other human enterprise. Consequently,
for two terms to oppose, they must have a specific common measure, and this
“supposes their similarity and their equality from the point of view in ques-
tion” (Tarde, 1897: 132).
To continue with his infinitesimal portrait of opposition, Tarde states it is
always about a clash of forces. This implies the need to regard dynamism and
variability in each one of them, as well as their reciprocal interaction. Each
force is susceptible to increasing and decreasing in intensity, speed and exten-
sion, and there can also be balance or unbalance between them. According to
Tarde, and against what could be expected, it is balance what characterises
struggle. The peculiarity of the oppositional relation is not the prevalence
of one force over another (in this case we would speak of domination), but
rather the instance of indetermination, equality and vacillation in which none
has succeeded yet. In fact, the highest degree of mirrored symmetry in which
one force appears as the reverse side of the other corresponds to this moment
of unresolved tension, still proportioned on each side. The end of conflict,
either by mutual destruction or by victory of one of the sides, signals the end
of the symmetry of forms and the balance of forces.
To this, we must add that confronted forces at work are always positive.
According to Tarde, there is no opposition between being and nothingness.
In addition to this positive character, confronted forces are not only vari-
able but also reversible. That is they may turn into their contrary force after
going through a neutral state (or ground zero). This implies such a smooth
continuity from one pole to the other that its mere suggestion would disgust
any contender. Thus, the same population and the same individuals can go
from atheistic rebellion to theistic crusades, or from democratic engagement
to dictatorship support—and vice versa.
As might be expected, social opposition comprises wars, murders and
crimes, as well as uprisings, mutinies, sabotages and strikes. Moreover,
after the Tardean conceptualisation, we find the need to further expand this
inventory to economic competition, government elections, public opinion
controversies, religious and ideological disputes, as well as scientific and
philosophical debates; regional, generational and sportive rivalries; and so
many other conflicts. If looked upon carefully, all of them are relations of an
oppositional character in which confronting social tendencies collide because
of being counter-similar. All of them are kinds of the same gender, although
some work in a manner that is concentrated, spectacular and episodic; and
others are invisible, constant and disseminated.
Tarde also establishes a distinction among conflict types: there are con-
flicts of series, of degree and of sign. The latter is, so to speak, the classic
form of conflict and may be considered, to a certain extent, the most impor-
tant. It is produced when a social force unfolding in a given direction clashes
against another in the contrary direction on the same straight line. That is
why Tarde calls it diametrical. It occurs, for instance, when a nationalist
movement fights with a local or regional one, when the habit of honest work-
ing collide against criminal practice or when foreign invasion to a territory
finds resistance on the part of native inhabitants. They are all simultane-
ous oppositions between social currents of the same kind, but in opposite
directions. The other two types of conflict do not refer to struggles between
different forces, but to the ups and downs (or the forward and backward
moves) of the same force. With this categorisation, Tarde widens even further
the conflict-constellation. Oppositions of series or qualitative oppositions are
those consisting of the evolution and counter-evolution of a same force mov-
ing forward and backward, following the exact reverse road. Oppositions of
degree or quantitative oppositions are present in the increase and decrease
of a given tendency. It is the opposition that describes the undulatory curve
of suicide rates, matrimonies, crimes or birth-rates. It may also be found in
ups and downs of commercial exchanges and stock-exchange values; or the
growth and decline of religious, political or aesthetic beliefs.
But there is more. Deeper inside the microscopic approach to the social
field, we will find oppositions occurring not among individuals or groups,
nor within collective tendencies, but rather within individuals themselves.
Tarde claims that the doubts and vacillations that so often arise in a person’s
life constitute true social oppositions of infinitesimal character. Then what

is a doubt according to him? A minimal silent battle fought in the mind
and heart of an individual every time two example lines, or two opposing
imitation currents, interfere with each other proposing contrary models to
be followed. They are intimate struggles of a strictly collective nature, to
which Tarde assigns the label of “elementary social oppositions”, not only
because these social micro-conflicts produced within individuals are superior
in number to those among them, but also because all others depend on their
resolution. The speed of the sales of a product, the rising or lowering rate of
morals or stock values, the duration of a polemics, the growth of an army:
all depend on what each individual may decide—or rather—what may be
decided in him.
From doubt to war

Indecision here is the model of all opposition, its analogical prototype.
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English, doubt is “uncertainty
of belief or opinion that often interferes with decision-making; a deliberate
suspension of judgement: a state of affairs giving rise to uncertainty, hesita-
tion, or suspense”. Those who doubt are continuously unresolved between
ayes or a no, this or that, here or there, before or after—they ponder between
attraction poles that reclaim them simultaneously and exclusively. To doubt
is to be in-between two sides, to go from one place to another, without being
able to decide. And this is so, in Tarde’s view, since doubt is nothing other
than the infinitesimal form of social struggles, no matter what category they
belong to (political, religious, economic, scientific etc.). A social tendency
exists only in concrete individuals as concrete thoughts, feelings, and actions,
and it can only unfold by moving forward from one body to the next, so to
speak. As a consequence, sooner or later it will encounter another tendency
that was either already there or has just arrived, and that contradicts its
purposes. The nature of this encounter may be logical (a struggle between
two beliefs) or theological (a struggle between two desires), and in both cases
it will be expressed as subjective indecision. Only when one of these forces
prevails will indecision cease, and the individual may ascribe to a social bel-
ligerent group if this be the case.
Therefore, elementary social conflict is neither the Hobbesian war nor the
Marxian class struggle, but rather hesitations or doubts which are individu-
ally manifested. Even when Tarde may sometimes speak of doubt as psycho-
logical or internal opposition, to distinguish it from what he calls external or
social, we are not to be carried away by usual atomistic grammar. Very much
like propagations and inventions, social struggles are internal-external pro-
cesses: their space-time structure is topological, and their measure is micro-
mega. What doubt expresses is nothing other than the rivalry between two
imitative currents in dispute; to take the lead, to provide the level of detail,
or in individual actions, feelings or thoughts. Hesitation, in its tiniest expres-
sion, is then reflecting the battle among collective currents of oceanic vol-
umes and planetary extensions. Thus, in the folds of an individual decision
between a racist and a cosmopolitan wording, a patriarchal and a feminist
behaviour, a democratic and an authoritarian opinion, the roar of social cur-
rents can be heard, as they collide in the infinitesimal and infinite space of an
“individual” psychic field.
This is possible because, just as in the external physical space, the psychic
field is constituted in such way that it “entails infinity of assertions which
oppose negations, infinity of desires opposed to repulsions, and pursuing
exactly the same goal” (Tarde, 1898: 74). Therefore, our beliefs and wills
may describe an undulatory course with ups and downs, they may move for-
ward in stages and even at times retrieve into previous states. But in addition,
it is possible for us to love and hate the same object of desire simultaneously,
to believe and disbelieve the same truth or dogma. (It is also possible for us
to do it in an infinity of degrees.)
However, that which is valid for socio-psychical battles within individuals
is valid too for those outside them. In both cases, the three types of struggles
distinguished by Tarde may be verified (i.e. conflicts of series, of degree and
of sign):
If there are men or groups of men who evolve in one given direction, while
others inversely—for instance, from naturalism to idealism in art, from
aristocratic to democratic regimes, from democracy to aristocracy, etc.—
this is so because each man may evolve and counter-evolve in this way. If
there are class members or inhabitants in which religious faith increases,
while there are others where it decreases, it is because each man’s con-
sciousness admits ups and downs in intensity. If, finally, there are politi-
cal parties and religious sects asserting and desiring precisely what other
political parties and religious sects deny and reject, this is so because each
man’s spirit and heart is able to include yes and no, for and against, within
themselves, and on the same idea or belief.
(Tarde, 1895c: 96–97)
That said, it is certainly vital to differentiate social conflicts produced

within people and those happening among them. In fact, for Tarde these are
incompatible against one another: external opposition begins once hesitation
ends; only then may someone assert something that others deny or reject.
This resolution and the actions determined by it are socially contagious, and
must be considered as a first step towards a contentious or belligerent group.
According to this idea, at the start of any mutiny, revolt or revolution there is
always a “no”, uttered by someone in a given place and at a certain moment.
This is a minimal resolution, of an infinitesimal character, that later multi-

plies by imitation, strengthening more the more it repeats, intensifying the
more it propagates, forming a group united by a common faith and a shared
agonistic passion. Moreover, an association formed this way may encounter
or produce its collective counterpart—the group of those who symmetrically
assert that which they deny, and that imitatively strengthen with this asser-
tion. When this happens, street strife, massacres and national or interna-
tional wars take place.
An oppositive social association may adopt the configuration of a party,
sect or corporation, also as multitude or crowd. In all cases, the group is
formed by the propagation of a specific rejection which, the more it extends,
the more it grows in conviction and enthusiasm, becoming more intolerant
and dogmatic. But for a diametral conflict to take place, what is needed
is the encounter with a group acting in the contrary direction. Tarde dis-
tinguishes at least two typical-ideal modes in which this may happen. On
the one hand, there could be opposing groups whose genesis may begin
with a rejection to models which are current in their milieu, a rejection
which is contagious and gives rise to counter-imitative behaviours towards
those models. Then other individuals and groups may counter-reflect them-
selves in this rebel group and reject it in turn. In this way, those who up
until that time were conformists, and did not oppose anything in particular,
now constitute a collective in motion, mirroring in an inverted manner the
oppositive action of the former group. In other words, they reassert what
the rebellion denies and confront them actively. This action, which may
be considered reactionary, is also contagious, and will also intensify and
strengthen itself in the heat of that propagation and the confrontation. On
the other hand, it may also happen that when a dogma is instituted in a
social group, dogmatised individuals start to search for its negation in other
individuals and groups.
Invention as social relation (and as engine of history)

What is usually regarded as invention is the production of devices, procedures
or novel formulas. They are considered the more or less exceptional result of
the work and talent of remarkable individuals. Tarde accepts these conten-
tions, but sees them through a wider lens. His concept of invention is perhaps
quite simple and has the strange virtue of being wide and precise at the same
time: “What I understand as invention is any new (and useful) crossroad of
images or ideas in a human brain” (Tarde, 1902: 573). This means he labels
as such all technical and scientific innovations that history has witnessed,
regardless of their difference in complexity—from hammer to particle accel-
erator, from abacus to differential equations. Moreover, all human creations
come to be characterised in this vein, no matter their type—artistic, legal,
political, religious, ideological, commercial, administrative, architectural,

culinary, musical, verbal and so forth.
Tarde knows that inventions differ in their degree of complexity, but
understands that what is important, from the sociological perspective, is
their capacity of imitative diffusion and their transforming impact on soci-
ety. In this sense, the simpler ones tend to be the most prolific, whereas
the more complex ones neither propagate nor germinate. Furthermore, it
is not too relevant if the invention was sought after or not, as individuals
often innovate “despite themselves”. So it happens, in Tarde’s view, that the
emergency of an invention is strictly contingent. In his opinion, the unprec-
edented combination of ideas in a human brain, whatever gender it belongs
to, always happens to a certain extent by chance. Proof of this is that no
matter how long an invention may be pursued throughout a lifetime, it may
never present itself. Persistence, as well as its bearer’s training, naturally
increases the odds of its happening. But the contingency of the encounter
remains irreducible in all cases, and this is an intrinsic part of the definition
of invention.
There are no certainties in invention, and this is so in many senses: above
all, because its field of emergence is beyond what exists and is known. The
finding of an invention, if it happens, takes place in a zone of uncertainty and
indetermination, where chaos begins to prevail and total confusion threatens
to settle in. But besides, once the invention is found, it will lead to ways of
doing, feeling and thinking which are unexpected and strange in comparison
with the certainties which were the rule so far. For both reasons, too many
inventors were labelled as lunatics or criminals by their contemporaries—or
sometimes simply declared very wrong. Inventions are always somehow out
of time. They are “eventmental”.
If imitation is a repetitive activity, a memory, a conservative practice of the
existing social world, inventions generate changes or bifurcations, leading to
new forms of social relations—that is to new social worlds. But then, those
who invent something must, while they do it, stop imitating. For something
different to happen, the automatism of repetitions must cease. Inventors
somehow extract themselves from prejudice, but also from habits, customs
and truths dominating the society in which they take part. This is the rea-
son why Tarde (1902: 563) qualifies them as supra-social individuals and
declares that “the social world is a huge mass of somnambulists who are
mutually suggested, and among them, some manage to half-wake up during
some instants, and those are the ones we call men of genius”.
At this point, it is crucial not to get carried away by the myth of the
creator—especially by the myth of genius. Faced with the legendary image of
the inventor as an auto-produced entity, a small god who makes something
out of nothing, it is essential to dissipate, at least minimally, the mystery
covering these findings. A first step would be to micro-analyse the contents of
this chaotic opacity in which all creative action is immersed, and from where
it emerges with the great deed of a new order—whether this be the steam
machine, set theory or The Young Ladies of Avignon. According to Tarde,
this confusing twilight zone will show, if seen in detail, there is nothing mys-
tic or ineffable there. There is no other than the multitude of present and past
inventions taken in their inarticulate form or in their contradictions. Conse-
quently, he states that all creation consists essentially of the unprecedented
composition of some of these materials which used to be either ignored or
opposed before. In this respect, inventions, even the ones with the most
genius, are nothing other than the novel articulation of pre-existing banali-
ties. As an example, Tarde (1895:169) writes, “there is nothing simpler than
to express oneself by means of the letters of the alphabet and the abstract
quantities, even “x” or “y”; and yet, all algebra resides there”.
Adaptation: difference and integration

Tarde calls “adaptation” to that precise operation of heterogeneous imitative
vector articulation or conjugation. Such is the characteristic and truly origi-
nal factor in all inventions. There lies the true happening and from there, the
unexpected, which produces the rightful surprise, or even yet scandal. As to
materials proper, they are perfectly identifiable and have nothing extraordi-
nary in themselves. Tarde claims that “in general, they are ideas suggested by
someone else, imitated from someone else, so that imitation is, actually, the
raw material of invention” (1902: 573). For the same reason, all invention is
an event which can only happen in an individual, but it always has an imma-
nently social nature. Adaptation is the “happy encounter” in a singular mind
of a series of social examples transmitted through the most various channels.
So that even the most eccentric, subversive creation is always “ripe fruit from
the social tree”. We can therefore assert that all inventions are supra-societal,
rather than supra-social—and the same holds true for the individual who is
the locus of their occurrence.
In general, Tarde does not distinguish between discoveries and inventions.
When he does, occasionally, he relates the former to exploration of the world
through the senses. In any case, it would never happen without the idea-
tional and imaginative frames which, far from arising in the natural sphere,
are received from others by means of social communication. For the same
reasons, regardless of the degree of complexity, an invention can be micro-
analysed by identifying the social lines it combines, and the way it does it.
Thus, one may verify it is the novel coupling of ideas, purposes and practices
that circulated along different social circuits:
Newton’s discovery, for instance, consisted in paying attention to two

ideas which had been alien to one another until then, i.e. the falling of
terrestrial bodies and the gravitation of the moon round the earth, and
understanding the two consequences of the same principle. The invention
of the locomotive consisted in uniting. . . these two modes of action which
had been apart until then, steam piston and wheeled locomotion, etc.
(Tarde, 1898a: 190)
When we generalise this, we can see to what extent invention is an elemen-

tary social relation: every new idea, feeling, device or practice is born from
the original conjugation of other different ideas, feelings, devices or prac-
tices which preceded it. This outcome of the singular combination of already
spread examples may be imitated and spread in turn. In Tarde’s wording, an
invention is a difference arising from a singular and contingent adaptation
of repetitions, and if socially lucky, it will be the starting point of new series
of (different) petitions. We will be seeing shortly to what extent contingency
is at stake here, and everywhere, playing a central role in social dynamics.
For now, let us just highlight the heterogeneous character of the currents of
examples that invention conjugates or adapts. Thus,
what did Darwin’s thesis about natural selection amount to? To having
proclaimed the fact of competition among living things? No, but in having
for the first time combined this idea with the ideas of variability and hered-
ity. The former idea, as it was proclaimed by Aristotle, remained sterile
until it was associated with the two latter ideas.
(Tarde, 1903: 382)
Following this line of reasoning, we may assert that every invention has
something of a kaleidoscope or collage. Heterogeneity of its components is
cultural or even “material”, given the fact that they often come from diverse
places and times, carrying with them the history of their singular evolutions.
And yet the result of their adaptation works. Furthermore, it functions with
a given direction and a ruling sense. Then, it can well be said that it is a
system. A system that upon a closer examination of its (poly) genesis reveals
itself as something a little bit monstrous or unnatural. Over time, the force
of habit will naturalise it and forget the more or less improper blend of its
constituting differences, and ignore the always somewhat defectiveness of its
articulation. In this respect, the myth of genius plays an invaluable role, not
because genius does not exist but because myth offers an atomistic image of
the invention process, disregarding its social nature, its contingency share
and the incomplete crafting of its results.
At the same time, Tarde insists on a key point: inventions are harmo-
nisations which create harmonies. Their main social function is to gather
diverging tendencies and turn them into something relatively concordant
with each other. By this singular way of integration we aim to describe
adaptation. To invent is to adapt, and to adapt is to ensemble linear or

processual elements which are heterogeneous to one another in terms of
content, origin, rhythm and intensity. It is a composition uniting known
materials which had been indifferent or incongruent so far, and which now
coordinate in an original way, beginning to function in a formerly unknown
meaning and direction. Then, the result differs here from the composing
elements separately as much as to their simple juxtaposition or addition.
It could have been referred to as synthesis. But Tarde does not accept this
concept, at least not as Kant or Hegel. According to Tarde, neither of them
seems to have captured the polygenetic, heterogeneous and partial character
of the composition operation in question. And something as important as
this—they have not acknowledged contingency as the crucial, determining
factor it is. Such deep reasons motivate Tarde in his attempt to formulate
the concept of adaptation. And it is worth mentioning that in his view, this
operation not only is produced in the brain of individuals who invent, but
also is the very way in which nature works when creating something in any
of the fields it may unfold.
Contingency and necessity/virtuality and actuality

The question of contingency is a labyrinthine problem in this infinitesimal
sociology. It is also a crucial one. According to this sociology, randomness
does not oppose determinism or necessity in a simple manner. To affirm its
decisive role in social life, with its consequences of radical unpredictability, is
not equivalent here to abandoning all pretence of knowing scientifically the
socio-historical field and its dynamics. It does imply, however, the need for a
reform and expansion of scientific knowledge and its philosophical bases. In
Tarde’s view, this transformation takes place when the hypothesis of virtual
reality and its relation with the existing world is accepted—a hypothesis that
he developed under the title of Les possibles.
It happens that inventions are the product of both contingency and “rea-
son”. This last term is not reliable for it is imprecise and polyvalent, and
therefore Tarde prefers to speak of necessary chainings of propositions (a
logic) as well as of means and goals (a teleology). As we will see in the next
chapter, the character of this chaining is mainly syllogistic. That is to say that
every invention entails the unfolding of a type of mental activity that works
with premises and middle terms to reach necessary conclusions—being also
able to use in turn those conclusions as new premises. Now, inventions are
not mere deductive consequences of former premises. If that were the case,
they would not be inventions. The key is that they consist in the articulation
of series that are not only independent from each other, but also heterogene-
ous. Therefore, the result of an adaptation is an event,6 that is a result that
was not contained with the character of (logic or teleological) necessity in the
already known series. It is in this point where the possibles intervene to make
intelligible that rare event that is invention.
Let us remember that according to this (neo) monadological perspective,
we are to conceive “the actual as infinitesimal part of the real” (Tarde, 1895c:
25). This means that that which actually exists as visible, constituted, indi-
vidualised and numerable is the tiniest portion of that which exists as vir-
tual, invisible, constituent, pre-individual and innumerable. In this field of
virtualities—the field of possibles—a constant struggle for actually existing
is grappled, but this is not a given, and not in all cases. The reason behind
this is the infinitude of the possible, the finitude of the world. As a result, the
realisation of one possibility does eliminate others which will never come
to life, while at the same time inaugurating new series of previously non-
existent possibilities. This is equivalent to asserting that a multitude of pos-
sible ones (Les possibles) come in a procession in the real world, and have a
constant influence on it. Consequently, each society and individual is at every
moment a specific composition of realised possibilities, future possibilities
and aborted ones. The same holds, naturally, for each invention.
As already noted, every invention combines existing imitative lines or
actual examples; we must now add that they do it immersed in the field of
possible that these (and other) existing lines bring with them. And to be clear,
this field is infinite. With this, we reach the hyper-populated shadow from
which each creation arrives—and that each thing created renews. To put it
in another way, all which is actual implies an integration of the infinite into
the finite and, in the social sphere, invention is the demiurge to that passage.
But then, the socio-historical field must be conceived as an immense fabric
of actual relations wrapped up in an even bigger intertwine of virtual rela-
tions. The lines of both moving frames communicate and are in constant
interaction. It is necessary to see inventions as the result of their (partial) inte-
gration. In them, both types of series—actual and virtual—conjugate them-
selves by way of reason and imagination, generating a new difference in the
infinitesimal space of an individual mind. Without providence to determine
which specific composition will take place and no other, and in which indi-
vidual, it must be assumed that there is a fully contingent dynamic ruling this
process—a process which is no other than the polygenesis and configuration
of what we call social reality.
Along with this, it is worth mentioning that this enormous and moving
cloud of possibles from where innovation springs up and feeds is not some-
thing absolutely chaotic to Tarde, for he expresses, “there is certain order
in that disorder”. Instead of imagining the domain of a completely undif-
ferentiated randomness, one should rather speak of a field of probabilities.
As we said, we need to think of possibles as an infinite multitude of potential
forces interacting with one another. They struggle but also couple with one
another, as with the actual forces with which they intertwine. The results of
this combinatorics are unpredictable and can only be known post factum.
Tarde (1985c) states that they are unknowable before they realise themselves,
“even for an infinite intelligence”. However, as long as this potential field
is intertwined with the real world, we may device some strategies to know
something about them (in a partial, asymptotic way).
If every existing thing is the result of a specific combination of realised
possibilities, we can distinguish among unrealised possibilities according to
the gender of the existences to which they are associated. Therefore, there
would be possibilities of a political, economic, religious, criminal kind, and
so on. Once there, one will be located at the point where neither pure contin-
gency nor pure necessity reigns. It is the sphere of “conditional certainties”,
where the accidental and the necessary allow for a measure of their interac-
tion by means of probabilistic calculus. From there, one may also approach
the imbrications of the possible ones among one another and grasp their
interaction and chaining as what they are (virtual forces). That is, one may
approach what Tarde considers the contingent source of necessity and its
determinisms. According to this, there would exist possible of a first, second,
third, nth degree.7 This may allow for a better adjustment of probabilistic
previsions—or, in any case, it may lead us more precisely to know what hap-
pened, for the real can only be intelligible as a case of what’s possible. Thus,
for instance in scientific inventions,
after Kepler formulated his three great laws, the discovery of universal
gravity became a possible of a first degree. Similarly, the discovery of the
electric telegraph after Erstedt’s observation and Ampère’s research, or the
discovery of clocks after Galileo’s isochronism of pendulum oscillations,
or algebra application to geometry at some point in the parallel course
of both sciences. Even before Kepler or Ampère, the discovery of Newto-
nian laws and the electric telegraph were still possible at a lower degree.
Ampère and Kepler made it possible for the conceptions of those astron-
omy and physics possibilities to pass from second or third degree to first. It
is worth mentioning that these eminent figures attributed huge importance
to that passage, and even to the exact date of their passing. According to
Kepler’s own solemn words, it was in 1618 when the Newtonian principle
was mature enough and ready to be accepted.
(Tarde, 1895c: 164)
Great and small/chance and reason

According to this interpretation, a new scientific theory, a manufactured
object, a religious or political dogma are all results of original combinations
of pre-existing elements. These elements are models that by means of imi-
tative propagation encounter and conjugate themselves in a mind which is
adequate for their adaptation. This shows that each invention is the product
of social history, as well as is productive of it, and by the same token shows
the crucial role of contingency in social dynamics. In fact, there are here at
least three different series of contingencies and all of them run through the
inventor. One of them is properly social and relates, as already noted, to
the flux of examples which may reach the individual who invents or not.
They are the specific formation and information lines (in mathematics, phys-
ics, philosophy, politics, religion etc.), received by the inventor due to the
socio-historical coordinates in which she finds herself by chance. The other
is properly psychological and relates to personality traits (persistence, rigour,
boldness, prudence etc.), whose composition is always singular and uncertain
in advance. The latter relates to the physical configuration of the body, espe-
cially the brain, derived from biological inheritance and its inherent random
factors.
From there, the beautiful hypothesis of Tarde, which claims that a genius
is a supreme accident in history, since she constitutes the locus of this triple
contingency (biological, psychical and social). Here, some of the most com-
plex vectors of culture intertwine and adapt into a mind which is particularly
apt to dealing creatively with them, since it functions in an exceptionally
constituted brain that, at the same time, is in possession of the right tempera-
mental treats and education for that task. The simultaneous encounter and
successful harmonisation of all these exceptions in just one body is practi-
cally a miracle. Any variation, however minimal, in any of these contingent
series, would have prevented the invention—or given rise to a different one.
Thus, Tarde (1895c: 167) asserts:
A genius is a very singular vital invention that is fruitful in the most sur-
prising social inventions, she is at the same time the highest flower of life
and the highest source of society. She expresses the action of Nature in
History, not the imprecise and continuous action, but intermittent and
clear, and really important. And, when we want to examine this action in
some depth, we are led to perceive, at the bottom of everything, hetero-
geneous, differentiated, original elements, without which nothing can be
explained.
Leibniz is, of course, one of the most impressive and paradigmatic exam-
ples of the Tardean genius inventor. With a particular bio-psychological vig-
our, his social context and his biographical path located him in a crossroad of
opposed intellectual currents and diverse disciplines. In that intersection, he
was able to combine lines that were considered irreconcilable or (very) diver-
gent: NeoPlatonism and Aristotle in his metaphysics, and arithmetic and
geometry in his mathematics. Today it is still difficult to find any important
aspect of philosophy, science and technology that has not been influenced,
from near or afar, by some of his ideas—beginning with the differential and
integral calculus and the binary system.
Now, regardless of how great a genius may be, she is only one kind of
inventor, namely of the highest degree. But he is far from being the one and
only. In line with his definition, Tarde points out that he who invents is any
individual, exceptional or ordinary, celebrated or unknown, in whom for-
merly contradictory or disperse social fluxes coordinate. And this may happen
to anyone in their own right, if not in fact. It is a mistake when, approaching
social dynamics, we consider only the so-called great men and women, while
the key issue resides in the fact that great ideas may appear—as they do—in
“small” men and women as well. Here, we must add that it is necessary to
regard small ideas also, if one wishes to fairly account for social life in any
of its dimensions (political, economic, artistic etc.). At every moment, infini-
tesimal innovations germinate by the million and spread silently, producing
variations every minute, as they are capable of transforming vast courses of
social action.
It is worth mentioning that despite its optimistic tone, this perspective
is not the sociological equivalent to Voltaire’s Candide. When Tarde states
that inventions harmonising a given field do so because they are good and
useful, he refers to scientific and artistic innovations, but also to destructive
or even criminal inventions—as Fieschi’s infernal machine, the Ponzi scheme
or the battle tank. On the other hand, many inventions start as a dissidence
in the ground where it emerges, and sometimes it is criminalised as such
(like Socrates’ philosophical and moral innovations, or Galileo’s scientific
discoveries).
In all cases, we wish to insist that an invention is not something produced
by an individual as a rational, atomistic subject, but rather as a social infini-
tesimal vortex. Consequently, we may perhaps refer to a state of invention
in which mental activity becomes more permeable, intense and rigorous than
usual, precisely because of being more open to a whirlpool of different influ-
ences. This does not mean a loss of clarity, much on the contrary. Beyond
the real or imaginary bonds between invention and madness, it seems to be
here a lucky strike together with a sort of “access to reason”. In Tarde’s view,
all invention is a logical (and theological) work of the first order. It must be
seen as the result of a process in which judgements and propositions, means
and ends, are conjugated in pursuit of maximum coherence with maximum
variety. Now, this logical work is entirely social, that is individual and multi-
tudinous at the same time. It is the result of a social cooperation dynamic that
can be regarded as neither general nor abstract. It cannot be claimed to have
been produced by the genius of a people, or the spirit of the times, nor can it
be said to be the result of some culture in general, nor that it concocted by a
corporation (church, army), or not even by a small group as such (school, cir-
cle, academia). Rather on the contrary. Emerging in an individual or another,
inventions spread out by expanding their influence range gradually and thus
forming groups, corporations and peoples. Inventions combining with each
other in specific ways give the dominant tone to this or that time, and con-
figure this or that culture. For this reason, Tarde (1898) may writes, in the
wordings of the 19th century: “Deep down in every association among men
there exists, let me repeat it, originally, an association of ideas within the
same man”. In addition to this, as can be seen now clearly, these ideas are
accumulated inventions indeed, and to get associated within a mind, they
have sometimes travelled enormous geographic and time extensions by way
of imitative contagion. And at each and every step, they receive small (or big)
contributions that make them evolve. Therefore, each invention implies and
expresses a huge net of social networks—or neural networks, if one wishes.
In the tiny space of their occurrence, each one of them motorises, recomposes
and redirects vast layers of knowledge, doctrine, procedures and techniques
that have been accumulating, sometimes for centuries or millennia. Used as
we are to looking for great causes causing great effects, we come to know
that in social life, it is the small causes of enormous consequences that rule.
Notes
1 In an early text titled Maine de Biran et l’evolucionnisme en psychologie, Tarde
proposes De Biran as a predecessor of Spencer, Taine, Ribot and Wundt, and he
presents his own conception of evolution based in difference rather than in identity.
This text was re-published in 2000 with a preliminary study of A. Deveraux and a
comment of Alliez. On De Biran, see Montebello (2000).
2 There are many coincidences between Tarde’s sociology and Dawkin’s (1976) and
Blackmore’s (1999) memetics approach, to such an extent that some scholars have
seen Tarde as the “forefather of memetics” (Marsden, 2000). According to the
canonical definition, a meme is “a unit of information residing in a brain” (Dawk-
ins, 1982), that passes from mind to mind in a process of “thought contagion”.
Accordingly, religious beliefs can be for example understood as “mind viruses”
(Dawkins, 1993).
3 Bergson (1955: 278/279) affirms that Tarde’s sociology formulates “a certain very
original point of view on causality. In his perspective, causality is, par excellence,
that which operates in human societies where an individual invents and others imi-
tate her. It cannot be reduced to any of the types of causality described by physicists
and metaphysicians. Imitation is a certain sui generis action that is exercised from
spirit to spirit”.
4 See Toews (2018) for a comparison between Tarde’s and Simmel’s sociologies.
5 A general approach on Tarde’s criminal sociology can be found Tonkonoff (2014).
6 It is worth quoting the definition of ‘accidental event’ elaborated by Agustín
Cournot (1975:34), who is recognized by Tarde as one of his greatest masters: “The
events driven by the combination or the gathering of other events that belong to
series that are independent from each other, are what we call accidental, or random,
events”.
7 In this respect, Cournot’s teachings are decisive as well. Tarde devoted some articles
(1903a, 1905a) and a lecture (2002) in the College to Cournot’s work. On Cournot
as a sociologist see Leroux (2019).
4
SOCIOLOGY OF FLOWS AND
ENSEMBLES
The conceptual images provided by individualism and holism cannot capture

the social landscape in its kaleidoscopic dynamism and heterogeneity. That is
one of the findings of the infinitesimal point of view. If we observe social life
at an adequate distance, we will not find complete individuals or social totali-
ties. There is nothing such as entire, separate, clear and distinct entities—
whether individual or collective. Neither unified and corpuscular subjects,
nor defined and centred sets—whether they are mechanistic, organicist or
dialectic. Rather, we find that “thousands of historical currents, currents of
ideas, of feelings” pass through every “portion” of the social. These currents
are nothing but the iterated repetition of beliefs and desires (models) that
propagate imitatively, and that interfere themselves in a contingent way both
in adaptations (inventions) and in oppositions (fights). But as we know, this
implies that the social field is an a-centred field of actual and virtual forces
that spread in innumerable directions. So it does not have fixed or defined
contours.
The social field is then the realm of multiplicity, processuality, variation,
dissemination and contingency. However, social groups and their institutions
emerge, develop and transform in that field. Tarde will say that all of them are
“organisations of imitativeness” or, better yet, social systems. It happens that
imitation is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for such configurations
to exist. It is also necessary that the imitative flows organise in articulated
beams of beliefs and desires, able to achieve certain coherence and stability
as well as to evolve and interact in their own terms. And this is what actually
occurs. Therefore, some questions gain strength in this context: do principles
that guide or ease imitative propagations exist? Are all beliefs and desires
equally contagious? What makes some of them propagate more than others?
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197386-5
72 Sociology of flows and ensembles
Once these questions are answered, it is important to know how those differ-
ent heterogeneous imitative flows compose, and what kind of composition is
that. In other words, what is a social system in this sociology?
Following the line of these interrogations, we will see how Tarde seeks
to establish the principles that rule social contagions (laws of imitation). He
also aims to discover the processes through which social currents compose
with each other (laws of adaptation), as well as to describe the type of con-
figuration that results from those couplings, that is to say, the ensembles or
social systems as he understands them.
Tardean sociology is far from denying the existence of social systems, as
long as they are understood as dynamic configurations of collective currents
of beliefs and desires. As a matter of fact, Tarde formulated an original way
of understanding what a system is, which is condensed in the concepts of co-
adaptation and ensemble. This is an innovative approach still today because
it responds to the question about societal structuration starting from differ-
ence and not from identity, from the small and not from the big, from move-
ment and not from repose—and from below and not from above. According
to this, social institutions such as government, law, market, science, art and
language are neither operational rules somehow chosen by individuals nor
holistic structures which pre-exist and determine them. Instead, they are the
co-adaptation of multiple infinitesimal currents of belief and desire born from
many different inventions. Each of these ensembles is the result of the integra-
tion of psychosocial fluxes of popular faith and passion that, coming from
diverse origins and having diverse contents, spread at different speeds and in
different directions. None of these systems totalises its dynamic components,
but they however manage to partially articulate them, giving to these packs
of fluxes a certain global logic coherence, certain regular rhythm and certain
specific direction. And the same is valid for those systems of systems that can
be called—national and international—societies.
In this context, Tarde also develops the concepts of social intelligence and
collective willingness—or, in his own terms “social logic” and “social teleol-
ogy”. The first one is related to the set of judgements that live in scientific,
legal, philosophical, religious inventions and unfold with their propagation.
The second one refers to the goals that industrial, agricultural, commercial,
political inventions carry and communicate. Beyond this quite artificial divi-
sion between inventions of beliefs and inventions of desires, in which Tarde
sometimes insists, the key here is that convictions and goals articulated in a
syllogistic way are always implied in every invention. That is to say that both
beliefs and desires entail a type of operation according to which given cer-
tain propositions, certain conclusions, will necessarily follow. Hence Tarde,
many times accused of being irrationalist, characterises social thought and
will ruled, at least in part, by that logical device that is syllogism. However,
he proposes certain reforms to the classical syllogistic for he argues that it
Sociology of flows and ensembles 73
is necessary to “include the illogical” in order to address the processes that

guide the social world (and maybe the world in general).
From here, a two-folded approach to social life results from this: a “dif-
ferential sociology” of the elementary social relations—imitation, invention,
opposition—and an “integral sociology” of its compositions or ensembles—
with its two branches: social logic and social teleology. In Tarde’s words
(1895c: 11),
one shows how, not so much social bodies, but rather social tissues are
formed, how, not so much national garment, but rather social fabric is
made; the other one deals with the way in which those tissues are organ-
ised, how that fabric is cut and sewed, I mean, how it cuts and sews itself.
The logic of social contagion

If every social innovation is socially contagious by definition and it may
spread with no limits, why do only some of them actually propagate? For
instance, why do certain words, goods, political ideologies, scientific theories
or industrial techniques arisen at the same moment disseminate massively
and others do not? Or, why do some spread further than others? These ques-
tions are valid for new inventions as well as for others that, although very
old, penetrate a given society from the exterior, or are exhumed or revitalised
from within it. For Tarde, the problem can be presented in this way: assum-
ing that the supreme and fundamental principle of imitation is the impulse to
an indefinite progression, which are its specific laws? Or, more precisely, is
it possible to establish the (probabilistic) rules of imitative propagation once
we have accepted the mimetic character of the psyche and the intrinsic com-
municative potency of beliefs and desires?
Tarde answers this question affirmatively and recommends that we start
distinguishing between different types of favourable causes for the social dif-
fusion of anything. In the first place, we find the logical and teleological causes
of imitative propagation. The law of such causes is enunciated as follows: an
invention will have a greater chance of spreading the more compatible are
the beliefs and desires it contains with the social environment where it seeks
to unfold or deploy. This environment can be still called society or culture as
long as we consider that it is nothing but a very numerous group of inven-
tions disseminated and sedimented in a given social field. A cultural or social
milieu is a constellation of accumulated innovations that work together in
that singular way that Tarde calls co-adaptation or ensemble—as we will see.
These articulated innovations are able to configure shared frames of interac-
tion, intellection and affection, because of their intimate constitution. As we
know, they are made of the most resistant and ephemeral material: beliefs
and desires. Now we can add that these beliefs and desires involve logic and
teleology, that is to say, a way of reasoning based on specific principles or

precepts and a way of acting based on specific goals or objectives. This is
what innovation propagates by contagion, and this is what nests in individu-
als as memory, criterion, sensibility, habit and routine. Therefore, this law
can be stated by saying that the logic and teleological causes of diffusion
“operate whenever an individual prefers a given innovation to others because
he thinks it is more useful or more true than others, that is, more in accord
than they are with the aims or principles that have already found a place in
his mind (through imitation, of course)” (Tarde, 1903: 141).
An important consequence is that the expansion of the invention spread
by this cause confirms and strengthens previous inventions with which it is
compatible—and these in turn confirm and strengthen it. Tarde calls this
process union or coupling of imitations. Thus, for instance, the emergence of
the press favoured the production of paper and the habit of reading (and vice
versa). Likewise, the fabrication of the locomotive encouraged the develop-
ment of the industry of iron, the trade exchange and the taste for tourism—
which in turn boosted the railroad industry. For that reason, it is possible
to speak of alliances between imitative social currents that, reciprocally or
unilaterally, confirm and reinforce themselves. This evidences that one fun-
damental part of the general social dynamic refers to the association and
complementation of diffusion lines, and that their cooperation and harmoni-
sation is a consequence of the composition of truths and creeds, necessities
and interests that each one promotes and carries.
But the infinitesimal description of social dynamics does not stop there.
Another result of the aforementioned is that, while some innovations are
compatible with the already sedimented inventions, others result contradic-
tory to them. As we already know, this will lead to fights and oppositions
that now should be called logic or teleological duels, as the case may be,
and whose resolution will define which of the opposite trends will pre-
vail. It so happens that no invention is compatible with all the rest and,
in order to actually exist and unfold, needs some others not to obstruct
its zone of development. Therefore, if it finds them in its way, a fight will
start and it will strive to eradicate and substitute them. The reason for this
mortal antagonism between inventions is the incompatibility of the neces-
sities, tastes, dogmas and goals each one wraps. Thus, nationalism and
internationalism, polytheism and monotheism, diametrically oppose them-
selves in terms of beliefs, while consumption and saving oppose in terms of
goals. Something similar happens with inventions that have the same goals
but strive to satisfy them with opposing means: electric or gas lamps as
ways to lighten streets, home delivery or pyramidal scams as ways to earn
money. In all cases, the (logic or teleological) conflict between inventions
entails an impass or a detention in its imitative propagation. When the
trend that one of them implies finally manages to advance, it means that
the antagonism has been solved in its favour. It has succeeded in displacing
opposing trends—and solving in individuals the doubts in which they were
immersed. This victory very often occurs due to extra-logic causes. We will
explore this point soon.
Before that, let us remember that here what from afar appears as a more
or less homogeneous milieu is actually a field populated by micro propaga-
tions but also by micro-fights. There are a multitude of linguistic, industrial,
commercial, artistic, political, moral minute oppositions that first take place
between social tendencies and later between individuals and groups, so to
speak. That is why these conflicts should be characterised as infra and trans-
individual. If a new trend prevails as a result of these infinitesimal fights, it
will replace the previous logical or teleological model, and we should speak
of a substitution of imitations rather than a coupling of them.
Let us now attend to the social landscape outlined in this way. At every
moment, a multitude of innovations struggle to extend themselves and con-
quer the social field, transforming it to its image and likeness. In its unfold-
ing, each invention may find concordances that strengthen, impulse it and
enable it to advance, or resistances and contradictions that hinder it. The
field in which both things occur is the mind (and heart) of each of the individ-
uals that is reached by the invention in question, and to whom it represents a
model to follow. Hence, if we accept this, we should no longer imagine social
reproduction, conflict and change as centralised, global and homogeneous
processes with a regular and convergent course. Rather, we ought to conceive
social life as a multi-centred and polyrhythmic process in which a multitude
of imitative contagions and a multitude of infinitesimal adaptative harmonies
(i.e. inventions) coexist with a large number of infinitesimal conflicts and
substitutions. All of them take place scattered in hundreds, thousands or
millions of minds (and bodies). But it is also important to note that both this
cooperation and these fights between inventions entail a fundamental logic
and teleological component that, all other variables remaining the same, will
decide which of them will unfold and to what extent. Let us take a closer
look at this.
Social logic and persuasive syllogisms

Tarde argues that there is a logic of social beliefs and a logic of social desires
(which he calls teleology). It may be surprising that, in his hypothesis, the syl-
logism rules both of them, which turns the Tardean contagion into a partially
rational or reasoned process. Generally speaking, a syllogism is an argument
made up of three propositions, where the latter necessarily deduces from
the other two. Leibniz considers this intellectual mechanism one of the most
beautiful discoveries of the human mind, and Tarde makes it the cornerstone
of both collective and individual beliefs and passions. From his perspective,
the syllogism is the (micro) machine that produces the elementary mean-
ings and directions of thoughts, wills and feelings wherever they work and
propagate.
Therefore, he asserts that the more concordant the argument inscribed
in an invention is with those already established as truths and goals in the
context where it seeks to spread, the greater the logical concordance between
them and the faster, more extensive and profound the invention’s unfolding
will be. Another detail should now be added to this: such concordance may
be real or just apparent. That is to say, it can be based on the mistaken belief
that there is concordance between the existing ideas and ambitions and the
new ones. All in all, this is enough for their logical couplings to occur. In both
cases, Tarde will speak of persuasion, giving an amphibious meaning to this
word and linking it not only to rhetoric and seduction but also to reason-
ing. The logic of social contagion operates with something like persuasive
syllogisms.
As Leibniz, Tarde relies on the traditional Aristotelian theory of syllogism,
but he seems inspired in Aristotle’s notion of practical syllogism, rather than
in the theoretical or properly logical one. Aristotle speaks of practical (or
teleological) syllogism when he seeks to address the movement the psyche
makes from desire to action. This entails many complications because intel-
lect as well as “character and volition” intervenes in desire. And it must be
added that, even when reasoning may establish what is true or convenient
regarding a certain desire, action always involves contingency and exceeds
logical deduction. Therefore, the result of a practical syllogism is not neces-
sary but possible. That is why some scholars deny that those kinds of mental
operations have a strictly syllogistic character, and they make them depend
on rhetoric rather than on analytics. Tarde seems to agree with them, but
he does not take the step towards a radical localisation of the social logic
in the field of rhetoric—as, for example Lacan and some of his followers
do.1 However, he insists that social logic is a practical one (and the same
applies to social teleology). That is why, he proposes some reforms to the
classical Aristotelian framework, all of them ultimately related to the practi-
cal and persuasive status of social logic. He establishes that, whether indi-
vidual or social, the syllogistic analysis should consider grades in addition
to the classical opposition between true and false. Moreover, he advocates
for the inclusion of “the illogical” in the study of social syllogisms. And this
is because while the individual logic “demands the complete suppression of
intra-cerebral contradictions, the social logic is well-reconciled with inter-
cerebral contradictions” (1895c: 3). Sociology should then deal with socially
active propositions that, even when they are illogical or poorly built from a
formal point of view, are not pathological and enable social understanding.
The science of the social would lose a great part of its object if it excluded
“illogical” syllogisms that frequently govern vast realms of social life. And
the same would happen if it did not pay attention to the existence of socially
active and effective “semi-desires” and “semi-beliefs”.
It is important to note that the syllogistic functioning of the social logic
does not depend on the individuals’ operative consciousness (i.e. on the indi-
vidual logic). Faced with different innovations, that is to say, with different
arguments, each one believes she chooses freely which one to follow. How-
ever, what actually happens is that this election is the most adequate to past
persuasive arguments sedimented in herself, that is the most congruent with
her cognitive and volitional habits. The social logic demands no more. For
the same reason, it does not require the intervention of a clear and distinct
conscience in the process at stake. And if a conscience as such intervenes, it
will just tend to confirm that concordance of the new with the pre-existing
logical and teleological configuration (unless extra-logical causes appear,
which, according to Tarde, often happens).
As we know, it may also occur that a social trend enters combat with
others. We should now add that this fight is largely logical because every
invention implicitly entails an impersonal reasoning that may be contradic-
tory with the already admitted reasoning in its area of competence. In its
eagerness to unfold and gain ground, new trends argue in its favour and
the opposing existing trends counter-argue and defend themselves. Hence,
a major task of infinitesimal sociology is to approach things in detail. For
example it is a matter of unfolding the implicit arguments in consumption
goods, and discovering that
a conflict of propositions underlying the quarrel over shop-counters. The

quarrels that are to-day past history between cane sugar and beet sugar,
between the stage-coach and the locomotive, between the sailboat and the
steamboat, etc., were once real social discussions or even argumentations.
For not only two propositions, but two syllogisms, were here face to face.
(Tarde, 1903: 158)
It can then be said that logic and teleological syllogisms, with their cou-
plings and their collisions, “precede and govern each of the actions of our
lives” (Tarde, 1895c: 175). An infinitesimal approach allows us to under-
stand that propositions and syllogisms are not only found where we expect
to find them (scientific and philosophical theories, political ideologies and
religious dogmas). They can also be found more or less hidden in objects, and
certainly in individual actions and social practices. Every act contains a silent
proposition and a tacit goal. Every behaviour, no matter how small and insig-
nificant it may seem, expresses a particular belief. Moreover, it expresses cer-
tain desires or goals which it intends to generalise. Therefore, to practise any
activity is to defend its creed and to pursue its objectives, both of them often
implicit and far-reaching (certain theory of life or, better yet, of the universe).
A peasant who cultivates a field affirms, knowingly or not, that “the earth
is the mother of wealth” (Tarde, 1890a: 209). Hence, any invention—that is
to say, any new object, idea, feeling, gesture, action, practice—that contra-
dicts this principle will tend to hinder its dynamism and to dry its intellec-
tual and affective sources. Likewise, any other that complements it will tend
to reaffirm its validity and foster its development. Thus, an individual who
has made the criminal activity a regular office, “does not only practice, [but
also] professes, the right to murder and robbery as others profess the right
to work, and she did not wait for Darwin to represent life as a war in which
killing alternates with looting” (Tarde, 1890a: 116/117).
All this gives fashions a significant heuristic value. The rise of an inven-
tion is nothing but the emergence of a new way of doing, feeling or thinking.
And, if we accept this, its spreading addresses the dominant logical and tele-
ological configuration of the social space in which it unfolds. This is valid
for criminal innovations that cause criminal fashions. If modern societies
are characterised by the passage from the traditional sense of honour and
sacrifice to desire of wealth and hedonism, the periodical inventions and
propagations of new ways of appropriating others’ belongings won’t be then
surprising. The scarcity of legal techniques and institutional frames to repair
the publicly hurt pride or religious offences will not be surprising either. To
do sociology of those profound transformations in social values, it is neces-
sary to identify the specific innovations that concurred to produce those val-
ues. The map of its spreading, struggles and (re)compositions shall be drawn
as well. Furthermore, it is possible to map the major lines of the probabilistic
field in which these inventions occur and, maybe, some future inventions
can be glimpsed—because, from this perspective, there is no end of history.
Here, transformations of social values produce new necessities and gener-
ate new problems to which new inventions will seek to respond. Thus, for
instance, “as the solidarity of ancient, aristocratic origin, is dissolved by indi-
vidualism of modern and urban origin, the need to enjoy replaces the need
to be feared or respected, the need for money replaces the need for revenge”
(Tarde, 1890a: 86/87). Therefore, each society has somehow the inventions
and epidemics it deserves—be they legal or illegal, violent or peaceful.
Non-logic laws of imitation

Altogether with the logic and teleological causes, there would also exist extra-
logic reasons by which any imitative flow may unfold with higher probabili-
ties than others. In this point, Tarde is messier than usual and his elaboration
is more descriptive and less conceptual than regarding other topics. However,
this should not prevent us from noticing how interesting the ideas grouped
under this negative denomination are. Non-logic laws of imitation are actually
a series of different and related principles that can be formulated as follows:
when different inventions have equal logical or teleological value, (1) internal
models will be imitated before external ones, (2) models coming from indi-
viduals or groups considered superior will propagate easier, (3) models with
which we have a closer psychosocial proximity will be more imitated and (4)
the imitation cycle will always be custom-fashion-transformed custom.
The first of these principles could be designated as “the soul of social
things principle”. We already know that innovations are primarily new ideas,
beliefs and desires. This is valid for a scientific discovery and a new profes-
sional technique, administrative proceeding, political creed or religious rite,
as well as for every new consumption object, every new hairstyle, dress or
word, every new painting, song or film. Sociology must identify and describe
those infinitesimal driving forces if it seeks to address the social processes
in which such innovations emerge and inscribe themselves, as well as the
dynamics they inaugurate and the transformations they produce. In addition
to this, another specification related to the intimate composition of inven-
tions should be added: each one contains micro-sets of judgements and ways
of expressing them as well as micro-sets of goals and means to achieve them.
On this basis, Tarde argues that, in the process of social diffusion, ideas
are communicated “first” than their expressions and goals are transmitted
“before” means. In the end, notions and aims come into us much more eas-
ily and they spread much quicker than expressions and proceedings. This is
another way of saying that we believe in beliefs and wish desires, and that if
we do things in a certain manner and not in another it is because the potency
of an invention inhabits us as an organising and ruling force. The first to be
copied are principles and goals, ideas and passions; actions, consumptions,
practices, ceremonies and manners in accordance to them come later. Thus,
when a person copies another, when a class starts dressing up, furnish-
ing, having fun, taking as models dresses, furniture, ways of entertaining
of another class, it is because the former had already borrowed from the
latter feelings and necessities that are the exterior manifestation of these
forms of action. In consequence, this class could and should borrow from
the other one also its volitions, that is to say, to want according to its will.
(Tarde, 1890: 157)
This emphasis on the active power of beliefs and desires, on its relational
character and on its specular dynamic, has an undeniable Leibnizian stamp,
and it leads to the development of a sociology of unfoldings (or propagations)
and folds (or subjectivations). But also, and because of this, it is somehow
related to the perspective of the so-called “masters of the suspicion”.2 Here,
as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, what people believe they do hardly coincide
with what they actually do. It is true that, in Tarde, there is neither a conflict-
ual centre in the psyche nor a dialectic structuration in societies—as Freud
and Marx believe, respectively. According to his infinitesimal perspective,

everything that is important happens in the transversal entanglement of open
monads, and there is no such thing as powerful and depth negativity underly-
ing phenomena. Nevertheless, we know that the notion of unconsciousness
is constitutive of his theoretical system. For the same reason, here social life
is ruled by the dictum “they don’t know, but they do it”. Hence, sociology
should not be naive regarding explicit discourses and manifest behaviours
of actors. Rather, one of its main tasks is to unpack convictions and feel-
ings wrapped in the manifest saying and doing of individuals, groups and
institutions—also in their objects, clothing, food, buildings and so forth. It
happens that every social relation is always transversal, but it is also always
(infinitely) folded or nested. Therefore, to do infinitesimal sociology is to
un-fold those relations to know them, and to do it in such a way that is
asymptotic (and infinite).
The principle of imitation of the superior by the inferior, or “waterfall”
principle, affirms that examples coming from sources considered socially
elevated or superior will have a greater influence. That is to say, in the face
of different available inventions, those emerged in—or adopted by—socially,
politically, economically or culturally prestigious individuals and groups are
likely to propagate. The explanations Tarde gives about this point are varied
and fragmentary, but they are very often related to a sociological notion of
prestige and to certain psychological (and ontological) assumptions regard-
ing will in general. Tarde suggests that a strong will with a defined goal has
imitative efficiency as such, no matter what those goals are. And this because
it provides a certain direction where there is usually confusion and “weak
wills”. Small or even average wills find an irresistible path in the mandate
of a strong desire because the latter offers what the formers lack: a definite
purpose. Therefore, to obey would be an internal necessity rather than an
external imposition. Here, Tarde works with a model of the master and the
slave, close to Nietzsche’s will to power, where the differences in psychic
potency between individuals—and between groups—seem more ontological
than sociological. And those differences would be the ultimate foundation of
obedience. All in all, on most occasions, Tarde prefers to speak of prestige.
Here, the model is the hypnotic suggestion, but we have to accept that this
model also fails to address the concentration and imbalance of forces in the
social field. He then accepts as given that imbalance, providing some descrip-
tions of its sociological functioning, but without theorising it thoroughly. For
instance, he says that just as the faith of a people is the reflection of the faith
of an apostle, its activity is the propagation of a master’s will (“what the mas-
ter wants or has wanted, is wanted by them”). Moreover, he says that “domi-
nant classes have been or have started as model classes” (Tarde, 1890: 150).
He also finds that, with the passage from feudal to modern societies, and
the disappearance or decrease of aristocracies, this imitative dynamic of the
upper by the lower would not have disappeared. The irradiating source of
examples is now occupied by cities, especially by large capitals. They are the
new lords, the glorious poles of social magnetisation that fascinate themselves
and fascinate peripheral populations, spreading their political, aesthetical or
criminal fashions. Epidemics arisen in cities expand over a whole country
and even transcend their national borders, with a speed and extension that
are proportional to the reputation of their birth. In this way, the propagation
of ideologies, morals, techniques and arts, as well as of fantasies, ambitions
and violence invented in major cities, spreads progressively in the national
and international field, which they influence and conquer.
Another extra-logic factor intervening in the mimetic propagation is the
existing psychosocial distance between the exemplary focal point and its
receptors. This rule can be formulated like this: the degree of influence of a
model will be directly proportional to the closeness to it. But this is a psychic
and not geographical closeness. For Tarde it is clear that the influences from
immediate surroundings, transmitted in face-to-face meetings and in small
groups, are overriding for every individual. Thus, Tarde sees daily interac-
tions as the most fluid means for the imitative diffusion of fashions and fam-
ily as the most vigorous means for the reproduction of traditions. However,
he also was one of the first to highlight the phenomenon of compression of
social distances produced by mass media and their deployment throughout
the social field. With them, the psychic distance tends to get rid of the obsta-
cle of geographic localisation and of the requirement of face-to-face interac-
tions. In fact, they allow psychic intimacy at kilometres of distance.
Finally, Tarde underlines the importance of fashions and customs in imi-
tative propagation. If both work as extra-logic influences, it is also due to
the prestige they have—therefore, this principle is related to the aforemen-
tioned. To do “as everyone does”, and to do it because everyone does it in
this manner, is a (non) logical cause of imitative propagation. If that doing
propagates contemporary examples, it will be a fashion; if it disseminates
past examples, it will be a custom. There are historical moments in which the
new is the most prestigious, and some other moments in which the prestige
of the antique prevail. That domain of one or the other increases the prob-
abilities of diffusion at stake. Tarde says that fashions, that is diffusion of
contemporary inventions, are small streams and customs are big rivers. He
argues that this is also true in post-traditional societies ruled by the authority
of the new, and characterised by the production of innumerous and rapidly
spread inventions. In these societies, as in all the rest, millenary currents of
slow rhythm and long scope structure language, legislation, administration,
religion, family, cooking, clothing and so forth. In these slow currents, small
rapid flows produced by the imitative diffusion are irregularly grafted: a new
word, law, technique, recipe, item or dogma. This theoretician of innovation
affirms: “the part of the traditional and customary element is always the
one prevailing in social life, and this prevalence reveals itself powerfully in
the way how, even the most radical and revolutionary, innovations spread”
(Tarde, 1890: 246). This way, which may be actually called hegemonic oper-
ation, would be the following: to propagate a new idea it is necessary to
formulate it in the already-known and traditional language, and not in its
own terms because, as they are new, they are difficult to be understood. For
instance, this is what Luther, Rousseau and Voltaire would have done in order
to transmit their innovative dogmas: “The old ground is always the vantage-
point from which to tumble down old edifices and to rear up new ones. The
established morality is always the basis for the introduction of new political
ideas” (Tarde, 1890: 247). Furthermore, even when not all fashions become
customs, every custom has indeed started as a fashion. This permanently
repeated socio-historic cycle, through which innovations graft in the flow of
customs and become in turn tradition, is not regressive or conservative at all.
It is rather the proper form of social evolution. The propagation of innova-
tions depends on the traditional configurations, but once deployed these end
up subordinating them. The result is always that “the former custom obeys
and the latter rules, and, so to speak, explodes it” (Tarde, 1890: 140).
The world within the home and vice versa

Each of the objects that we currently use (utensils, tools, machines) were
manufactured by different individuals in different moments and places. If
we make the exercise to calendarise and geo-localise them according to their
date of invention and place of provenance, we could approach their prodi-
gious heterogeneity. Something similar must be said about each of the imma-
terial artefacts with which we think (words, numbers, syllogisms, formulas,
theories). They are inventions once created by someone in a precise space
and time, and then developed by successive additions and modifications pro-
vided by others over time (and space). The very same thing occurs with the
customs and practices to which we are used (cooking, dressing, celebrations
and manners). All of them carry the memory of their birth and development,
and some even indicate their origin more or less accurately—Arabic num-
bers, Pythagoras’ theorem, the Eiffel Tower. Therefore, it is possible (and
necessary) to make the archaeology of their genesis and evolution and the
cartography of their propagations.
This archaeological and cartographic approach to the social can be called
“micro-mega method”. The following quote summarises it graphically:
Enter any house, a Parisian apartment, a rustic hut, a wild cottage or in the
nomad’s tent and you will see furniture, weapons, tools, household uten-
sils, clothes. There, you will attend religious exercises or manual or intel-
lectual professional jobs, and you will listen to conversations or songs,
prayers to a God or lessons to children; everything according to customs,

habits, manners and laws that have covered a more or less vast country
in a more or less long time. . . An erudite may often say where, in which
date, the first of these ornaments found today in all chimneys and the first
or those shirts everyone wears, were manufactured. She would also tell us
where this breed of dogs, horses, oxes that occupy all current stables and
barns was created; which the modest origin of such a rite, such a sacra-
ment, or such a prayer now in practice of millions of believers is; which
canton of Galilee, Greece or Lazio derive from such a legal text, such a
moral maxim, in force throughout the civilised world; in which corner of
the globe, a small Asian plateau, for example, such a verbal root, such a
grammatical form, at present repeated by millions of mouths that have
faithfully transmitted it from father to son with a prodigious accuracy
of imitation, was inaugurated no one knows by whom, but by someone
certainly, in a remote epoch.
(Tarde, 1898: 127/128)
It can be seen that the tiny space of a room is not only interesting regarding
the face-to-face interactions that occur there or the testimonies of private life
that can be found in it. Rather, a micro-mega analysis implies the diagram-
matisation of the socio-historical forces that configure in detail the dynamics
of everyday life in a certain time and place. It also shows the domestic setting
as a space open to—and constituted by—the social field in its multiple tem-
porality. And this turns it into an immediately (micro)political, even public,
emplacement. Even if the objects found there were made by nearby and con-
temporary manufacturers, each one always carries something of its origi-
nal geography and history. That is to say, each one contains in its interior
the social forces (i.e. dogmas, principles, necessities, interests) that produced
them and that have evolved throughout its unfolding and diffusion. This is
also valid for all the forms of relations that we understand as domestic. To do
the archaeology of such a tiny place is to discover the minuscule and diverse
origins of all of its components in order to address the micro meanings and
directions they carry. To do its cartography is to map these lines in at least
two senses: (1) identifying the dominant forces in this field of relations and
(2) following them not only to their (multiple) origins but also to their (mul-
tiple) present destinations. By doing this, the home will reveal itself as an het-
erogeneous ensemble of multi-scalar relationships, many of them planetary
in scope—long before the Internet.
All the aforementioned is true for every social institution, regardless of the
number of people and resources they entail (simultaneously or successively).
It also applies then to what we usually call great or macro-social institutions:
positive law, secular moral, monotheistic religions, modern science, nation-
state, post-industrial mode of production and so on. When seen up close,
each social institution is a bundle of heterogeneous trends, a package of imi-

tative processes in constant movement and evolution. And this is so, because
institutions are always the result of the intersection of different forces that
gave birth to them, as well as the graft or coupling of lines that were added
to the original composition over the course of time. Therefore, it does not
matter how monolithic and homogeneous it seems to be at first glance: every
social institution is a poly-faceted and polyrhythmic reality whose coherence
is always more or less incomplete. As any other form of social configuration,
it is a crossing point of variable and diverse forces which should be micro-
analysed in their differences and transformations.
Now, this micro-analysis is as indispensable as insufficient. It is neces-
sary to address as well the way in which these forces are integrated. It is not
enough to register the interactions and intersections that inhabit things; it is
crucial to examine the forms of functional articulation that constitute and let
them exist and reproduce as such. This means to exist more or less perma-
nently as dynamic multi-linear compounds with their own modality of action
and singular characteristics. Therefore, differential sociology of forces and
fluxes must be complemented with an integral sociology of co-adaptations
and ensembles.
In classical Tardean terms, it can be said that every invention is an adapta-
tion of imitative propagations and that every institution is a co-adaptation of
inventions that regularly propagates. As we know, each of the inventions that
make up the corpus of an institution is itself the result of a poly or heterogen-
esis. We also know that each one is a force with a particular evolution and
we may add that it is related to multiple extra-institutional processes. But it is
imperative to highlight that these heterogeneous forces are articulated in such
a way that, together, give rise to something new and active in its own right.
Something that, as such, is not found in its components separately. What we
are then trying to describe should be called set or, more precisely, system.
However, the theoretical load that both notions traditionally carry is huge
and perhaps unbridgeable. That is why Tarde will sometimes call the result
of those articulations “ensembles”.
Social ensembles or systems

Social ensembles or systems are formed in the same way as their elements—
those that, as we know, are in turn ensembles or systems. To differentiate
them, we can call adaptation to the first case and co-adaptation to the sec-
ond one, as Tarde does. A social system is then an invention made of inven-
tions, or, if preferred, a complex invention in which a great number of brains
cooperated successively. Therefore, systems like language, law, economy and
religion must be seen as cooperative productions that were produced in a
transversal, disseminated and singularised way.
Here, as everywhere else, Tarde distinguishes between desiring and believ-

ing forces. These forces co-adapt forming desiring and believing systems.
But he also explains that they are never separated from each other. In the
formation and reproduction of each social ensemble or institution, bundles
of judgements and propositions intertwine and collaborate with bundles of
goals, interests and necessities. It is the primacy of ones over the others that
sets the logical or teleological character of the system in question. Thus, lan-
guages, religions, philosophies and sciences would be, above all, systems of
belief; while governments, administrations, industries and art would mainly
be systems of desire.
According to Tarde, every social system is evolutionarily formed from a
loose aggregation of elements, whose main bond is not contradicting each
other. But this is not enough. That formless field of forces has to be organised
by dominant premises and/or goals that work as rules of composition or
ensembling rules. This precise operation is what turns the aggregation into
“a vigorous group of elements which not only do not contradict one another,
but, for the most part, confirm one another” (Tarde, 1890: 174). Those dom-
inant premises act as the grammar of the system and transform the mass of
the remaining elements into a dictionary. This is valid for language, where
there is, properly speaking, a syntax and a vocabulary, as well as for any
other social system. Thus, we can find that double dimension of systems
also in matters of religion, science, administration, legislation, moral,

industry, art, where the religious, scientific, government, moral, economic,
aesthetics grammar appears under diverse names (catechism, theories,
constitution, rules of law, maxims, economic laws, poetics). And thanks
to this grammar, once established, it is how the dictionary, not only lan-
guage but also all the other enumerated institutions, may be then enriched
indefinitely. As dictionary, I understand the collection of legendary narra-
tives in accordance with the settled dogma, facts explained by theory, con-
stitutional laws and decrees, legal trials, lasting factories or workshops,
pieces of art that follow the model, in a word: the accumulation of small
inventions that are not limited to not contradicting to others previously
accumulated, but that rather confirm each other wearing the same gram-
matical livery, as all new words incorporated to a language do.
(Tarde, 1895c: 156)
Therefore, every social system, dynamic as it is, has these two different
axes or dimensions. The most general form of relation between them is the
integration of the infinite in the finite, and the re-unfolding of the infinite
in the system. The model would be the following: in a field where the pos-
sibilities of adding elements are virtually unlimited due to the laxity of their
relationships, a group of rules is established. This group can only be finite in
order to accomplish their organising function and preserve the system over
time. But after that, the field of organised elements can grow indefinitely.
Thus, for example, before Newton’s laws, the successive astronomical dis-
coveries did not contradict themselves, and, after them, they confirm in the
system of celestial mechanics that today we call classical. There, as in any
other system, data may extend ad infinitum, but grammar does not. Gram-
mar may introduce new principles, but there is a moment in which it is not
possible to add a new one without contradicting some others. The same hap-
pens with religions. Each one emerges immersed in a vast plot made of diverse
narratives, myths and legends, whose meanings are certainly heterogeneous
and even more or less contradictory. And its constitution would be nothing
but the establishment of a dominant dogma and some rites in accordance
with it. Once established, this religious grammar has to keep itself relatively
restricted if it aims to make its dictionary coherent. For this reason, it tends
only to incorporate rules that corroborate its principles. On the other hand,
the religious vocabulary (legends, saints, martyrs etc.) is then able to enlarge
without limits, as long as it remains subsumed by the guiding lines.
If this is correct, we should say that the more active the lexical (or narra-
tive) axis of a social system is, the more plastic and changing this system will
be. Likewise, if its grammatical or dogmatic axis prevails, it will tend to be
more static and resistant to transformations. For instance,
in ancient polytheism, if dogma is a little thing, narrative is nearly every-

thing. Hence an incredible ease of enrichment, analogous to the thickening
of a modern language, as English that, grammatically very reduced, incor-
porates all kinds of foreign words, subject to a slight change of ending, a
kind of linguistic baptism. However, if this ability to grow without limits
is a cause of viability for a narrative religion, this does not mean that it is
particularly resistant to the attacks of critique. Very different is the solidity
of a theological system, a body of dogmas and dogmatic rites, that support
or seem to support each other, and that, confronted one day by an outside
contradictor, stand up to protest as a bloc.
(Tarde, 1895c: 203)
These considerations are also valid for systems of desire. Even though
Tarde does not make it explicit, we may add that the dictionary is in these
systems constituted by the repertory of means to achieve goals, and grammar
is the hierarchy of goals that rules and organises this “lexical set” of actions.
Such linguistic, religious and scientific systems coordinate and address the
multitude of collective currents of faith through the co-adaptation of the
inventions of beliefs; the political system, economy and law organise and dis-
tribute collective currents of passions, interests and necessities. According to
Tarde, the common denominator of these teleological ensembles is to refer to
values, and both their dynamics and transformations depend on the change
of the respective values they express.
Law would be exemplary in this for it is a social system produced by the
“mutual and intimate reflection” between (logical) principles and (theologi-
cal) values—with prevalence of the latter. Thus, chattel law is instituted when
private property is born and both the desire to achieve it and the belief in the
importance of its acquisition propagate socially. Likewise, transformations
in criminal law depend on the changes in crime patterns that are in turn ruled
by the transformations in social desires. This highlights the distinctive char-
acter of law which, as language, is not only “an integral part of social life, but
also its integral mirror” (Tarde, 1994: 132). When a new necessity or interest
is invented and propagates, the legislative ensemble is driven to adapt itself.
This does not only occur when new values emerge; but it is also linked to the
ups and downs of current values. Therefore, every time it grows or decreases
the flow of “one of the countless unequal channels through which the river of
national Desire distributes and branches, it is necessary to modify the legisla-
tion, a kind of original map of that basin” (Tarde, 1895: 517).
Social intelligence and general will

From time to time, Tarde repeats that social life is mainly psychic so that we
do not lose sight of this fundamental fact. In view of this statement, it is cer-
tainly difficult not to think of individuals endowed with consciousness (and
even with unconsciousness) that relate to each other. That would be social life.
Otherwise, we should conceive a collective consciousness—or unconscious-
ness. That is to say, a kind of a great immaterial supra-individual that would
carry out her designs through the actions of small individuals that somehow
inhabits. We already know that Tarde rejects both alternatives, but he does
not deprive himself of speaking of social mind or spirit, and even of collec-
tive soul. Moreover, he asserts that this is ultimately the object of sociology.
How to understand this? With his usual analogical way of proceeding, Tarde
says that the psychology of societies presents notable analogies with people’s
psychology. According to this, human groups undoubtedly exist as such and
believe and want as individuals do. But also as individuals, they think and act
guided by reasonings. We may then speak of social intelligence and collective
will. However, neither one nor the other is here understood as metaphysical
entities or as transcendent unitary systems—they are not globally centralised
either. Rather, the social mind lacks a unique centre and a unique direction.
Furthermore, it does not exist outside the individual minds that it communi-
cates and through which it somehow passes. The social mind then exists as a
never very concordant set of networks of communication that carry ways of
intellection and volition that evolve in diverse orientations. But, as we already
know, it also happens that they co-adapt with each other through successive
couplings and substitutions (a kind of selection) that are produced with the
collaboration of different individual minds. And all this occurs in a more or
less impersonal way in individuals mentally related to others in such a way
that it is difficult to identify where each one starts and ends.
We may speak here of a social mind that believes (reasons, knows, opines)
and desires (needs, seeks to, pursues). But we should be careful not to con-
ceive it as a Hobbesian mechanical automaton or as a transcendent totality—
as Hegel’s objective Spirit, Marx’s General Intellect or Durkheim’s collective
consciousness. It is rather the disseminated functioning of a trans-individual
psychic field made of innumerable infinitesimal currents of intellection, affec-
tion and actions. The social mind then lacks a unique centre and a one-way
address and it only exists as a multi-linear network whose nodes are the
singular minds mimetically communicated. This communication may have
any content, no matter how delusional it may seem from an exterior point of
view. However, the collective mental processes here at stake are never exempt
from certain rationality.
As mentioned, Tarde finds syllogism functioning on the basis of any pro-
cess where beliefs intervene. This means that philosophies and sciences belong
to the same family as religions, myths and political ideologies. He then makes
a double movement: he includes reason—however it is defined—in the wider
field of beliefs and, at the same time, he postulates that all beliefs are syllo-
gistically structured. This does not imply that all philosophical, scientific or
religious propositions are true in ontological terms or formally correct. But it
does have notable consequences from a sociological point of view.
Above all, something that may seem obvious takes on a new meaning:
whatever is collectively believed will be true for believers. And this is also
true for individual convictions: it is not possible to believe in what is con-
sidered false. If we add that the establishment of any socially shared premise
is produced through diffusion, we are one step away from saying that social
truths are instituted politically. Tarde does not take this step explicitly, even
though his work enables and presupposes it. The prevalence of some certain-
ties implies both the subordination and the exclusion of other convictions,
and both things occur in the realm of public opinion, that is to say, in a mul-
tiple, virtual and volatile space made of collective beliefs and passions always
on collision and in dispute. Once certain major premises are established
there, certain consequences will follow as logically necessary and therefore
true—and others will remain established as false. And the same is valid for
collective desires. The consolidation of certain values as fundamental and of
certain means as legitimate will organise a social logic of volitions—because
as there are logic syllogisms, there would also be teleological ones. Both tend
to the logical coherence of social thinking and desiring, in spite of their ran-
dom origins and evolutions. Both have a socially effective, binding and objec-
tive character during their historical reign.
Now we see why sociology should contain those interrelated branches that
Tarde called social logic and social teleology. A priority task of social science
is to address in detail the syllogistic economy of the human groups it studies.
When micro-analysing an imitative flow or a social trend, it should iden-
tify the notions working as subjects and predicates in the propositions they
carry. Such social science should also identify which of those propositions
work as major and minor premises and which as conclusions. Furthermore,
it should recognise which conclusions are affirmed as true and possible and
which are rejected as false, wrong or impossible. It should also be registered
the highs and lows of the believing and desiring intensity that invest those
reasonings. All this has to be done without forgetting that these practical
syllogisms belong to the relational field of social actions and interactions,
and consequently, they are always submitted to the non-logical influences of
fashion and custom, personal and collective prestige, psychosocial distance
and so forth.
It is important to mention that, as a branch of sociology, social logic
would be able to adopt a normative position regarding its object, that is
to say, an analogous role to that (plain) logic has with regard to individual
reasoning. Applying adequately the reformed syllogistic, one could identify
which socially ruling reasonings are (formally) correct, which are more or
less correct and which are not at all correct. And this is also valid for the tele-
ological branch of this science which can be assimilated to moral, because it
deals with the means and goals that rule social practices, a kind of scientific
moral dedicated to the study and orientation of social desires based on the
practical syllogisms that drive them. Hence, faced with social thought and
will, this science would be able to objectively describe the social mind as it
actually exists and works in each historical moment. Determining whether
these socio-psychic configurations are structured around true beliefs or ethi-
cally fair goals does not correspond to this sociology—even assuming that
the (classical) alternative between realism and relativism makes sense here.
Nevertheless, it will be able to establish if social truths are logically coher-
ent with themselves and if the means of action implemented are suitable to
serve the socially pursued goals. It will also be competent to examine to what
extent the different prevailing truths and dominant goals are consistent with
each other. Finally, it will be able to measure the matching between social
judgements and goals.
A science of intensive communication

The science of the social is the science of—mostly unconscious—beliefs
and desires. It may then be instructive to compare it with psychoanaly-
sis. According to Freud, unconscious desire is the one that really matters
in individual or collective actions. This kind of desire is far from being
ruled by the deductive propositional structures of the syllogism—even if the

syllogism is wrongly built. In fact, human desire is not even governed by
the principles of identity, of non-contradiction and of the excluded middle.
Therefore, Freud affirms that the rules of (classical) logic have no validity
here; the individual unconscious is the realm of the “a-logical”. And this
also applies to myths, religions and ideologies and other forms of social (un)
consciousness. From the point of view of classical logic, the “reasoning” of
unconscious desire is not only wrong but also meaningless. However, the
whole point of psychoanalysis is that there is a non-classical logic ruling
those “senseless” desires, whether individual or social. According to Freud,
this singular logic of desire, that is in fact the logic of dreams, is articulated
around the principles of displacement and condensation. The first one refers
to the psychical mechanism by which a representation involves at the same
time several heterogeneous associative chains; the second one refers to the
transfer of psychical energy from some contents to another by means of
associative chains.3 It should be admitted that Tarde did not go that far in
this point. When addressing desire or conatus, he remained faithful to Aris-
totle’s and to Leibniz’s rationalist understanding of will—despite sometimes
invoking Schopenhauer.
That said, it should be underlined that the paralogisms Tarde’s infini-
tesimal approach finds functioning as leading micro-mechanisms of social
life are certainly relevant. It is here when his sociological syllogistic results
are more stimulating and productive. In this reformed syllogistic, there is
an argument that needs to be accepted as true or rejected as false not only
in every political idea, scientific theory or legal norm, but also in every
industrial, commercial, and financial practice, as well as in every tool, food,
dressing or footwear. Furthermore, Tarde argues that the diffusion of these
inventions depends, at least partially, on this logical agreement. He also
states that the diffusion of any innovation is the propagation and evolution
of the internal reasoning it contains. Therefore, he can say that logical and
teleological syllogisms “precede and govern each of the actions of our lives”
(Tarde, 1895c).
Tarde understands that there is rationality where action is adapted to the
goals pursued by the individual. He considers that this rationality is relative
to the circumstance and information available for the individual. That is why
Boudon (2000: 256–260) seeks to associate his perspective to the modern
theory of decision. However, the logic Tarde speaks of is not individual but
rather social. It functions networked and its syllogisms rule the reasonings in
each branch of social life in such a way that is as unknown as captivating and
mandatory for the ones involved. As we have seen, those social syllogisms are
practical or rhetorical. Social logic is an “alive logic” in which thousands of
arguments are built everyday more to convince than to reflect.
In fact, the utility of real, practical, reasoning does not consist in generat-
ing new propositions, induced or deduced . . ., but rather in clearly modi-
fying our opinion—I add: or mainly the other’s opinion—that is to say, in
making our faith or the other’s faith in these propositions go up or down,
or even in making it change its sign, turning it from affirmative into nega-
tive or vice versa.
(Tarde, 1895c: 256)
As important as the study of social life understood as an heterogene-

ous field of imitations, adaptations and oppositions that propagate forming
psychosocial flows is that those flows form systems. Law, art, economy,
religion and politics are co-adapted systems of beliefs and desires. Such
systems are diverse not only regarding the content of the creeds and goals
they articulate, but also regarding their origins, temporalities and scales.
But they can also combine with each other and form systems of systems.
The nation, Tarde affirms (1890), is a complex syllogism. As we know, all
these systems are social ensembles that entail the integration of innumerable
currents of different speed, intensity, sense and meaning. For this reason,
sociology must be a cartographic science, but also an archaeological and
kinetic one, that is a science attentive both to the (poly) genesis of these
social ensembles and to the psycho-sociological dynamics that compose and
decompose them.
Tarde summarises the aforementioned in this way:
Sociology has as its essential domain all the facts of communication

between spirits and all their effects. It must study the action of contact
or at a distance—and at increasing or decreasing distances depending on
the epoch—that each spirit exerts on the others by its affirmations or its
denials, by its orders or its defences, or better, without anything to affirm
or expressly impose, by its examples that have always something affirma-
tive or imperative, and, as such, suggestive. It must examine the currents
of convictions and the currents of collective wills, which result from there;
indicate the rise or fall, increase or decrease of these currents; show the
contests and conflicts of these various currents of belief or desire, when
they meet; and elucidate the logical laws of interference or combination
that govern these clashes or couplings. In short, it must show how and
why these concordant or concurrent forces come to organise themselves
in a double, more or less coherent, more or less stable, system of explicit
or implicit propositions that confirm or do not contradict each other too
much, and of confessed or hidden desires that assist or do not confront
each other too much.
(Tarde, 1895c: 315)
Notes
1 Lacan (1966) formulated a “logic of the signifier” to address psychic and social life.
Developing that very same line, Laclau (2014) speaks of the “rhetorical founda-
tions of society”. From his part, Castoriadis (1987) will postulate the imaginary
institution of society and will seek to outline a post Lacanian “logic of magmas”.
2 As it is known, this qualification was coined by Ricoeur (1970: 32) to highlight that
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, in their own ways, aimed at unmasking the real hidden
behind appearances. “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the
school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud”.
3 “The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and
contradictions. This is simply disregarded. To the dream ‘No’ does not seem to
exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent
them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element
by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles
is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts” (Freud, 1997: 110).
5
THE CONTINUITY OF MULTITUDES
In the field of social sciences, it is frequent to speak about social morphol-

ogy according to two different, often related, meanings. The first and more
comprehensive one refers to the study of the form or structure of social
groups. It classifies them in types or formations in relation to their different
organisation and functioning, such as hordes, tribes, corporations or nations,
for instance. The second and more restricted meaning alludes to the way in
which those groups relate to “their material substrate”. It refers specifically
to issues such as the number of individuals in these social groups, their age
and sex, their distribution in space, the infrastructure in their communica-
tion, the architecture of their housing units so forth. These elements have—or
seem to have—the features of physical objects in the way they present to
immediate perception, that is in number, extension, density, movement and
spatial shape. Their relation to social organisation forms (or morphology in a
broad sense) is complex and reciprocally influential in different ways. Among
these relations, the causal action of restricted morphology onto general mor-
phology is usually considered evident. That is, the material substrate plays
the role of independent and explanatory variable in the configuration of the
structures of collective association.1
From this perspective, societies would have a volumetric body constituted
by the number of individuals comprising them and the way in which they are
distributed in a territory. This body may vary in form or structure accord-
ing to the changes in these elements and the influence of the topographic
and climatic characteristics of the inhabited space. Population and geography
are thus likely to appear as the most “material” dimensions of the social.
Or, at least, no social group would be likely to do without this substrate.
The expression “material substrate” belongs to Durkheim. He may have well
DOI: 10.4324/9781003197386-6
94 The continuity of multitudes
been the one to coin the term “social morphology” and he uses it in the two
aforementioned meanings. We could argue that there is no spatial, numerical
raw determinism in Durkheim, given the fact that he understands the sub-
strate of a group includes, apart from its already mentioned material density,
a “moral” density as well, related to the type, quantity and frequency of its
social interactions. In any case, Durkheim (1982, 1994) and his school would
later take pains to find certain correlations between restricted morphology
and collective representations (Durkheim and Mauss, 2009), or moral den-
sity, as well (Mauss, 1979).2
It is worth mentioning that Marxism, in diametrical opposition to Dur-
kheimian school in almost every sense, tends to agree on the idea of a material
substrate of group structures and social representations. Here, population
and geography are fundamental in relation to economic life. As workforces
and natural resources, they are a crucial element of the material infrastructure
of society, together with its technical production means (tools, machinery
etc.). In addition, the idea of a general morphology made up of social classes
is constitutive of the Marxist point of view. Moreover, it is worth mentioning
that empiricist tradition rejects the possibility that groups are anything other
than aggregates of individuals, but it does not discard the idea of a material
substrate for social interactions. In classical political economy, for instance,
it is of great relevance to consider the number of individuals involved, their
technical means available and the geography they inhabit.
As for Tarde, it is possible to reconstruct in his work the fundamental fea-
tures of a social morphology in a broad sense—the one defined by Durkheim
as “the part of sociology whose goal is to construct and classify social types”
(1982: 127). As we know, for Tardean sociology, social formations cannot be
conceived as internally homogeneous parts of a larger whole—whether it be
organismic or dialectic. Now we must add that they are remarkably free from
any geographical or numerical determination. Here, to make the cartography
of the formations which are present in a given social field is not to relate them
to their number of individuals, or territorial distribution. Rather, it is to map
the different types of inter-mental connections at a distance that we find in
this field, which form diverse while interpenetrated configurations. In Tarde’s
thought, society’s material substrate is the ocean of trans-individual beliefs
and desires whose currents generate, reproduce and transform all associa-
tion types known to history (from the horde to national and international
societies). As will be seen, this implies not only a critique to the reification of
these different social configurations, but also a questioning of both unilineal
evolutionism as much as spatial and populational causalism.
We know that, according to Tarde, there is no social group made out
of simple homogeneous elements; nor are groups simple or homogeneous,
in such ways that they may later gather in larger totalities comprising or
synthesising them. Instead, all social groups are ensembles that combine
The continuity of multitudes 95
with others in terms of ensemble. An ensemble is a whole that is always

smaller than the sum of its parts, where “parts” means psychosocial fluxes
and “whole” means partial and dynamic integrations of these fluxes. This
singular conception of social groups does not prevent Tarde from asserting
that they are different from the addition of their elements, and that they
have their own dynamics—that is they are sui generis social configura-
tions. Tarde drafts, somewhat roughly, an evolutionary line of the different
types of social configurations developed along the history of humankind.
It would start with the family and the horde, go along tribes and clans,
to finally give birth to corporations, cities and nations. This is a general
historical hypothesis shared with many of his contemporaries (Spencer and
Durkheim, in the first place). But instead of making a socio-historical study
of this evolution and its stages, Tarde concentrates on certain forms of
association in particular. He focuses on the crowd primarily, as he consid-
ers it, together with the family, the most primitive form of association. It
so happens that, what Spencer, Durkheim, and Freud called “horde” is to
Tarde (1901: 28) a multitude: “the horde, the rough and plundering band,
is nothing else but the crowd in motion”. Far from treating it as an extinct
species, Tarde observes that the mass persists in time throughout numerous
civilisations, gaining remarkable protagonism ever since modern political
revolutions.
He is also the one who discovers, or in any case one of the first to concep-
tualise, a type of social group that his contemporaries tended to disregard—
the public. What distinguishes this conceptualisation still today is that it sees
the public as a configuration with a sociological value equivalent to the fam-
ily, village, city or State. That is, it grants the public a morphological status
which is as robust as any other social formation. However, this compact form
of association functions in a completely deterritorialised and dispersed way.
Tarde places this novel form of association on the opposite edge of social
evolution in respect to the mass, characterising it as “the social association
of days-to-come”. However, as we shall see, both of them are species of the
same kind. The crowd and the public are amorphous social groups.
In addition, Tarde pays special attention to corporations as a major social
type in post-traditional social dynamics. However, he did so without disre-
garding other formations to which he grants considerable importance (the
city and the sects, in the first place). Corporations are organised, hierarchical
and long-lasting groups that unfolded in the social field simultaneously with
its democratisation. They achieved relevance and extension progressively and
turned societies “into an immense factory”. Saying that the public is the asso-
ciation of the future does not mean that it is the only one. The social land-
scape is truly polymorphic and polyrhythmic. And according to Tarde, it is
populated by a multiplicity of corporations, crowds and publics that coexist
in a continuous, intertwined and reversible way.
These three types of social groupings are the most active vectors in the
highly shifting constellation of the post-traditional social field. They are not
the only ones but they are the most relevant, together with individuals—
understood, themselves as well, as sui generis social configurations.
According to Tarde, they represent morphological milestones in the his-
tory of humankind. An evolutionary line can be traced along them, but
this does not mean that one has replaced the other as they appear. Rather,
once emerged, they live in the same social field and also transform into one
another unceasingly. Hence, there is a synchronic continuity and also some
“smooth” transitions amongst all these different social formations. A great
deal of our social, political, cultural and economic life consists basically in
this game of continuous metamorphoses and their consequences. The num-
ber of participants in each configuration is not a determining aspect in any
case. There is no room for questions such as how many participants in a
group make it qualify as a multitude. And the same holds for the other types
of social groupings. It is not about quantitatively different groups per case,
but of qualitatively different relational regimes. Therefore, the characteris-
tics of the inhabited territory or the spatial distance among its inhabitants
are not determining factors either. Here, social morphology is more topo-
logical than topographical: the other side of the world may be near and the
neighbour next door, very far. To make these assertions plausible, we will
deploy them showing the change of perspective they produce within social
sciences, and outside them.
The crowd
In the end of 19th-centuryEurope, and after a long period of popular upris-
ings, the study of the multitude gained great interest in the scientific and
academic milieu. In this convulsed social context, multitudes were matters
of an urgent political and legal concern. Emerging human sciences felt sum-
moned both in theoretical and in practical terms: which kind of phenom-
enon is this? How and why does it emerge? What characteristics does it
have? But also, how to evaluate its social value? Are multitudes a negative
phenomenon? And eventually, how to control it? Tarde, together with Le
Bon and Sighele, was one of the main intellectual references in the research
and debates around these questions. The three of them were part of a field
of interlocutions that, among others, also includes Freud, McDougall and
Durkheim in a certain way. Their works about this subject are sometimes
grouped under the label of “Psychology of Crowds”. We will soon see that
the question of masses exceeds by far the limits of a specific and subordi-
nated discipline—at least for Tarde. In any case, for all of them, a multitude
is itself a remarkable epistemological and political problem. In the following
paragraph, Tarde vividly describes “the mystery of the multitude” such as it

is presented in this context:
A mob is a strange phenomenon. It is a gathering of heterogeneous ele-

ments, unknown to one another; but as soon as a spark of passion, hav-
ing flashed out from one of these elements, electrifies this confused mass,
there takes place a sort of sudden organization, a spontaneous generation.
This incoherence becomes cohesion, this noise becomes a voice, and these
thousands of men crowded together soon form but a single animal, a wild
beast without a name, which marches to its goal with an irresistible final-
ity. The majority of these men had assembled out of pure curiosity, but
the fever of some of them soon reached the minds of all, and in all of them
there arose a delirium. The individual who had gone precisely to counter
the homicide of an innocent is one of the first ones to suffer the homicidal
contagion and, what’s more, she is not surprised.
(Tarde, 1968: 323)
Faced with such a landscape, there were some who characterised crowds as
a pathological phenomenon and considered them a threat to the social order
and its survival. But this was maybe a cultural and political symptom. As
regarding hypnotism, the crowd manifests features that contradict the way in
which European civilisation understands itself, that is to say, a consolidated
group of free, equal, rational and pacific individuals. The masses’ mirror
returns the image of those very same individuals intertwined in a thoughtless,
amorphous and often violent movement.
Even when his last works introduce some nuances, Tarde never stops
describing the crowds using a series of disturbing (and polemic) comparisons
typical of his time. In the masses, he finds some traits shared with wild ani-
mals and with the so-called primitive societies—which would also be close to
savage animals in evolutionary terms. Thus, for example, crowds in modern
cities would be not only gregarious but also ferocious in their behaviour.
That ferocity, altogether with their superstitious gullibility, their taste for
idolatry, their constant willingness to direct action, would assimilate them
to archaic societies, as was imagined by late-Victorian anthropology. The so-
called primitive people would be as dogmatic as mobs and, like them, they
would not know indecision. On the other hand, masses are also changing,
contradictory and voluble in their beliefs and goals, as well as intolerant “as
an African despot”. In addition, they would always have something “child-
ish” and would be “female in their temper”, even in those cases in which they
are made of male adults. But this is not all. The crowds are often violent as
criminals and they do everything with a disproportionate vanity—like tribal
chiefs do according to the European believes. Furthermore, all crowds are
also like alienated individuals, always close to hallucination due to their ideo-
logical, religious or patriotic delusions. Therefore, Tarde (1895: 63) could
write that “a group of people, more or less healthy in spirit, easily becomes a
sole and unique madman”.
This eloquent characterisation was shared by vast sectors of the West-
ern intelligence at the end of the 19th century. It was present in the Italian
Scuola Positivista of Lombroso, Ferri and Garofalo—to which Sighele also
belongs. It had also a central role in Le Bon’s famous texts, and Freud was not
indifferent to it. It is difficult not to see to what extent this characterisation
describes, above all, those who make it. It is not too bold to state that these
rhetorical images hardly dissimulate their reference to the popular uprisings
of 1848 and 1871 and, a little further in time, the French Revolution. But
also, as in a dream, they condense all the figures by which the European—
colonialist, patriarchal, individualist and nature-dominating—social order
felt threatened.
Having said that, one should not be discouraged by the barely disguised
prejudices and fears that these analogies entail.3 Rather, it is important to
keep the elementary psychosocial features they seek to illustrate. To summa-
rise them, we will say that the crowd is a kind of social association that can
be distinguished by the unity and simplicity of its ideas, the intensity of its
passions and the coordination of its actions. In it, individual consciousness
becomes unconsciousness and the mental functions we call rational are sub-
jugated by imagination and passions. Within the multitude, class and social
status differences disappear, and everything happens as if memory faded and
there was no lucidity in individuals that make it up. The idea or purpose
embraced by a crowd one day is rejected with equal vehemence the following
day. And, in both cases, nothing stops the tendency to direct actions, without
mediation or measures. If all this happens when reasonable and measured
individuals gather together in a multitude, it is then worth asking how this is
possible and why.
The multitude as paradigm and laboratory

According to the aforementioned mass psychologists, this occurs because
the social compound called multitude is a different reality from the individu-
als that make it up. It has a “soul” (Lebon), “certain mental unity” (Tarde)
or a “collective consciousness” (Durkheim) that guides the actions, feelings
and thoughts of its members without them being clearly aware of it. This
is why the psychological and behavioural characteristics of the multitude
are (very) different from those of its elements separately taken. To say it in
a classical way, here the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. And this
must be read in a strong sense: there would be not only criminal masses
made of honest persons, but also heroic ones made of wills that are average
separately. This metamorphosis suddenly happens in individuals who will

find it difficult to recognise themselves in those states and actions once the
multitude scatters.
It is not the number of individuals that characterises the multitude. For all
the aforementioned authors, a crowd is a particular psychosocial state and a
form of association. Le Bon (1908: 26/27) wrote:
A thousand individuals accidentally gathered in a public place without any

determined object in no way constitute a crowd from the psychological
point of view. . . . At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute
a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of
men gathered together by accident.
All the problems consist of knowing how this simultaneous phenomenon

of obnubilation of individual consciousness and tight coordination of their
feelings, thoughts and actions is produced. It is a matter of addressing the
hidden mechanism through which an aggregate transforms into a mass and
of capturing the fugitive moment in which individualities dissolve giving rise
to the “soul of the multitude”.4
Tarde rejects the idea—typical of Le Bon and the Italian positivism—
according to which the mass is an exceptional and pathological phenomenon.
Instead, he thinks that a crowd is an (acute) case of sociability. It is even the
archetype of the social and also a privileged laboratory for its science. And
this is because it would be nothing but an especially intense and rudimentary
imitative social relation.
This means that Tarde does not consider the multitude from an emergen-
tist point of view—in contrast to Le Bon and Durkheim, for instance. It is
not a supra-individual entity, a sui generis reality, that somehow transcends
its components. It is rather a particular kind of relational regime character-
ised by the reduction and simplification of beliefs and desires that often go
through individuals. This reduction in quantity and variety of the communi-
cated convictions and passions is accompanied by an increase in their inten-
sity and velocity. The multitude would not be a new kind of being, but rather
the very same type of relation that characterises the social being in general,
that is, the imitative one, but more schematic, intensified and accelerated. Or
more accurately, it is the product of a transformation in the state of the social
becoming, a metamorphosis of its believing and desiring economy.
Tarde rejects substantilising the mass phenomenon and, at the same time,
he turns it into a key for the understanding of social reality—or, better yet,
of the relational reality of the social. This phenomenon is a laboratory in
the open air where the sociological micro-analysis can capture elementary
processes of sociality, mimetic as it is. The multitude is, so to speak, the
collective version of the induced somnambulism. It will not be necessary to
search much in order to find beliefs and desires that cloud its members or the
hypnotists that irradiate them. The infinitesimal (i.e. relational, continuous,
intensive) character of the social and its exemplar causality appear here in a
particularly clear way, especially regarding its capacity to transform and even
distort the individuals.
Before advancing in this key point, let us add another feature that, for
Tarde, is characteristic of this social configuration: it is regressive. And this
in two main senses: one that values its social performance and another one
that refers to an evolutionary scale. He then says that the multitude is men-
tally conservative and materially destructive, incapable of creating something
new but prone to excess. The individual is the only one who innovates; the
multitude repeats and/or opposes the already created. In this, Tarde differen-
tiates from Durkheim (1995), for whom “collective effervescence” can either
preserve traditional values or conceive new ones. Moreover, Tarde affirms
that the multitude is a “retrograde organism” in terms of social evolution.
It is a regressive phenomenon when compared to Modern society and even
more regressive regarding the Modern individual. It happens that a multi-
tude is a simple syllogism, while an evolved society (a nation) is a complex
syllogism—and its individuals are even more complex.
The individual, the crowd and its leaders

Modern life’s typical form of social relation is reciprocal communication
between people with different beliefs and desires. This is certainly an imita-
tive relation. That is to say, it involves mutual attraction and assimilation,
and it is tendentially homogenising. However, given the number and variety
of these relations, that homogeneity is always partial: each imitative bond
involves only a specific issue, not all social flows pass through all individuals
and no one copies an example in the same way as others do (though small
variations always exist). It is then not paradoxical to say that such relational
plurality complexifies the internal states of the individuals wrapped in this
plurality—their individuality is in fact produced by that plot. Tarde (1890)
says that that social field made of imitative relations seems like a musical
chord—or, better yet, a more or less harmonic ensemble of chords that
repeats with variations and develops over time. In its unrepeatable singular-
ity (in its difference), the individual is the result of these complex imitative
processes which are multiple in direction and meaning as well as regular in
their repetition rate.
In contrast, the multitude is a different and more elementary kind of social
regime: the one that produces unilateral imitation. The man and woman of
the multitude concentrate all their desiring and believing force on a unique
pole of imitation—as if they were hypnotised (1890a: 63). Here, the influ-
ence of one model prevails over all the rest to the point of neutralising or
cancelling them as it spreads and gains force and extension. But this cannot
happen without some individuals acting as magnetisers or, to say it in the
political language of the 19th century, as meneurs, that isas leaders, agita-
tors or instigators who are the emission sources of these models (i.e. ideas,
images, goals, emotions, necessities). They channel each one’s previously dis-
persed and diversified psychical energies, concentrating and driving them in
a sole direction.
Therefore, reciprocal and complex suggestions of daily sociality are
replaced by unilateral imitative flows that carry a limited number of beliefs
and desires—in the limit, one single belief charged with desire. To this focali-
sation, reduction and addressing of passions and ideas, we should add the
increase in the desiring and believing intensity, which is related to its propa-
gation. Such is the process of formation of a multitude with its characteristic
monolithic unanimity. Hence, Tarde says that it has the simple and profound
potency of a long unison. In the multitude, the plurality of imitations of regu-
lar and slow rhythm that configure individuals are drastically reduced and,
at the same time, accelerated in a violent contagion. Therefore, an emotion
and a dogma come suddenly to dominate all the group, the individual’s wak-
ing consciousness darkens and reflexibility is turned into automatism. In this
way, the more strengthened and centralised the multitude is, the more indi-
vidualised it becomes. In this context, the individualities it brings together
tend to weaken and disappear.
Any individual, and any group, may become in multitude. When this does
happen, it is not possible to avoid that febrile collective state that, under
certain occasions, drives to atrocity. It happens that when opinions get closer
they turn into convictions and when convictions strengthen each other, they
transform into fanaticism. What was a simple desire in the individual becomes
a passion in the mass. That fervent dogmatism is, for Tarde (1892: 359), the
reason for all the excesses of a mob, including its crimes when they occur.
A multitude first believes and desires with violence, and only later—and for
that reason—acts violently. A “monologisation” of communication and an
extraordinary affective charge concentrated on those few passions and con-
victions transform the economy of social relations and put this singular form
of collective configuration in motion.
Tarde understands that collective over-excitement, monoideism and undif-
ferentiation are mainly premodern ways of relation. It is in that very sense
that the result of the individuals’ association in a multitude is a regression.
It is a purely sociological regression. In addition, masses would recover
anti-cosmopolitan and anti-ecumenical features characteristic of traditional
social formations (e.g. tribes and castes). As they are groupings with an
excited feeling of cohesion, they contradict the socialising and globalising
current that, in Tarde’s view, constitutes the main direction of social his-
tory. Masses transform into strangers or enemies, everyone who does not
adhere to their overwhelming impulse. Within a mass, planetary socialised

individuals “become inaccessible to pity for the suffering of other individ-
uals, recently their brothers or countrymen, now good to be slaughtered,
burnt, stolen” (Tarde, 1892: 376). For this reason, every multitude would be
assimilable to a return to the social state characteristic of the primitive family
(Tarde, 1892: 357).
We can see that the multitudinary behaviour, as Tarde understands it, has
nothing to do with the avatism á la Lombroso and entails neither biological
degeneration nor neuronal disorders. It does not express the liberation of
dark drives or derive from a momentary anomia either. Rather, the multitude
is an hyper-social phenomenon, a vertiginous swirl of simplified, accelerated
and intensified sociability. It results from the fast contagion of practical syl-
logisms available in daylight for everyone. But the key is not in its content
but rather in its way of circulation, its vehemence and in the lack of relation
with other syllogisms that may complicate it. If the members of a multitude
behave violently, they do so because they are unilateral and exaggerated.
And this maximalist dogmatism is the result of social forces acting “on the
surface”. One sacks or murders for wealth or pleasure, for love or hate, but
also for religion or the Republic: passions and convictions, social like no one.
Multitude’s drivers or meneurs distinguish from inventors for their treat-
ment of social beliefs and desires. Instead of combining or co-adapting ideas
and interests, they simplify and isolate them; their role is not to diversify but
to reduce. The individuals who play this leadership role are fascinated who
fascinate, monologised who monologise. For the very same reason, they are
also good catalysts. They gather dispersed forces and dynamise their con-
tagion, increasing their strength. This is possible not because they liberate
repressed desires, offering themselves as a transgressor model with which to
identify, in Freud’s or certain psychoanalysis’ manner. For Tarde, if the leader
is a model to imitate and with which to identify is because he somehow
restricts the flow of examples, magnifying some of them, polarising the field
of imitations, producing specular fascination with no depth.
The corporation
Tarde does not develop a detailed sociology of corporations like he does
with multitudes and publics. However, he points out the basic characteristics
of this social configuration which he conceptualises in a peculiar way. As
all Tarde’s concepts are, this is extraordinarily broad and strangely precise.
It does includes not only professional groups, but also public administra-
tions, schools and hospitals, which are also types of the corporate genre. The
most intense expressions of a corporation—that is to say, the ones exhibiting
more distinctive characters—are the army and the monastery, and the most
overreaching—or extensive—ones are the State and the Church. Or, to put
it in more precise words, during their most robust period of growth, States
and Churches tend to perform the monastic and military type (without never
achieving it completely).
Corporations then fulfil the requirements of coordination, hierarchy and
division of functions—and also of rationality—that characterise the so-called
“social organisations”. This kind of social formation is undoubtedly very
antique, and the classic sociological narrative watches it developing and
spreading progressively until it dominates Modern social space. That is why
Modern societies were sometimes called “organisational societies”. There,
enormous bureaucratic complexes would fully dominate social dynamics,
displacing Pre-Modern forms of association and transforming them into rel-
ics or even into pathologies. We already know that, from the infinitesimal
perspective, the social landscape is always much more varied, complex and
hybrid than this. This is not because it ignores the historical deployment
of the corporate forms of association and their increasing prominence, but
rather because it considers to be witnessing the persistent activity of masses
and because it also discovers publics.
The first thing to remark is that, seen up close, every corporation is a
multitude. But it is not just that; it is a disciplined, stable and persistent mul-
titude. A second key point to mention is the continuity that exists between
both types of social association. The multitude precedes the corporation in
time; it is, together with the family, the most antique social grouping known
by humans. This was an assumption shared by Tarde, Le Bon and Durkheim,
among others. Tarde argues that the passage from the mass association to the
corporate one entails a civilising evolution produced over time. However, he
also asserts that the result of this evolution is the co-presence of both types
of social formation in the same (Modern) social field, rather than the replace-
ment of one by the other. As important as that diachronic continuity is the
synchronic continuity he finds between both. According to Tarde, there is
not only historical but also sociological continuity between the crowd and
the corporation, since they are both made of the same material. Among other
things, this implies that a corporation can always, and at any time, become a
mass more easily than what is often assumed.
If unity of objectives, coordination of actions and the existence of hierar-
chies are established as the minimum characters of social organisations, we
may then compare these two types of association regarding these features.
Above all, we will no longer be able to affirm without reservations that a
multitude is a disorganised group because a tight coordination oriented to
achieve a goal can be verified in it. Due to its dense cohesion and its sim-
ple objective, the multitude acts with the efficiency and the speed of a sole
and unique individual. The important difference with the corporation is the
spontaneous and ephemeral character of this (proto) social organisation.
Regarding the hierarchical element, we have already seen that the leader or
meneur is an indispensable component of the multitudinary association. The

hierarchical position of the leader, however fleeting and diffuse it may be,
consists in indicating the direction (and the meaning) of collective action.
According to Tarde, corporations are also produced and driven by leaders.
Corporations function around common goals and ideas, but these purposes
and beliefs always emerge, confirm themselves and vary according to the
action of individual leaders—just like crowds. Tarde (1893: 381) considers
that in the origin and functioning of both social configurations we will find a
visible or invisible, near or distant, living or dead chief. In fact, he says that
masses follow living and present leaders. On the other hand, in corporations
the example of a dead chief survives lengthily and over that inertial leader-
ship others graft successively. Then, a corporation is not only a group of co-
adapted inventions; it is also an ensemble of accumulated leaderships.
As we can see, the infinitesimal point of view discovers the relation leaders-
guided everywhere. Whether in street crowds or in factories, offices and bar-
racks, the social relation implies this clinamen: to bond is to bend. This does
not mean that everyone’s will has disappeared due to the imposition of some
others. In Tarde’s work, there is a theory of hegemony scattered throughout,
according to which the most important and extended form of obedience is
neither consensual nor imposed, but rather suggestive or mimetic (to do what
the model does, to want what she wants). However, at the same time, it is
imprescindible that the model reflects, at least partially, the desires and beliefs
of its followers. Therefore, leaders operate as the echo and the condensation
of (certain) principles and goals of her followers. This is why the leader can
canalise and eventually vary followers in direction and meaning. A complex
interplay is established here: every leader must concede in order to rule, no
matter how autocratic his reign may be. In the case of those fully organised
crowds that corporations are, the leader should act in accordance with the
traditional trends of the dominated wills. As spontaneous social movements,
multitudes do not have traditions, but this does not exempt its leaders from
the necessity to be tuned in to her followers’ longings and dogmas.
The multitude is then a “rudimentary, fleeting and amorphous” social
association (that does not lack coordination), while the corporation is an
“organised, hierarchical, lasting and regular” multitude. Nevertheless, in the
historical passage from one to the other, it is important to see the result of
an evolution, for there is no difference of nature between them (one rational
and the other one irrational, for instance). This evolution consisted in com-
plexifying goals and means, in multiplying hierarchies, as well as in dividing
functions.5 A corporation forms on the basis of diversified and articulated
imitative chains that repeat over time. They are then memorious social con-
figurations that register their practices and produce their own traditions.
They also have diverse degrees of internal differentiation or, so to speak,
“differentiated structures”, that is co-adapted specific and regular imitative
lines. Hence, corporations are just associations of mimetically communicated

individuals, but these bonds are more stable and enduring than in crowds.
They are also more complicated and less intense, less fast and more regular.
To deepen the counterpoint, Tarde states that corporations are cleverer
and less emotional than masses. This is due to the fact that in the former the
distance among bodies, and especially psychic distance, is larger than in the
latter. We already know that ideas that flow within the multitude are simple
and intense. We should add that they are also more sensitive than abstract.
Therefore, Tarde argues that the multitude is generally speaking inferior in
intelligence (and morality) than the average of its members. The individual
plotted within the crowd is more passionate but also more gullible and deter-
mined than when she is out of it. In contrast, the corporation would be more
intelligent than its members taken separately because it basically consists of a
coordinated ensemble of several ideas and goals in motion. Accordingly, gen-
darmes would be less smart than the gendarmerie. Something similar happens
in terms of wills: a regiment is braver than its soldiers. As non-organised, or
at least non-disciplined collectivities, crowds are more unstable, more for-
getful, more mood-changing or atmospheric. Hence, corporations go much
further than mobs “whether for doing good or evil” (Tarde, 1893: 356).
The aforementioned enables us to state that if there is a soul of the multi-
tude, there is also a spirit of the corporation. And this is not only a sense of
belonging of its members, but rather a characteristic way of collective func-
tioning, permanently active in each of them.
Tarde affirms that the crowd “elevates” to a corporation through a series
of intermediate stages, although he never investigates them thoroughly,
pointing out exactly what these stages are. However, the important thing
is that there is no unbridgeable civilising hiatus between these two forms of
association. Rather, there is both historical progression and transformation
between them—or, in Tarde’s terms, evolution. Even more relevant and coun-
terintuitive is the fact that crowds are by no means the sociological oppo-
site of corporations. In contrast, there is continuity and reversibility between
both types of collective economies. At any time, a corporation can become
a multitude—and vice versa—because they are kinds of the same genre. The
modern enterprise, the university, the scientific laboratory are all hypnotic
milieus, like any other social milieu. There, as everywhere else, individuals
copy examples more or less consciously—that is to say, they repeat formulas
and proceedings together with the convictions, goals and values these exam-
ples always carry. Among other things, this means that corporations are not
merely instrumental machines, no matter how elevated their degree of ration-
alisation is. They are also made of flows of beliefs and desires and, therefore,
of suggestions and contagions, customs and fashions, magnetisers and mag-
netised. As ensembles of inventions, they have a logic and a teleology, and the
rationality they hold is that given by their rector syllogisms. Undoubtedly, all
this is expressed in their rules, hierarchies and functional divisions. However,

there are also leaderships, more or less effective hegemonies, and more or less
tight cohesions that make the most abstract and impersonal corporation a
dynamic composition of collective passions. This shows that every domina-
tion is at least partially charismatic and every social reproduction is more or
less contingent.
The public, the mass media

Tarde was one of the first to notice the public as a singular phenomenon
and to conceptualise it as a type of social configuration different from all the
forms of association known before it appeared at the dawn of Modernity. He
understands it as a form of social relation, carrier of a far-reaching civilising
transformation; an event analogous to the emergence of the family, the mass,
the corporation and the nation. It is also a collunarium of all of them. That is
to say, it represents an evolution of the configuration of sociality, more subtle
and dynamic than the former. The public co-exists and overlaps with the old-
est forms of social groupings and has not stopped increasing in importance
and diversity since the invention of the press. Such is Tarde’s socio-historical
thesis. Regarding his properly sociological conceptualisation, Tarde argues
that the public must be understood as “a purely spiritual collectivity, as a dis-
semination of physically separated individuals whose cohesion is completely
mental” (Tarde, 1901). Such is the seeming paradox of a social grouping that
consists in the tight (physic) union of physically separated individuals. As an
oxymoron, the public gathers characters that common sense substantialises
and assumes as opposite: dispersion and cohesion, distance and proximity,
difference and similarity.
It is a social configuration—a group properly speaking—emancipated
from the requirements of co-presence that were a necessary condition in pre-
ceding forms of association. But also if every social relation is an inter-mental
action at-a-distance, the public is then the most purely social form of relation
known so far. It does not demand individuals that make it up to see, touch
or listen to each other, or to gather (even from time to time) to reaffirm their
unity and verify their shared belonging. Moreover, the frequency and inten-
sity of this bond is indifferent to factors such as the weather, geography and
population. The public is then a deterritorialised group that exists as a men-
tal reality and works literally at a distance. For this reason, it is indefinitely
extensible and can reach planetary dimensions.
Here, like everywhere else, the social bond is made up by the transmission
of beliefs and desires, but this is a “contactless contagion”—or, better yet, a
contagion with non-direct contact. Their propagation is not face-to-face, but
rather happens when separate individuals read, listen or see the same mes-
sages. This means that there is no public without communication media, in
particular media of transmission at a distance of beliefs and desires. There-

fore, Tarde identifies a series of crucial inventions for the emergence and
developments of publics. In the first place, the printing press, the journalism
and the telegraph and, later, the radio, the cinema and the telephone. Nor
does he forget the importance the railway, power lines, cars and roads have
in this, which is an excellent example of the coupling and feedback dynamic
of diverse and complementary inventions. For Tarde, it is clear that the cru-
cial role is here played by what today are called communication and infor-
mation technologies. It happens that the “transport of force at a distance is
nothing compared to the transport of thought at a distance” (Tarde, 1890:
204). This is because thought and feeling are the social forces par excellence.
Mass media should be then seen as drivers not only because they provide
the necessary infrastructure for the formation of publics—like wires conduct
electricity—but also because they transmit certain specific (and not other)
contents in very specific directions. This fact acquires its full dimension when
journalism and advertising are understood as essential elements in the media
devices, forming and directing publics. In Tarde’s terms, we may say that
there are no publics without contagion means, but neither without meneurs,
that is to say, without agitators, influencers and leaders, that put in motion
and canalise the imitative process that is in the root of every public.
It is necessary to insist on the following point because it is the key of
all this problem: neither the access nor the frequent attendance of the same
mass media or communicator by diverse individuals is enough to form a pub-
lic. The reception of the same specific content by diverse channels is neither
enough. Its requisite to exist is stronger than the mere co-existence of simi-
lar individual activities. A public emerges when these individuals “abandon
themselves” to the same idea and/or passion communicated by these media
devices. And this process is (at least partially) unconscious. This is equivalent
to saying that publics arise when individuals cease to be individuals. It is
important to understand that if the public is a singular type of social forma-
tion it is because here, as in the other cases, “the whole does not equal the
sum of its parts”. Therefore, Tarde speaks of “the spirit of the public” as he
had before spoken of the “spirit of masses” following Le Bon. The difference
with Le Bon, and with Durkheim, is that Tarde prevents us from the substan-
tialist temptation of conceiving it as a new being. Rather, it is a new type of
process or relation in which individuals participate, unmaking, or at least,
transforming themselves partially. But this means that Tarde also prevents us
from the atomist illusion of believing that there is nothing else than individu-
als (i.e. another kind of substantialism).
In the public everything happens like in the mass and, in fact, both are forms
of multitude. They entail a series of basic features and also present variations
worthy of attention. The public is a dispersed and fully deterritorialised mul-
titude that forms and functions thanks to the same type of mimetic economy
as masses. We already know its principles: simplification, unique sense, inten-

sification and acceleration of the communicated beliefs and desires—in this
case, at a geographical distance. We also know its consequences: a tenden-
tial dissolution of individualities in a community with simple and powerful
convictions and emotions that dominate the intelective, affective and even
perceptual processes of its components during the contagion.
Like in the mass, the relation that intertwines the diverse individuals of
a public does not consist in the harmonisation of their diversity (a chord),
but rather in the inter-reflecting and confusing “in a simple and powerful
unison” (Tarde, 1890a). This cannot happen without the action of certain
individuals who lead and catalyse the collective flow. As in the mass, the
feedback processes are multiple. The potency of the public grows when it
propagates within a greater number of individuals, but the consciousness or
semiconsciousness (the reflect) of that simultaneous massivity increases even
more that collective power. As masses, publics fall in love with their own
spectacle—with the powerful view that they themselves configure. Accord-
ingly, they are also intolerant, proud and conceited and “Under the name of
public opinion, they believe that everything must yield to them, even truth
when it opposes them” (Tarde, 1901: 36). Thus, in the era of masses and
publics, Tarde asks: “Isn’t it visible that the feeling of restraint is lost as the
spirit of the group, the spirit of the public, even the spirit of the multitude,
develops in our contemporary societies by the acceleration of currents of
mental circulation?” (Tarde, 1901: 38)
That collective unanimity is always partial, not only because it is tempo-
ral, even though it can last for centuries (the public of the Bible), but rather
because it is primarily specific (the public of the Bible). This specificity is
then thematic: they are always certain beliefs and desires that form and keep
the public alive. We should then speak of publics in plural and in particular:
political, economic, religious, scientific, philosophical, aesthetical and so on.
We should also remember that, inside those categories, we may find a diver-
sity of precise currents which are the ones that matter.
Where appropriate, we can speak of publics related to any specific type of
economic activity and link them to the social division or labour. There are
business, worker and peasant publics. However, it is a mistake to assume
that these are publics economically determined according to their members’
social class or stratum. With this, we would lose sight of a fundamental
feature of this kind of association: they are un-stratified and non-stratifying
social formations. Publics always originate from organised social groups of
which they are the “inorganic transformation”. Moreover, their expansion
is always declassifying for it intertwines individuals with very diverse origins
and conditions, putting them in intense resonance. This makes the public a
social group with blurred borders, emancipated from the constrictions of
lineage, territory or race as well as of its class and institutional embeddings,
that is, from the organic determinations that correspond to corporations,

families, nations and so forth. They are then properly transversal social
formations.
According to Tarde, to become public is a generalised trend of Modern
social life and its expansion and diversification is promoted by the inven-
tion and development of (interspiritual) communication devices. Modern
communication technologies—to which contemporary ones may be easily
added—transport a big number of beliefs and desires over great distances
and with an explosive speed. If the kind of experience of time that this social
association implies is added to the aforementioned, we may then understand
why all that is solid melts into publics. This experience is related not only to
the technological devices, but also to those particular inventions that journal-
ism and press are. As Tarde shows, what characterises press is the produc-
tion of actuality and a passion for “the present time”. The instantaneous (or
hyper-fast) reflection among the individuals communicated by the press, as
well as the speed at which messages follow each other, generates a sort of
social vertigo. Therefore, Tarde (1901: 124) writes:
The press mobilises everything that it touches and vitalizes it. There exists
no Church, however immutable in appearance, which, from the moment
that it submits to the mode of continuous publication, does not develop
the signs of internal mutations impossible to hide. To be convinced of this
efficacy, at once dissolving and regenerating, inherent in a newspaper, we
need only compare the political parties before the existence of the press to
those of the present time. Were they not then less ardent but more durable,
less alive but more tenacious, more fixed in their dimensions and more
solid, more resistant to efforts to renew or fragment them? From the cen-
turies old opposition, so sharp and so persistent, between the Whigs and
Tories, what remains today in England?6
Finally, it is important to consider that within publics we may also identify

the complex relation of feedback and reversibility between leaders and fol-
lowers we find in the rest of the social configurations. The agitator (journal-
ist, publicist, writer etc.) that puts in motion and drives in a certain way these
social forces that publics are, must later follow them if he wants to remain
in her leadership position. This places them in a certain position of submis-
sion. They are then “Masters turned into serfs”, who also often sink in the
torrential waters they made arise or unblocked.
Evolution and metamorphosis

In Tarde’s view, the configuration of an individual—that is of a psychic field
of relative coherence and determination—takes place fundamentally with the
formation of the functions of judgement, will and memory, precisely there

where there was (and still persists) a biologically, physically and metaphysi-
cally excessive and porous body. This occurs at the heart of a plural social
field, through imitation of others and of oneself. The unilateral direction
modality of imitation describes properly the first steps of individual socialisa-
tion, and the most elementary form of the social relation. But it is insufficient
to account for the formation of the individual as the (morphological?) config-
uration proper to post-traditional societies. This type of social configuration
does not result from simple imitation, but rather from a process of multiple
imitations, irradiated from very diverse sources all at once. Therefore, Tarde
finds in the city the most appropriate ecosystem for the individual as social
configuration to be able to germinate and unfold—and from which the indi-
vidual as model will spread out imitatively across the most diverse social
spaces, transforming them. And this because urban life is characterised, in
the first place, by reciprocal imitation of many different beliefs and desires.
Thus, this individual emerges from bonds of mutual assimilation with others,
but in which this cross assimilation produces the increasing complexity of
the “internal states” of the participants in the process. The city as a weave of
plural communications (or polyphonic ensemble) allows for a wide range
of variations of the individual configurations unfolded within it. The diver-
sity of its mimetic currents creates the conditions for equally diverse individu-
alisations. If we add worldwide expansion of urban life to this, it becomes
clear why Tarde understands the individual as the most refined result, the
most elaborate and differentiated social form that the long civilising process
has produced.
Each individual is therefore the outcome of a specific regime of relations,
a reality which social life produces as a singular and active configuration.
It is necessary to add here that social life also decomposes these individuals
every time that they become part of a multitude, a public or a corporation.
Assembled in these different social formations, the individual is regularly
“un-done”, precisely for those other formations to function as such. This
does not only take place periodically, when she becomes part of an amor-
phous group (the celebration or the revolt). It takes place daily, many times
a day, when they are part of an organised group (the office, the factory). It
also happens when they become public through diverse interfaces, and when
currents of hope or fear drag them imperceptibly. Therefore, the individual
is an intermittent social reality, intertwined in diverse relational economies.
An infinitesimal approach shows each individual as a configuration of diffuse
limits, entangled in a reversible continuity with the rest of the social forma-
tions active in the social field.
Each of these configurations has its way of being, so to speak. That is it
has its own typical structuring and dynamics, and is far from depending on
the wills or reasons of the individuals who conform them, taken as such. As
FIGURE 5.1 Continuity and metamorphosis of social formations
already seen, Tarde refers to a soul of the multitude as well as to a spirit of the
public and of corporations. Each of these social configurations, functioning as
collective minds, leads with precision and efficacy the individual minds (and
bodies) they envelop. But this does not mean that they must be conceived as
transcendent beings, that is entities with a supra-individual existence. From
the infinitesimal point of view, they are social relation regimes that do not
exist outside the socio-psycho-somatic singularities through which they run.
In this respect, they are inter-mental and trans-individual realities that fold
and unfold, following different rhythms and producing different states.
Notess
1 Thus, a manual that used to be a classic in France reads, “quantitative variations
of these elements imply changes in the social structure, in the group’s morphologi-
cal configuration in a broad sense. Such is the basic principle of social morphology
proper” (Cuvillier, 1963: 366).
2 The position of the Durkheimian school is summarised in the classical work by
Halbwachs (1938). On the relation of the Durkheimnian morphology with the
metaphor of the organism and on Tarde’s critiques to this tradition, see Vianna
Vargas (2000).
3 Foucault (1995) and Donzelot (1979) have pointed out the main features of the
production of madness, delinquency and also childhood and colonised cultures as
alterities and objects of intervention at the end of the European 19th century. On
the figure of non-conformist deviant women in this context, see for instance Dean
(1992). For a comprehensive approach to the history of the concept of crowd see
Moscovici (1981), van Ginneken (1992) and Borch (2012).
4 Moreover: “Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circum-
stances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from
those of the individuals composing it. . . A collective mind is formed, doubtless
transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has
thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised
crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a
single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds” (Le Bon,
1908: 26).
5 Between the mass and the corporation, Tarde locates the sects—to which he gives
an important historical and sociological role. Sighele (1898: 46) defines sects in a
strictly Tardean way as follows: “The sect is a selective and permanent crowd. The
mass is a transient sect which has not chosen its members. The sect is the chronic
form of the mass; the mass is the aggravated form of the sect . . . The sect is, then,
the first crystallisation of any doctrine. From the amorphous and confused state in
which the mass manifests itself, any idea must be concretised in the well-defined
form of the sect, unless it later becomes a party, a school, or a scientific, politi-
cal or religious church . . . It is the first stage in which the human group, leaving
the undifferentiated state of the unknown, varied and anonymous mass, rises to a
specification and integration which can then lead to the highest and most perfect
human group: the state”. The type of social formation that Tarde calls “sect” is
what Canetti (1978) and Deleuze and Guattari (1980) later called “pack”. For a
thematisation of the crowd-pack relation in a sense similar to the one we have dis-
cussed here, see Brighenti (2010).
6 And he continues: “In our time, the parties are in the process of perpetual alteration,
of regeneration, and of spontaneous generation. Thus, there is less and less worry
and concern about their platforms, for it is well known that if they come to power,
they will do so only after being thoroughly transformed” (Tarde, 1901: 124).
APPENDIX
Cartographical note
Gabriel Tarde was born in the small city of Sarlat, in a Catholic family. He
received a Jesuit education, studied science and literature in high school and
later attended law school in Toulouse. He got his degree in Paris in 1866. In
1867 he started working as the assistant secretary of a judge in Sarlat and,
in November 1875, he was appointed as an investigating judge. In addition
to his career as a magistrate, Tarde carried out intellectual activities in litera-
ture, philosophy and law (especially criminal law and criminology). His first
productions were distributed within the field of these “three cultures” and
they are fundamental in the development of his sociology. Tarde’s first pub-
lication was a collection of poems titled “Contes et Poèmes” in 1879 and he
continued writing poems and plays throughout his life, some of which were
published in local newspapers. In 1884, he wrote Fragments d’histoire future,
a quite successful novel that was published in 1896. This novel describes a
world where the sun has gone out and humans begin a new underground
civilisation. In the foreword to the English edition, H. G. Wells (1905: 16)
underlines the key of this book and of all the others that will be later written
by Tarde:
He rejects the proposition that “society consists in an exchange of ser-

vices” with the confidence of a man who has thought it finely out. He gives
out clearly what so many of us are beginning dimly perhaps to apprehend,
that “society consists in the exchange of reflections”. The passages sub-
séquent to this pronouncement will be the seed of many interesting devel-
opments in any mind sufficiently attuned to his. They constitute the body,
the serious reality to which all the rest of this little book is so much dress.1
114 Appendix
Although having several influences, in the field of philosophy Tarde mainly

relies on Leibniz in order to develop what he calls “ma neo-monadologie”.
In his writings of youth,—La Différence Universelle, La Repétition et
L’Evolution des Phénomenes, La Variation Universal, Les Possibles—he
develops the metaphysics of infinitesimal difference which would be the foun-
dations of his sociology. Milet (1970), for whom Tarde is an authentic phi-
losopher, summarises the foundations of his system in three basic principles:
(1) the difference that characterises the beings, which reverses the classical
privilege of identity over difference and affirms that “to exist is to differ”;
(2) the pre-existence of the possibles, through which everything that exists is
the actualisation of a virtual infinite or that means that “to exist is to go from
the possible to the real”; (3) the infinitesimal character of the real, that is to
say, “to exist is to integrate the infinite in the finite”.
These principles have a cosmological character; they imply a general
vision where relation and heterogeneity are the generative bases of nature.
That is why Montebello (2003) places Tarde altogether with Ravaisson,
Nietzsche and Bergson, who worked in the production of “another meta-
physics”. Tarde’s great masters, located in the intersection of philosophy
and science, were Maine de Biran and Cournot. Tarde refers to the former
as the “greatest spiritual psychologist of our century” and inherits his con-
siderations about hypnosis and somnambulism, as well as about the role
of tiny perceptions in psychic life. From the latter, whose work considers a
“sack of seeds”, he retains specially the role of the contingent, the acciden-
tal, in nature and in society.2 In this context, Spencer is for Tarde a privi-
leged polemic reference—not only in philosophy but also in sociology. Very
early, Tarde studied the works of this English thinker, sharing his evolutionist
vision and criticising severely his “first principle” (the law of homogeneity)
and his unilinear perspective of evolution. He also questions his determinism
and organicism—mainly regarding society. Some years later, he will make
these critiques also extensive to Durkheim. Darwin was another fundamental
reference; Tarde considered him not only a scientist but also a thinker who
produced researches with major consequences. From his work, he retained
and emphasised above all the comprehension of evolution as a time-varying
process which follows branching pathways and where hazard plays a deter-
mining role. Establishing the importance of Adam Smith and other Scottish
thinkers in Tarde’s work is something yet to be done. However, we already
know that the theory of sympathy as a basic form of social relation devel-
oped by Hume and continued by Smith presents considerable coincidences
with Tarde’s imitation theory.3
In 1880, Tarde began to collaborate regularly with numerous articles in
the Revue Philosophique, which allowed him to gain recognition in the field
of philosophy. Simultaneously, he started exchanging correspondence with
Théodule Ribot, director of this journal and a well-known thinker at that
Appendix 115
time. In one of his first letters, he suggests Ribot the creation of an “asso-
ciation of philosophers that, every year, during the holidays, would go on a
collective summer retreat, a kind of academy in the ancient style”. From that
moment on, there were frequent intellectual exchanges between the two phi-
losophers, as well as an almost uninterrupted publication of articles. Between
1880 and 1893, he published more than twenty texts there, the first of which
was titled “La croyance et le désir, la possibilité de leur mesure”.
In 1887, while working for the General Administration of Prisons, Tarde
also started collaborating with the magazine Archives de l’anthropologie
criminelle et des sciences pénales. Later, in 1893, he became its director when
the journal changed its name to Archives d’anthropologie criminelle de crimi-
nologie, et de psychologie normale et pathologique. He published numerous
articles there, most of them related to criminal law and criminology. This
journal was for Tarde a front of opposition to the Italian Criminal Anthropol-
ogy and a means of dissemination and recognition of his ideas. Under Lom-
broso’s aegis and influenced by French positivists and Darwin’s evolutionary
theory, this school founded its propositions on the fundamental postulate of
biological determination in deviance and crime. In fact, this school supported
the typology developed by Lombroso in L’uomo delinquente (1876): alien-
ated criminals, habitual criminals, occasional criminals, criminals of passion
and born criminals. According to Tarde, crime is a (mimetic) social phenom-
enon, and his divergence with the Italian anthropologists became clear in
1886 with the publication of La criminalité compare. There Gabriel Tarde
developed his considerations regarding criminal statistics as well as an origi-
nal theory of criminal responsibility. Furthermore, the strong controversy
around the notion of the “criminal type” placed Tarde as the main opponent
of the biologicist and psychologist conception of crime. According to him,
the criminal type is just a professional type. The recognition granted to him
in the nascent field of criminology is symbolically represented by his appoint-
ment as honorary president during a congress in Brussels in 1892.4
From 1890 onwards, Tarde resolutely turned towards his sociological
concerns—although without forgetting criminology. Proof of this is that,
in that very same year, he published simultaneously La Philosophie Pénale
and Les Lois de L’imitation, which quickly succeeded both in France and
abroad, making the magistrate of Sarlat an intellectual celebrity. Les Lois de
L’imitation was quickly translated into English, Russian, German and Spanish
and was the object of several celebratory reviews. Delighted with this, Tarde
reports in his diary: “Brunetière has admiration for me (he told me) that my
Lois de L’imitation are among the 10 works of this century”.5 This book is
the first of the three large volumes where he elaborates the basis of his general
sociology. In it, Tarde sets out the essential aspects of his sociological syntax
regarding imitation and invention. Moreover, he establishes the logical and
extra-logical causes of imitative propagation of any invention. The second
116 Appendix
book of the trilogy is La Logique Sociale, which appeared in 1893. There,

we can find an analysis of the social spirit (or social mind) based on the con-
cepts of social logic and social teleology. Here, Tarde seeks to understand
how the multitude of currents that weave social life configure institutions or
systems of relative balance and duration. The first part of the book focuses
on theorising these questions and on unveiling the laws of invention, while
the second one is devoted to their application in language, religion, political
economy, art and “the heart”. The third volume is L’Opposition Univer-
selle. Essai d’une théorie des contraries, published in1897. He considered this
work as “a promenade of the spirit” due to all the phenomena of opposition
that occur in nature and in human life. With the development of the notion
of opposition, Tarde completed his ternary approach to the social: repetition
(imitation), opposition (counter-differentiation), adaptation (invention). In
1898, Tarde published a little volume titled Les Lois Sociales, where he offers
a synoptic exposition of his sociological doctrine.
During this period, there are also several works in which Tarde addressed
specific problems, the fundamental thesis of imitation and its circular rela-
tion with invention and opposition. For instance, in Les transformations du
droit. Étude sociologique (1893), he aimed to deepen the general theory of
imitation, adaptation and diffusion studying the legal field. Furthermore,
there are a few books composed of articles published mostly in the Revue
philosophique and in Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle. These are Les
Études pénales et sociales (1892), Essais et mélanges sociologiques (1895)
and Etudes de psychologie sociale (1898a)
Tarde in Paris
In 1893, Tarde was invited to write a report on the organisation of criminal
statistics in France. On 26 January 1894, he was promoted to the Ministry of
Justice in Paris: “Antonin Dubost, the Minister of Justice at that time, with-
out knowing him, called me and spontaneously offered me the appointment
of head of the department of judicial statistics in his ministry. I accepted, and
I did well” (Tarde, 1904: 333). At the same time, his career as a magistrate
was crowned with the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor, awarded on 14
July 1895 by the Government and the Ministry of Justice for his twenty-six
years of service in the judiciary and public administration. Likewise, Tarde
received the distinctions of Commander of the Order of Vladimir of Russia
and of the Order of Venezuela.
Tarde’s essential task at the Ministry was to summarise the judicial events
that took place in France after 1891. The functions and area of study of his
department of judicial statistics were essentially linked to mercurials, general
accounts of the administration of criminal, civil and commercial justice, the
collection of judicial statistics published abroad and certificates of judicial
Appendix 117
records. Tarde compiled the material in twelve volumes that appeared in

1896, preceded by comments linked to the results of the statistical analyses.
However, the functions of a bureaucrat did not seem to please him much.
In contrast to the isolation in Sarlat, Tarde led a hectic life in the heart of
Parisian society, which allowed him to escape from the austere ministry. He
adapted perfectly well to the rhythm of the worldly and cultural occupa-
tions of the capital, frequented the salons assiduously and was recognised
there as an important personality. Tarde was highly appreciated, welcomed
and introduced in the great majority of the influential places and social cir-
cles of the capital city: “In Paris, his conversation is a party at every soirée
he attends; attraction emanates from him” (Alfred Thorns, “Notice sur la
vie et les oeuvres de Gabriel Tarde”). At the same time, Tarde was part of
numerous intellectual associations as the Society of Statisticians; the General
Society of Prisons, the International Institute of Sociology and the Society
of Sociology founded by René Worms, and the Philosophy Society. He also
took part in several scientific congresses and various teaching institutions: the
Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales, the École libre de Sciences Politiques and
the École Russe des Hautes Études Sociales (from 1900 onwards).
At this time, sociology struggled to establish itself as an autonomous sci-
entific knowledge, and Tarde sought to introduce the infinitesimal point of
view in it. In this regard, he was Èmile Durkheim’s main rival and the famous
debate between these two sociologists was a competition for the establish-
ment of a conceptual framework of reference. One starts from the minute
and the difference; the other begins from the whole and the identity. This
dispute, which lasted more than ten years, was full of misunderstandings and
many times below the theoretical level of these formidable opponents. At the
beginning, Tarde (1895) published a review of The Division of Labour in
the Revue Philosophique, where he criticised Durkheim’s unilinear concep-
tion of social evolution, as well as his neglect of the role of social conflicts
in it. Moreover, he affirmed that the division of labour was not explained by
the increasing number or density of societies, but rather by the inventions
that diversified social life. And, what is more important, Tarde discussed
the opposition between organic and mechanical solidarity. That is to say,
he questioned the conceptual base of Durkheim’s entire text. According to
Tarde, the difference between both solidarities presupposed the community
of values, and the division of labour itself did not moralise individuals. Dur-
kheim’s response is found in the first chapter of The Rules of Sociological
Method (1895), where he argues that social facts are general because they are
collective and coercive—and not vice versa. He also added that his definition
of “social fact” was indeed very different from “Tarde’s ingenious system”.
For Durkheim, there was no doubt that every social fact was imitated, but
this was due to its social or, what is the same, mandatory character. Tarde
answered in the 1st International Congress of Sociology in 1894, arguing
118 Appendix
that the external character of the social fact did not apply equally to all indi-
viduals. He also contested its external character and insisted that social phe-
nomena are transmitted from individual to individual—something that had
already been admitted by Durkheim himself, although asserting a “theory
of emanation”. In Tarde’s view, social phenomena are immanent to the indi-
viduals associated and are not more exterior to them than “the wave to the
water drops that compose it”. Finally, he emphasises that the Durkheimnian
definition of social fact is limited because it only considers hierarchical or
unequal relations, ignoring peer-to-peer relationships. For Tarde, Durkheim
is a prisoner of Medieval realism and supports all this reasoning in the false
belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We already know
that Tarde contested this assumption because he starts from a different one:
the element is always more complex than the ensemble it composes. We also
know that he does not deny the existence of a “social reality”—as it is con-
firmed in an article in 1901—but this is made of inter-psychic states and only
exists in the individuals it communicates. Therefore, in the heat of the contro-
versy, he affirms that “separated from the individual, the social is nothing”.
In his review of Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, Tarde (1895a)
attacks his opponent’s positions fiercely, and perhaps inappropriately. He
mainly concentrates on the thesis regarding crime, normality and social
health developed by his adversary in this cardinal work. For Tarde, Durkheim
considered that the increase in crime rates in that time was normal and also
useful because it prevented the social morality from punishing insignificant
acts. Moreover, he attributed to Durkheim the idea that crime and genius
were two aspects of the very same mental status and the pre-disposition to be
interested only in low and violent crimes. Durkheim (1895a) denied almost
all of these assertions in an article titled “Crime and social health”. However,
he reaffirmed his postulates on crime as a normal social phenomenon for
finding it linked to social life’s fundamental conditions.
The most serious and systematic critiques that Durkheim makes to his
opponent are found in The Suicide (1897). In that book, there is an entire
chapter devoted to discarding the imitative phenomenon as the explanatory
cause or factor of suicide—and of any other social phenomenon. In fact,
the book is an attempt to demolish the individualist explanation of social
actions, of which Tarde would be an exponent. As we already know, when
this book was written, Tarde was the director of the Department of Statistics,
in charge of, among other things, compiling the annual figures of suicides in
France. There, Durkheim got the data he needed for his research with Tarde’s
endorsement and courtesy. At that time, the conflict had not yet escalated
to its critical point. Once the book was published, Durkheim sent a copy
to Tarde, who later communicated to him his intention to refute it. The last
milestone of this controversy took place in an on-site encounter between
both thinkers in the École de Hautes Études Sociales in 1903. As far as we
Appendix 119
know, Durkheim addressed the problem of the division between philosophy

and sociology, as well as the role of auxiliary disciplines. Then, Tarde spoke
about the study of social phenomena, arguing that these should be addressed
by what he called “intermental psychology” or “elemental sociology”—
necessary propaedeutic to any social science. Finally, the debate itself took
place. Tarde started it by admitting the value of the comparative method for
the deduction of general laws, however insisting on the importance of the
microscopical elements in society. Durkheim replied that general sociology
could only be the synthesis of the work of particular sciences, and he argued
that this result could not be obtained through inter-mental psychology. He
insisted that the conditions to establish what an elemental social fact is was
not yet met. Tarde’s response was that general sociological laws could be
formulated, even when scientific disciplines were not definitely constituted,
and he repeated that there were only individual acts in social life, challeng-
ing Durkheim to refute him. In his words: “The debate between us is that
of nominalism and scholastic realism. I am a nominalist. There can only be
individual actions and interactions. The rest is nothing but a metaphysical
entity and mysticism”. Durkheim refused to comment on this, arguing that
this was a problem he had not treated and that had nothing to do with the
debate itself. With this reluctance to discuss “general terms or problems”,
Durkheim in fact avoided treating fundamental or paradigmatic problems.6
Around 1900, Tarde’s institutional consecration was completed. A year
earlier, he had been nominated by Théodule Ribot and Louis Liard for the
Chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France. He requested to trans-
form it into a chair of sociology, but this was rejected by the board of pro-
fessors. In January, he was offered the chair again, and he then accepted.
However, his first courses devoted to inter-mental psychology and economic
psychology denote a clear desire to orient his audience towards sociology.
Louis Léger, Professor at the Collège de France, who supported Tarde’s
appointment, recalled that
[h]e was competing with a fearsome adversary, Bergson, and this competi-
tion discouraged him a little. I was one of those who encouraged him to
persevere. I do not ignore, I said, the merits of your opponent and I hope
that we can have him one day at the Collège. But Bergson already belongs
to the world of teaching, he is a teacher at the École Normale, he can
exert on young minds the action of his science and his talent. You, you are
confined to your office; you must go out: we must give you the public that
you lack. Persevere.
(Léger, 1910: 57)
From then on, extricated from his duties in the statistics office of the
Ministry of Justice, Gabriel Tarde devoted himself to the application of his
120 Appendix
sociological ideas in several specific fields, such as politics and economics. In

1899, Tarde published a work titled Les transformations du pouvoir and in
1902 he edited La Psychologie économique. These two works are largely the
result of a series of lectures: the first one gathers the lectures held at the École
Libre des Sciences Politiques, titled “Élément de la Sociologie politique”
(1896), and at the Collège libre des Sciences sociales, titled “Les principes
de la sociologie politiques” (1898). The second one gathers the courses titled
“Psychologie économique”, given at the Collège de France (1900–1901) and
at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (1902).
Events such as the Panama financial scandal (1892), the anarchist attacks
(1892–1894) and the Dreyfus affair (1894–1899) inspired a series of impor-
tant works where Tarde studies publics, the press, masses and sects. Faced
with the serious political crisis surrounding the Dreyfus affair, he published
a series of articles in which he formulated the concepts of “public” and
“opinion”, and highlighted the relationship between the press and public
opinion. Gathered in a book titled L’ Opinion et la foule (1901), the recep-
tion of these articles in the 20th century recognise Tarde as the first theorist
of the society of communication and networks.7 According to Tarde, as an
evolved form of multitude, the public is a “purely spiritual community”, “a
dissemination of physically separated individuals among whom the cohe-
sion is entirely mental”, or yet, a “dispersed multitude, where the influ-
ence of the spirits, of one on the other, becomes an action at a distance, of
increasingly greater distances” (Tarde, 1901: 29). Tarde showed the role
and effectiveness of the newspaper in the formation of publics and opinion,
and he also underlined that the emergence of this and other communica-
tion mass media (telegraph, radio) enabled the “transport of thought at a
distance”. Tarde (1901: 38) affirmed that the public “is the social group of
the future . . . I do not agree with a vigorous writer, Le Bon, that our time is
the era of the multitudes. It is the era of the public or of the publics, which
is quite different”.
In 1902, La Psychologie économique was published.8 This work is largely
the result of a series of courses given at the Collège de France (1900–1901)
and the École libre des Sciences politiques (1902). There, Tarde tested his
concepts in a field that may seem completely alien to them. However, Tarde
finds that also this realm of social life is ruled by the laws of invention and
imitation: every economy is an economy of beliefs and desires. Thus, he for
instance writes:
An industry, born from an invention, or rather, always, from a group of

successive inventions, is only viable to the extent that the desire for con-
sumption to which it corresponds has sufficiently spread from individual to
individual by means of an inter-psychological action which is fascinating
Appendix 121
to study; and the development of that industry is entirely subordinated to

the propagation of this desire.
(quoted by Barry & Thrift, 2007: 518)
At the end of his life Gabriel Tarde was at the peak of his career. Suffer-
ing from ophthalmologic and health problems, he died on 13 May 1904, at
the age of 61, in his apartment from Bourdonnais Avenue in Paris. His last
writings on “Inter-psychology” systematised his sociology and were devoted
also to the “abnormalities of inter-mental action” and “infantile inter-
psychology”. Tarde left a diverse body of work that manifests the richness
and independence of his intellectual path. In Bergson’s words:
[W]hat was impressive about him was the unpredictability of a fantasy

that multiplied new ideas, original and brilliant views. But above all, it
reveals the unity and depth of his doctrine. A broad thought sustains the
work and guides it in this direction. . . Sociology and psychology, law
and politics, moral philosophy and general philosophy, most of the great
problems have attracted Tarde at different times. Or rather, they attracted
him all together.
(Bergson, 1955: 213)
Tarde in North America

After Gabriel Tarde’s death, his children sought to continue their father’s
legacy and the dissemination of his work. Alfred de Tarde, the philosopher
and mathematician’s second son, founded the Revue de Psychologie Sociale
in 1907, which had a very short existence. In 1909, Alfred also edited a small
biography of his father, along with an anthology of his work, both com-
missioned by Henri Bergson—who can be considered Tarde’s successor at
the College de France. Six years after the jurist from Sarlat’s death, Amadee
Matagrin published a comprehensive study titled The Social Psychology of
Gabriel Tarde. Moreover, during the following decade, Tarde’s work was
addressed in some psychology and philosophy textbooks. However, beyond
this, Tarde’s tradition and his ideas did not take flight in France and were
relegated at best, if not forgotten. As mentioned before, one of the main rea-
sons for this was that Durkheim’s way of understanding and doing sociology
ended up imposing itself in this scientific and academic milieu.
In contrast, Tarde’s ideas were highly influential in other parts of the
world. His books travelled outside the French borders and had a strong
resonance, being even translated into Spanish, German, English and Rus-
sian. Reconstructing the map of the Tardean paradigm’s influence outside
France would be itself a Tardean exercise. We should have to trace the lines
122 Appendix
of communication that conveyed his writings, mapping how his ideas dis-
seminated forming a public. We should also have to describe the ways in
which his concepts were adapted and modified, the mutations that occurred
in each of these lines of diffusion. Here, we will only be able to sketch how
some of these lines unfolded in North America.
The philosopher William James, one of the fathers of American pragma-
tism, coined the term “stream of consciousness” and described consciousness
as “an uninterrupted flow”. He once wrote that, in his Principles of Psychol-
ogy (1890), he saw things á la Tarde. However, the convergence between
both thinkers is much wider, above all, because for both of them nature is
“redundant and overabundant”—as Bergson (1955: 240) would say refer-
ring to the former. James and Tarde, as well as Bergson, were
committed to an ontology of movement, which relied on a very specific

way of inventing psychological matter. They were all members of the Insti-
tute for Psychical Research in Paris, established in 1900, and framed the
problem of personality through concepts derived from spiritualism, psy-
chic phenomenon and studies of hypnotic trance.
(Blackman, 2005)
Nowadays, studies on the relation of these authors are increasingly being

produced, and it is to be expected that other pragmatists—such as Dewey—
are added to this list.
James Mark Baldwin, a founding father of American psychology, was
also strongly influenced by the writings of the French author. In two of his
main books—Mental Development in the Child and in the Race (1894) and
Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1897)—imitation
is identified as the fundamental psychosocial phenomenon. In the preface
to Social and Ethical Interpretations, Baldwin writes: “I find my opinions
regarding the social function of imitation very close to those of Monsieur G.
Tarde”. This is not the end of the story as in 1898 Baldwin wrote a letter
to Tarde inviting him to patent the concept of “imitation” as the “Tarde-
Baldwin sociological principle”. In his view, they had both discovered the
concept at the same time and independently. However, Baldwin had no
qualms in requesting that the “psychological” dimension of the imitative
principle carry only his surname.
Tarde’s influence on the emergence and formation of the Anglo-Saxon
social psychology field is evident when we revise the works of William
McDougall—Introduction to Social Psychology—and of Edward Ross—
Social Psychology—both published in 1908. The circulation of both books
was really successful: around 143,000 copies were sold, which in turn multi-
plied the circulation of Tarde’s perspective itself. McDougall’s, a British phys-
iologist and psychologist who emigrated to the United States, was still very
Appendix 123
much linked to the 19th-century biological paradigm and focused on Man’s

“social instincts”. In spite of this, an entire chapter of the book is dedicated
to imitation, play and habit, with multiple references to Tarde. Ross, on the
other hand, was already a more properly Tardean thinker, distanced from
the organicist background. Evidence of this can be found in some lines of
the preface of his book, where he highlights “a sense of tribute to the genius
of Gabriel Tarde” and his “incomparable” The Laws of Imitation. Ross has
also written an earlier work, titled Social Control (1901), which at times
resembles a free translation of The Laws of Imitation.
The diffusion of Tarde’s ideas in North America did not occur without ups
and downs. The American edition that compiled Tarde’s work on imitation
was delayed for several years due to budgetary problems with the transla-
tor in charge. The book was finally published in 1903, and less than 2,000
copies were printed.9 Both in France and in the United States, Tarde’s ideas
circulated and were discussed in a small circle of scholars. Nevertheless, dur-
ing the years that followed, two works of Michael Davis greatly contributed
to spreading the Tardean perspective: his doctoral thesis “Gabriel Tarde.
Essay on Sociological Theory” (1906) and his book Psychological Interpre-
tations of Society (1909). Among other things, these publications gave rise to
an important discussion about “the social mind” between North American
scholars and were also part of the emerging field of sociology in the United
States.
In this discipline, Charles Elwood and Franklin Giddings, among many
others, have acknowledged Tarde’s singular genius. Charles Horton Cooley,
who coined the concept of “looking-glass self” and was a founding member
of the American Sociological Association, was also highly influenced by the
French author. Moreover, Albion Small—founder of the Department of Soci-
ology at the University of Chicago—characterised Tarde as “one of the most
predominant figures” of that novel science. George Herbert Mead, an expert
in his work, asserts that he admitted owing some aspects of his theories to
Tarde’s work (Strauss, 1956). Other heavy-weight names such as William
Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, authors of the famous The Polish Peas-
ant in America, would also acknowledge the same. A few years after the
publication of this book, the authors recognised that Tarde had developed a
highly consistent theory of the process of diffusion of cultural traits. In the
same line, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess wrote Introduction to the Sci-
ence of Sociology (1921), which has a notorious Tardean tone. This treatise,
which was key for the academic formation of various generations of Ameri-
can students, includes more references to Tarde than to prominent figures
such as Comte, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel. The Introduction concluded
with a contrast between social control and collective behaviour, terms in tune
with the constellation formed by the notions of public, sect and crowd that
Tarde had developed.10
124 Appendix
Delving into Park’s ideas, we find that his theoretical developments are
Tardean in their most important traits. This is visible since Park’s doctoral
thesis elaborated during his stay in Germany at the beginning of the 20th
century, titled Masse und Publikum—a title that is a clear allusion to Tarde’s
essay of “The Public and the Crowd”. Park based his interactionist sociol-
ogy on Tarde’s theory of imitation, understanding sociability as a process
that mainly consists in organising attention and arguing that the individual
constitutes a state of the social process.11 Park’s perspective was further
elaborated and refined by Herbert Blumer, founder of the symbolic interac-
tionism movement. In the second part of his book Principles of Sociology,
Blumer distinguishes four types of crowds: the casual, the conventionalised,
the acting and the expressive one. However, Tarde is not cited here, although
there are striking similarities to his descriptions of collective behaviours.
Blumer’s followers, including Turner and Killian, as well as Kurt Lang and
Gladys Lang, all further developed (perhaps without realising it) Tarde’s
approach to the crowd. They were in fact interested in the emergence of
new patterns of interaction, and extended the arguments on the crowd to
phenomena such as social movements and public opinion (another issue
studied by Tarde).
It is worth mentioning other two branches of Tarde’s influence in North
America. As the early (re)introduction to Tarde written by Clark (1969:67)
states, the models of cultural diffusion formulated by North American anthro-
pologists were clearly indebted to Tarde’s sociological framework. Specially
Franz Boas (1897) would have borrowed from it to study, for example,
the patterns of growth of secret societies on the coast of British Columbia.
More recently, Watson (2017) stated that through the mediation of Boas and
the early Boasians, Tarde’s concepts of invention, imitation and opposition
became “ubiquitous structuring precepts for US anthropology”. As Watson
pointed out, the reception of these concepts did not happen in a cultural void
and they were even mixed with Durkheimnian’s categories—in what seems
to constitute a beautiful confirmation of Tarde’s thesis on the propagation of
ideas and their “graft” in diverse cultural milieus. The result of this compo-
sition is also properly Tardean, at least as Watson (2017: 137) describes it:
This eclecticism does not leave anthropology in epistemological tatters.

Rather, it has assembled shreds and patches of others’ theories into a sus-
tained radical empiricism, an open and creative engagement with dynamic
worlds. In so doing, US anthropology long anticipated much of Latour’s
and other science studies scholars’ systems-oriented empiricisms. As a his-
toricist with tendencies toward radical, nonhumanist empiricism, Tarde
had a distinctive position in late 19th-century French social thought. So
it should not be surprising that both the Boasians and—much later—the
Latourians would come to find considerable value in his work.
Appendix 125
The influence of Tarde was also important in the studies about “diffusion
of innovations” as well as about public opinion and social and political com-
munication developed in the United States since the 1940s. As Katz (2006)
points out, this is visible in classical studies such as The People’s Choice
(Lazarsfeld et al., 1944), Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presi-
dential Campaign (Berelson et al., 1954) and Personal Influence (Katz and
Lazarsfeld, 1955). The Tardean idea, according to which, even in the era
of mass communication, personal influence and conversation are crucial for
the successful diffusion of anything, is present in all these cases. Since then,
research on diffusion has emerged independently in the field of rural, edu-
cational and industrial sociology, as well as in market studies. The books
from Rogers (1962) and Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) pick up and concep-
tually and methodologically synthesise many of these investigations from a
Tardean-inspired point of view. Both books are perhaps the most cited works
in all the diffusion literature (Kinnunen, 1996).
Back to France
This brief cartographic exercise drives us to the studies on opinion and the
measurement of “social mood” which appeared in France after the post-
war period, imported from the United States. This line of work was strongly
tied to the influence of Tarde’s paradigm, even when its representatives
half admitted it. Jean Stoetzel (1943), the founder of opinion research in
France, acknowledged Tarde as a pioneer in the study of group psychology,
but did not include him among the initiators of opinion theories. He was
also excluded from the list of founders of social psychology. Once again,
the recognition of Tarde’s contributions was usually relegated or forgotten
in France.
However, his thinking was also continued by authors who were in turn
very influential. As we have seen, Bergson is among the most important ones.
He paid homage to Tarde publicly several times and he included many Tar-
dean ideas in his work. Jean Millet summarises in this way:
Tarde was the first in his time, it seems, to raise the problem of the rela-
tionship between the Static and the Mobile, and to opt resolutely for the
priority of the Mobile . . . Secondly, Tarde was also one of the first to put
publicly back on the agenda the problem of the epistemological meaning
of the Infinitesimal Calculus. . . . Another point of convergence: Tarde for-
mulated a theory of creative Evolution that clearly announces that of Berg-
son. It invokes a élan vital, and at the same time, it accredits the idea of an
Evolution that would be in itself creative. Tarde’s influence on Bergson is
even more remarkable in the field of moral and religious questions. Tarde
provides Bergson with an exemplary causality analysis . . . which Bergson
126 Appendix
will use in The Two Sources (of morality and religion). In Tarde, Heroes
and Geniuses do not impose their will, they preach by example; however,
it will be exactly the same for the Heroes and the Mystics, in Bergson.12
(Milet, 1970: 387)
After Bergson there was a long period of Durkhemnian hegemony that

lasted until Structuralism arrived, and Tarde was relegated to oblivion—
together with Bergson. It was not until the end of the 1960s that his thought
was rehabilitated within the framework of various poststructuralist strate-
gies. Deleuze was the great artifice of Tarde’s contemporary renaissance in
France—and beyond it. In his book Differential and Repetition from 1968,
Deleuze makes a brief but very precise reconstruction of the grammar of
infinitesimal difference that Tarde had developed almost a century before. It
is worth quoting it:
The philosophy of Gabriel Tarde is one of the last great philosophies of

nature, in the tradition of Leibniz. It unfolds on two levels. On the first
level it deploys three fundamental categories which govern all phenomena:
repetition, opposition and adaptation. . . Opposition, however, is only the
figure by means of which a difference is distributed throughout repetition
in order to limit it and to open up a new order or a new infinity. . . Adapta-
tion itself is the figure by means of which the repetitive currents meet and
become integrated into superior repetitions. As a result, difference appears
between two kinds of repetition . . . On a deeper level, however, it is
rather repetition which serves difference. For neither opposition nor even
adaptation presents the free figure of difference: that difference “which
opposes nothing and which serves no purpose”, which is “the final end of
all things”.
(Deleuze, 1994: 314)
Deleuze, together with Guattari, would go back to Tarde’s work in The

Anti Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). There, they address
fundamental questions of social theory and their answers are based on the
assertion that both individuals and groups are composed of lines or flows.
That is to say, they have a completely Tardean approach to the matter. Tar-
de’s concepts of innumerable and dynamic relations of desires and beliefs
understood as the “infinitely small” social forces, resonate with the Deleuz-
ian approach to the social as an infinite, heterogeneous and dynamic field.
Deleuze and Guattari’s micro-politics must be seen as a reinterpretation of
Tarde’s microsociology, which is incorporated into a more compressive (and
complex) framework. Both approaches emphasise the idea that everything
that is social is constituted by multiple micro-currents or flows, each of which
have different intensities, velocities and origins. These flows carry forms of
Appendix 127
action, thought and feeling, as well as virtual potentials waiting to be actual-

ised. In their Homage to Gabriel Tarde, we read:
[H]is long-forgotten work has assumed new relevance with the influence
of American sociology, in particular microsociology. It had been quashed
by Durkheim and his school. . . Durkheim’s preferred objects of study
were the great collective representations, which are generally binary, reso-
nant, and overcoded. Tarde countered that collective representations pre-
suppose exactly what needs explaining, namely, “the similarity of millions
of people”. That is why Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail,
or of the infinitesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and inventions
constituting an entire realm of subrepresentative matter.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 218/219)
The influence of Tarde in the Poststructuralist movement is not only evi-

dent in Deleuze. Foucault also finds in Tarde’s work a way out from the
holistic-individualist dilemma, and he heavily borrows from Tarde’s theoreti-
cal and methodological perspective. But he does so without saying it. As is
well known, Foucault called microphysics, and also genealogy, his approach
to the social realm. That is why, while the Nietzschean inspiration of his work
is usually acknowledged, Tarde’s influence is often overlooked—although
being equally important. Especially in Discipline and Punishment (1995)
and The History of Sexuality (1984), Foucault adopted Tarde’s micro-socio-
logical grammar without explicitly quoting him. The genealogical approach
uses Tarde’s framework to analyse the dynamics of production, reproduction
and transformation of modern societies, understanding them as processes of
invention and dissemination of power/knowledge technologies through the
social field. Then, Tarde’s sociology can enhance the understanding of Fou-
cault’s emphasis on biopolitical technologies as capillary and infinitesimal
forces that reconfigure social space, leading to the emergence of normalis-
ing societies. As Tarde’s infinitesimal sociology, Foucault’s microphysics is
fundamentally related to the concepts of multiplicity, invention, imitation,
opposition, propagation and ensemble. These concepts provide Foucault
with insights into the genesis, organisation and change of social groups,
although he diverges from Tarde on the issue of subjectification modes. Here,
the Nietzschean weight is perhaps more important.
According to Foucault, the invention and dissemination of disciplines
were crucial in the formation of post-traditional societies. Then, invention
and diffusion should not be understood as limited to specific areas of social
life. They are fundamental general processes concerning social organisation
and social change. And the same is true for Tarde. Both authors recognise
invention and propagation as productive and reproductive forces in soci-
ety, but they do not fully explain how they unfold in inter-psychic relations.
128 Appendix
Especially in the case of diffusion, they neglect the internal mechanisms by

which these processes function, treating them as a black box.
Finally, it is important to mention the important role Tarde has in the
influential work of Burno Latour and his Actor-Network-Theory (ANT).
In his book Reassembling the Social, Latour opposes the “sociology of the
social” to the “sociology of associations”. In the first denomination, all social
sciences based in the traditional dichotomy individual-society are included.
The second one refers to a knowledge that treats things—whether social,
biological, physic or chemical—as societies or associations, rather than social
facts as things. According to Latour (2005:13), Tarde
vigorously maintained that the social was not a special domain of reality
but a principle of connections; that there was no reason to separate “the
social” from other associations like biological organisms or even atoms;
that no break with philosophy, and especially metaphysics, was necessary
in order to become a social science; that sociology was in effect a kind of
inter-psychology; that the study of innovation, and especially science and
technology, was the growth area of social theory; and that economics had
to be remade from top to bottom instead of being used as a vague meta-
phor to describe the calculation of interests. Above all, he considered the
social as a circulating fluid that should be followed by new methods and
not a specific type of organism.
Latour proposes Tarde as an antecessor of the ANT because, in his view,

Tarde introduced in social theory the idea according to which the distinction
nature-society is not relevant to comprehend human interactions, avoiding
at the same time the distinction micro-macro that would prevail during the
20th century. In several opportunities, Latour (2005, 2002) does the mental
experiment of imagining how social sciences would have been today if during
the 19th century Tarde’s thought, rather than Durkheim’s (or Marx’s), had
been considered scientific.
Since 1999, Tarde’s work has been systematically republished in France,
after almost a century of episodic and dispersed re-editions. In 2000, the
Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines devoted a monographic issue to
him, while many philosophers inspired by Deleuze started to analyse his
work (Alliez, 1999, 2001; Lazzarato, 1999, 2005; Schérer, 1999; Martin,
1999; Zourabichvili, 2003); Bruno Latour (2002) proclaimed him the grand-
father of the ANT. Since then, the secondary literature is growing slowly but
more or less constantly inside and outside France.
Notes
1 Tarde also is the author of “Les géants chauves” (1892), a fictional story that
portrays a society where the head of each newborn is placed in a mould for study,
play and recreation.
Appendix 129
2 In 1902 and 1903, Tarde (2002) taught a course on Cournot at the Collège de
France and he wrote several articles, such as “La philosophie sociale de Cournot”
(1903); “La notion d´hasard chez Cournot” (1904) and “L’Accident et le Ration-
nel en Histoire d’après Cournot” (1905).
3 See Park’s seminal thesis (1904 [1972]). Also see Santana-Acuña (2015: 212)
according to whom the “Tardean neo-monadology seems closer to Smith’s under-
standing of the social as the result of beings-in-association”.
4 For a historical approach to Tarde’s criminal sociology, see Renneville (2018). See
as well Pinatel (1956: 436), for whom “Tarde has been a criminologist above all”.
5 Carnet 19, 1er. Avril 18 94. Fonds Gabriel Tarde.
6 On the Tarde-Durkheim controversy, see Lukes (1985), Borlandi (1994), Vargas
et al. (2008), Viana Vargas (2000), Candea (2010) and Nocera (2011). To deepen
on the specific debate on the criminal question, see Pinatel (1956) and Tonkonoff
(2014).
7 See Park (1972), Stoetzel (1943), Reynié (1989), Katz (1992, 2006), Katz et al.
(2014), Sampson (2012).
8 Latour and Lépinay (2009) made an introduction of this work, and Lazzarato
(2002) used it to develop his analyses on contemporary capitalism. On the coinci-
dences between Tarde’s and Schumpeter’s economic views, see Taymans (1950).
9 See Van Ginneken (1992).
10 Edwin Sutherland’s influential criminology (1937, 1939) is also widely indebted
to the Tardean mimetic sociology. Sutherland, who was elected president of
the American Sociological Society in 1939, elaborated a “theory of differential
association” to explain crime as a social phenomenon. He postulates that crime is
a social practice transmitted through the learning of specific skills and guidelines,
and argues that the criminal is an ordinary individual, socialised normally in a
milieu opposed to the larger society.
11 This is at least Isaac Joseph’s (2001) hypothesis. On the reception of Tarde in
Park’s sociology, see also Nocera (2008).
12 To the aforementioned, Milet (1970: 388) adds one last point, which he considers
the most important philosophically: “Tarde gave Bergson a very elaborate doc-
trine on the metaphysical and theological meaning of the experience of the mys-
tics. The mystics are not sick, they are truthful witnesses. They must be considered
as messengers of the higher Realities. Tarde is led, from there, to the hypothesis
of higher realities. Bergson even recognizes a personal God. The conclusions are
different, but the starting points were the same”.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am especially grateful to Martina Lassalle for her generous work on many

aspects of this book and to Nicolás Edelcopp for his research assistance. The
conversations with Daniel Castaño, Christian de Ronde, Daniel Alvaro and
Mariano D’ambrosio have all been particularly helpful throughout the writ-
ing process. In addition, I have been extraordinarily fortunate to receive the
comments from Pablo Navarro, Martin Vignola, Fernanda Ramas, Marta
Besio, Edward Levitin, Ramiro Gonzalez and Catalina de Urquiza. I also
thank Natalia Barry and Martina Lassalle for working on the translations
of these texts, and to Julieta de Urquiza for her creativity in drawing the
figures included in the book. Many colleagues and friends from the Struc-
turalism and Poststructuralism Study Group have also been key parts of this
publication. Also, I thank Dr. Jorge Thieberger, without whose support this
book would not have been possible. It is also worth mentioning the decisive
institutional support of CONICET (Argentina) and the University of Buenos
Aires. My grateful thanks to the peer reviewers of this book and to Gemma
Rogers and Neil Jordan from Routledge, for the suggestions given which
have improved the text.
Finally, I thank Griot and Universitas Journals for letting me reformu-
late two articles, which are now part of this book. These articles are as
follows:
• Infinito y Teoría social: Tarde como lector de Leibniz. Griot: Revista de

Filosofia, Amargosa, v. 23n. 2, p. 115–129, junho, 2023.
• Individuo, sociedad y campo social. Aproximaciones a la sociología infini-
tesimal de Gabriel Tarde. Universitas—XXI, 38, pp. 231–252.
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26 (5): 761–777.
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INDEX
adaptation 63, 64, 65, 68, 71, 72, 73, Boudon, Raymond 4, 90
84, 86, 91, 116, 126; see also Bouglé, Celestin 4, 53
invention Boyer, Carl 30n1
Alliez, Eric 30n4, 70n1, 128 Brighenti, Andrea M. 112n5
Ampère, André 67 Bruno, Giordano 23
archaeology 82 – 83 Brunschvicg, León 46
Aristotle 64, 68, 76, 90 Burgess, Ernest 123
atomism 6, 15, 18, 26, 31, 42
Caesar 37
Baldwin, James M. 122 Calculus 4, 16, 19, 23, 31, 38, 67,
Baroque 3, 4, 7, 8, 15, 25, 26, 27, 32, 39 69, 125
Barry, A. And Thrift, N. 121 Candea, Matei 12n1, 129n6
Beliefs And Desires 4, 10, 25, 26, 28, Canetti, Elias 112n5
29, 30, 32, 33, 42 – 46, 49, Cantor, Georg 16
52 – 54, 58 – 60, 71 – 75, 77, 79, cartography 82, 83, 94
86, 88, 89, 91, 94, 97, 99, 100, Cassirer, Ernst 46n1
102, 104 – 110, 120, 126 Castoriadis, Cornelius 47n9
Bell, John 30n1 change 10, 17, 19, 20, 21, 31, 42,
Bentham, Jeremy 35 47n6, 62, 75, 86, 87, 91, 93, 96,
Bergson, Henri 16, 27, 53, 54, 114, 119, 111n1, 115, 127
121, 122, 125, 126 Clark, Terry 124
Berkerly, George 16 clinamen 104
Bernheim, Hippolyte 53 Cohen, Hermann 46n1
bifurcation 11 collective willingness 72
Blackmore, Susan 70n2 Comte, Auguste 34, 37, 38, 123
Blumer, Herbert 124 contagion 1, 29, 32, 44, 46n2, 48, 49,
Boas, Franz 1, 124 50, 51, 52, 53 – 70, 72 – 76, 97,
Bonald, Louis 37 101 – 102, 105 – 108
Bondel, Charles 123 contingency 3, 6, 28, 36, 62, 64, 65, 67,
Borch, Christian 12n1, 111n3 68, 71, 76; accident, 11, 33, 36,
Borges, Jorge L. 30n2 67, 68, 70n6, 99, 114, 129n2;
Borlandi, Maximo 129n6 randomness 65, 66
Index 139
Cooley, Charles 123 event 8, 37, 63, 65, 66, 70n6, 106, 116,
Copernicus 6 120; eventmental 9, 62
corporations 45, 70, 93, 95, 102, 103, exemplar causality 54, 81, 87, 100, 125
104, 105
Cournot, Antoine A. 16, 43, 46n1, Féré, Charles 123
70n6, 70n7, 114, 129n2 Ferri, Enrico 98
Couturat, Louis 22, 46n1 Foucault, Michel 1, 30n4, 47n4,
crime 5, 11, 56, 57, 58, 87, 101, 115, 111n3, 127
118, 129n10 Freud, Sigmund 50, 53, 79, 89, 90,
crowd 30, 61, 95 – 100, 103 – 105, 92n2, 92n3, 95, 96, 98, 102
111n3, 111n4, 111n5,
112n5, 123, 124; see also Galileo Galilei 6, 67, 69
multitude Garofalo, Raffaele 98
Cuvillier, Armand 111n1 Giddings, Franklin 123
D’alambert, Jean 16 Halbwachs,Maurice 111n2

Darwin, Charles 64, 78, 114 – 115 Hegel, Georg W. 34, 37, 65, 88
Dawkin, Richard 70n2 heterogenesis (poly genesis) 64, 84, 91
Dean, Carolyn 111n3 Hobbes, Thomas 37, 56, 59, 88
Debaise, Didier 30n4 holism 34, 71; totalism, 6, 31
De Biran, Maine 16, 43, 50, 51, Homans, George 4
70n1, 114 Hume, David 73, 114
Dedekind, Richard 16
Deleuze, Gilles 1, 16, 30n4, 46n1, 47n4, imitation 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 24, 32, 33,
47n9, 112n7, 126, 127, 128; and 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 4547n7,
Guattari 112n5, 126, 127 48, 49, 52, 53, 59, 61, 62, 63,
Descartes, René 22 70n3, 71, 75, 78, 79, 80, 83, 91,
Deveraux, Anne 70n1 100, 101, 102, 110, 112, 114,
Dewey, John 122 115, 116, 120, 122, 123, 124,
difference 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 19, 22, 24, 127; see also repetition
25, 31, 32, 35, 42, 44, 47n9, imperceptible 8, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19, 20,
53, 55 – 57, 61, 63, 64, 66, 26, 33, 38, 45, 50, 53, 55
70n1, 72, 80, 84, 98, 100, 103, individual 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15,
104, 106, 107, 114, 117, 126, 22 – 30, 31 – 37, 49 – 66, 69,
heterogeneity, 6, 13, 55, 56, 64, 70n3, 71, 72, 74 – 82, 87 – 90,
71, 82 94, 96 – 111, 117 – 120, 124,
diffusion 11, 21, 41, 44, 62, 73, 74, 126 – 128
79, 81, 83, 88, 90, 116, 122, individualism, 4, 37, 71, 78
123, 124, 125, 127; see also infinite 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14 – 33, 36,
propagation 37, 39, 40 – 45, 49, 50, 54, 57,
Donzelot, Jacques 111n3 59, 60, 61, 65, 69, 74, 77, 79,
Dreyfus, Alfred 120 100, 110, 114, 126
Durkheim, Emile 1, 4, 9, 10, 12n2, 29, infinitely small 7, 14, 16, 17, 18,
33, 34, 37, 47n9, 88, 93 – 96, 98, 19, 126
99, 100, 103, 107, 111n2, 114, infinitesimal 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14 – 22, 25,
117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36,
127, 128, 129n6 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 49, 50,
54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 65, 69., 71,
Eiffel, Gustave 82 72, 74, 75, 79, 80, 88, 90, 100,
Elwood, Charles 123 103, 104, 110, 111, 114, 117,
ensembles 27, 28, 32, 42, 44, 45, 71, 126, 127
72, 73 – 92, 94, 105 infinitesimal sociology 3, 15, 26, 39, 44,
Erstedt, Hans 67 49, 50, 54, 65, 77, 80, 127
140 Index
integration 3, 19, 24, 29, 40, 42, 45, 63, micro-macro distinction 6, 128
64, 66, 72, 85, 91, 95, 112n5 micro-mega 28, 82, 83
intermental 45, 119 Millet, Jean 4, 5, 125
invention 1, 3, 5, 11, 32, 33, 35, 36, 39, monad 21 – 29, 30, 31, 39, 66, 114
40, 41, 44, 46, 54, 59, 61 – 70, monadology 25, 26, 30
71 – 82, 84, 85, 86, 90, 104, 105, Montebello, Pierre 30n4, 70n1, 114
106, 107, 109, 115, 116, 117, Moscovici, Serge 111n3
120, 124, 127; innovation 11, movement 8, 19, 20, 21, 32, 42, 48, 51,
35, 38, 46, 61, 66, 69, 73, 82, 58, 72, 76, 84, 88, 93, 97, 104,
90, 128 122, 124, 127
Muccielli, Laurent 12n2
James, William 1, 122 multiplicity 22, 25, 30, 31, 32, 34, 52,
71, 95, 127
kaleidoscope 27, 64 multitude 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 21, 22, 23,
Kant, Immanuel 65 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34,
Katz, Elihu 12n1, 125, 129 35, 39, 40, 44, 50, 56, 66, 94,
Kepler,Johannes 6, 67 95 – 111, 112, 116, 120
King, Anthony 12n1
Kinnunen, Jussi 125 necessity 33, 54, 65, 67, 80, 87, 104
network 1, 23, 26, 37, 45, 54, 70, 87
Lacan, Jacques 76, 92n1 88, 90, 120, 128
Laclau, Ernesto 92n1 Newton, Isaac 6, 8, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22,
Lang, Kurt And Lang, Gladys 124 35, 63, 67, 86
Latour, Bruno 1, 124, 128 Nietzsche, Friedrich 50, 79, 80, 114, 127
Lazarsfeld, Paul 125 Nocera, Pablo 129n6, 129n11
Lazzarato, Maurizio 128, 46n2
leaders 100 – 104, 106, 107, 109; opposition 2, 3, 11, 32, 44, 55, 56, 57,
meneurs 101, 102, 107 58, 59, 60, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76,
Le Bon, Gustave, 96, 98, 99, 103, 107, 91, 94, 109, 115, 116, 117, 124,
111n4, 120 126, 127
Leibniz, Gottfried W. 7, 15, 16, 19,
20 – 26, 28, 29, 36, 38, 43, 43, Parikka, Jussi 46n2
50, 68, 75, 76, 90, 114, 126 Park, Robert 1, 97, 123, 124, 129
Leroux, Robert 12n1, 70n7 Pascal, Blas 23, 26
Locke, John 47 Pasteur, Louis 53
Lombroso, Cesare 98, 102, 115 picturesque 9, 11, 31, 33, 51
Lukes, Steven 33, 37, 129n6 Pierce, Charles S. 16, 18, 46n1
Luther, Martin 36, 82 Pinatel, Jean 129n4, 129n6
Poincaré, Henri 8
Maimon, Salomon 16 possibles 2, 29, 65, 66, 114; see also
Marsden, Paul 70n2 virtual
Martin, Jean C. 125 propagation 101
Marx, Karl 1, 9, 34, 35, 37, 56, 59, 79, public 10, 21, 29, 32, 36, 44, 45, 54,
80, 88, 92n2, 94, 128 56, 59, 61, 67, 71 – 75, 78 – 82,
Matagrin, Amadee 121 84, 90, 101, 106, 115, 121,
Mauss, Marcel 94 124, 127
Mcdougall, William 96, 122 pythagoras 82
Mead, George H. 123
memetics 54, 70n2 rational 2, 4, 17, 44, 49, 50, 69, 75, 90,
methodological individualism 4, 9, 34, 97, 98, 104
37, 47n5, 125, 127 Ravaisson, Felix 114
micro-linear 25, 27; micro-analytic 25, relational 10, 15, 16, 23, 33, 39, 48, 52,
42; micro-genetic 16 53, 79, 89, 96, 99, 100, 110
Index 141
Rembrandt 7 Strauss, Anselm 123

Renneville, Marc 129n4 Sutherland, Edwin 129n10
repetition 10, 11, 32, 35, 36, 41, 45, 55, syllogism 72, 75, 76, 77, 82, 88, 89, 90,
62, 64, 71, 100, 114, 116, 126 91, 100, 102, 105
Reynié, Dominique 129n7 system4, 11, 13, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35,
Ribot, Théodule 70n1, 114, 115, 119 36, 37, 39, 40 – 47, 64, 69, 71,
Richet, Charles 53 72, 80, 84 – 87, 91, 110, 114,
Ricoeur, Paul 92n1 116, 117, 118, 121, 124, 128;
Rogers, Evertt 125 see also ensemble
Ross, Edward 122 – 123
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 37, 82 Taine, Hippolyte 70n1
Russel, Bertrand 16, 30n3 Tarde, Alfred 121
Taymans, S. J. A. 129n8
Sampson, Tony D. 12n1, 46n2 Terranova, Tiziana 46n2
Santana Acuña, Alvaro 129n3 Thomas, Isaac 123
Schérer, René 128 Thorns, Alfred 117
Schopenhauer, Arthur 50, 90 Toews, David 12n1, 70n4
sects 60, 61, 95, 120, 123 Tönnies, Ferdinand 10
Sighele, Scipio 96, 98, 111n5 Turner, Ralph And Killian, Lewis 124
Simmel, Georg 2, 56, 40n4, 123
Small, Albion 123 unconscious, 21, 22, 38, 43, 50, 52, 53,
Smith, Adam 37, 144 80, 87, 89, 90, 98
social currents 27, 39, 45, 58, 60, 72,
74; social flows 39, 91, 100 Van Ginneken, Jaap 111n3, 129n9
social field 27, 31 – 47, 52, 54, 56, 58, Van Gogh, Vincent 8
71, 73, 75, 80, 81, 83, 94, 95, variation 18, 17, 19, 21, 26, 32, 33,
96, 100, 103, 110, 127 38, 56, 68, 69, 71, 100, 107,
social forces 27, 28, 32, 40, 42, 50, 83, 110, 114
102, 107, 109, 126 Veblen, Thorstein 2
social intelligence 72, 87 Viana Vargas, Eduardo 129n6
social logic 2, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 88, 89, virtual 15, 65, 66, 67, 71, 85, 88, 114,
90, 116 127; see also possibles
social mind 29, 87, 88, 89, 116, 123 voltaire 69, 82
social morphology 93, 94, 96, 111n1
social teleology 72, 73, 76, 89, 116 Wallis, John 16
society 1, 5, 6, 10, 13, 15, 22, 25, 26, Watson, Matthew 124
29, 31 – 47, 49, 52, 56, 62, 66, Weber, Max 1, 4, 9, 10, 49, 50, 123
68, 73, 78, 94, 100, 113, 114, Weierstrass, Karl 16
117, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128 Wells, H.G. 113
Socrate 69 Weyl, Hermann 46n1
somnambulism 32, 50, 51, 52, 99, 114 Worms, René 34, 117
Spencer, Herbert 1, 9, 29, 34, 37, 70n1, Wundt, Wilhelm 70n1
99, 114
Spinoza, Baruch 16 Znaniecki, Florian 123
Stoetzel, Jean 125, 129n7 Zourabichvili, François 128

Reintroducing Gabriel Tarde - Tonkonoff

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REINTRODUCING GABRIEL

This book offers a new introduction to the thought of Gabriel Tarde,

Sergio Tonkonoff is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical

Decoloniality, Intersectionality and the Schreiner Theoria

Reintroducing Ferdinand Toennies

Reintroducing Harriet Martineau

Reintroducing Marcel Mauss

Introduction: Hypothesis about an oblivion and

1 Infinite and social theory 13

2 Individual, society and social field 31

3 The social as contagion, creation and fight 48

4 Sociology of flows and ensembles 71

5 The continuity of multitudes 93

Appendix: Cartographical note 113

1.1 Infinitesimal. John Wallis’ notation 15

increasing contemporary efforts to retrieve it?1 And more profoundly, why

Where to locate Tarde’s work?

It can be objected that this question about the disciplinary belonging

Three classical readings and a (neo) baroque one

he (Tarde) believes in the originality of the “social fact” and, in conse-

speak of social psychology—as he himself invited us to do—it is to high-

However, as Millet knows, the opposite is also true: in this inter-psychology

Multitudes in heaven and Earth

Physical or vital, mental or social, differences which open up to the clear

Thus, we find it relevant to include here a nested quotation, one in which

becoming—is plural, heterogeneous, changing and eventmental. Everything

The problem of the social and its pure sociology

imitation theory—which involves a theory of invention—does not compel

Another type of elementary social relation should be added to this plu-

Nowadays it is accepted that nature is made of elements so tiny that they

people involved in the social processes studied. But in both perspectives an

FIGURE 1.1 Infinitesimal. John Wallis’ notation

did so with the ambitious objective of refounding philosophy and sciences on

FIGURE 1.2 Number Pi

The labyrinth of the continuum

Now, one of the historical difficulties of mathematics (and philosophy) is

(§ 66) Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a

statements, it is important to underline the main characteristics of the concept

moving multitudes that are communicated by soft transitions, without gaps

The composition of the infinite

In its simplicity and closure, each monad receives a multitude of affections

As a result, the existing universe is nothing but the harmonic integration

Towards an infinitist social theory

wrapped or folded in every individual. And this is because each individual

it is not enough to say that I have been the inevitable confluence of so

If the aforementioned interpretation is correct, we should then affirm that

contingent state that is always achieved in a partial, provisional and unstable

From society to individuals

history, understood as a process with a single trend or unilinear evolution.

and intolerance. But it is also an epistemological (and political) mistake

satisfactions to the world, propagate or tend to propagate by imitation . . .,

From points to lines

every student of mathematics who learns calculus is linked to Leibniz

We may add something very important with this: imitation is a type of

an individual to another with variable speed, intensity and extension. One of

The social as skein, the individual as wool ball

FIGURE 2.1 Eight inventions spreading in the social field

Beliefs and desires as infinitesimal social forces

(inventions) whose regular repetition works as social memory that coor-

1 Infinite and social theory 13

2 Individual, society and social field 31

3 The social as contagion, creation and fight 48

4 Sociology of flows and ensembles 71

5 The continuity of multitudes 93

Appendix: Cartographical note 113

1.1 Infinitesimal. John Wallis’ notation 15