The Social after Gabriel Tarde

Debates and Assessments

Matei Candea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317312215
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Gabriel Tarde was a highly influential figure in 19th century French sociology: a prolific and evocative writer whose understanding of the social differed radically from that of his younger opponent Emile Durkheim. Whereas Durkheimian sociology went on to become the core of the social scientific canon throughout much of the 20th century, Tarde's sociology fell out of the picture, and he was remembered mostly through a few footnotes in which Durkheim dismissed him as an individualist, a psychologist and a metaphysician.

The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom 'every thing is a society and every science a sociology'. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde's sociology as "an alternative beginning for an alternative social science". This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like.

This second edition has been expanded to include, alongside the original chapters, two key essays by Gabriel Tarde himself - Monadology and Sociology and The Two Elements of Sociology, as well as a significantly revised and extended introduction by the editor.

Part I

Two essays

1 Monadology and sociology¹

Gabriel Tarde Translated by M. Candea, A. de la Ferriere, and J. N. Hale

Hypotheses fingo.

I

The monads, daughters of Leibniz, have come a long way since their father’s time. Unbeknownst to scientists themselves and through many different channels, they have found their way into the heart of contemporary science. In a remarkable turn of events, all of the secondary hypotheses implied by this great hypothesis in its essential, if not its strictly Leibnizian guise, are being proven scientifically. Indeed, the monadological hypothesis implies firstly the reduction of matter and spirit to one entity, the latter, and secondly the prodigious multiplication of the spiritual agents of the world. It supposes, in other words, the discontinuity of the elements and the homogeneity of their essence. Indeed it is only upon these two conditions that the whole universe could be transparent to the eye of understanding. On the one hand, the chasm between movement and consciousness, subject and object, mechanics and logic, having been plumbed a thousand times over and judged unfathomable, has eventually been thrown into doubt, then reputed a mere appearance; in the end, the bold have denied it outright – and their conclusion has everywhere been echoed. On the other hand, the advances of chemistry lead us to affirm the existence of the atom, and to deny the material continuity which was suggested by the superficially continuous character of physical and living manifestations of matter: expanse, movement, and growth. Nothing is more surprising, in truth, than the combination of definite proportions of chemical substances, without the help or interference of intermediary proportions. There is no evolution here, no transition: everything is neat, abrupt, clear-cut. And yet this is the source of all the undulations, the harmonious graduations of matter, just as the continuity of nuance relies on the discontinuity of colours. And chemistry is not the only science whose progress seems to lead us towards monads. So do physics, natural sciences, history, and mathematics. Lange writes:

Newton’s hypothesis, that the gravity of a celestial body is none other than the sum of the gravities of its constituent masses, has been extremely important. Its direct implication is that terrestrial masses too, gravitate mutually towards each other, and furthermore, that the same is true of their smallest molecules.

This notion is far more original than might at first appear: through it, Newton exploded the individuality of celestial bodies, which had theretofore been considered as superior units whose internal relations bore no resemblance to their relations with external bodies. It took an energetic mind to resolve this apparent unity into a multiplicity of distinct elements, tied together just as they were tied to elements of other aggregates. The progress of physics and astronomy began the day this perspective prevailed over the opposite assumption.

In this respect, the founders of cellular theory have been Newton’s successors. They similarly broke up the unity of the living body, resolving it into a prodigious number of elementary organisms, each selfish and avid to develop at the expense of the outside – the outside meaning the neighbouring cells, their brothers, as well as inorganic particles of air, water or any other substance. Schwann’s perspective on this was no less fruitful than Newton’s. His cellular theory tells us

that a vital force, understood as a principle distinct from matter, can be found neither in the organism as a whole, nor in each cell. All phenomena pertaining to animal or vegetal life must be explained by the properties of atoms [you should say of the final elements of which atoms themselves are composed], whether these be known forces of inert nature, or forces heretofore unknown.

What could be more positivistic, more in keeping with sound and serious science, than this radical negation of the vital principle, a negation against which vulgar spiritualism is so wont to clamour? And yet, we can see where this negation is ultimately taking us: to the monads, fruits of the boldest wishes of Leibnizian spiritualism. Like the vital principle, illness, this other entity which ancient doctors used to treat as a person, explodes into infinitesimal disorders of histological elements; furthermore, thanks to Pasteur’s discoveries, the parasitic theory of illness which explains such disorders by the internal conflicts of tiny organisms, is spreading day by day – spreading indeed at an excessive rate which calls for some reaction. But parasites also have their parasites, and so on. The infinitesimal once again!

The new chemical theories have formed on a similar pattern. “Here is the new and essential point,” writes Wurts:

The properties of the radicals are reported to the elements themselves. The former were previously considered en bloc, and the radical, considered as a whole was attributed the power to combine with or substitute itself to simple bodies. This was fundamentally the outlook of Gerhart’s theory of types. Today, we go further. In order to discover and define the properties of radicals, we look to the atoms which compose them.

(Atomic Theory, p. 194)

The thoughts of the eminent chemist go further even that our words above. The examples he cites show that amongst the atoms of a radical, there is one whose atomicity, whose unsatisfied avidity survives the saturation of the others and is the ultimate raison d’être of the combination.

Just like stars, individuals, illnesses, or chemical radicals, nations are no more than entities, which have often been mistaken for real beings in the ambitious and sterile theories of supposedly philosophical historians. Have we not been told time and again how petty it is to seek the cause of a political or social revolution in the marked influences of writers, statesmen, inventors of any kind, and that it has sprung forth spontaneously from the spirit of the race [le genie de la race], from the depths of the people, that anonymous and superhuman actor? Yet this easy perspective, in which the truly new and unpredictable phenomenon brought about by the meeting of real beings, is mistaken for the creation of a new being, will only do as a temporary measure. Quickly exhausted by literary overuse, this has given way to a serious return to a clearer and more positive kind of explanation, which accounts for a historical event solely in terms of individual actions, and particularly the actions of inventive men which served as models for others and reproduced themselves by the thousands, like stem cells of the social body.

That is not all: these prime elements at which each science arrives, the social individual, the living cell, the chemical atom, are prime only in view of their own specific science. They too are composed, as we know, including the atom itself which, following Thompson’s vortex atom hypothesis (which is the most plausible, or the least difficult to accept of the hazardous conjectures on this subject), would be a spinning mass of simpler elements. Mr Lockyer’s research on the solar and stellar spectrums has led him to suppose, with some likelihood, that some weak lines that he observes are due to the component elements of substances that on our planet we regard as unsusceptible of decomposition.

Scientists who live in daily commerce with the so-called elements are in no doubt as to their complexity. Whereas Wurts is favourable to Thompson’s hypothesis, Mr Berthelot for his part notes that:

With each passing day, the in-depth study of the elementary masses which make up our current simple bodies increasingly leads us to think of them not as indivisible homogeneous atoms, subject only to more general forces, but as extremely complex edifices, with their specific architecture and varied internal movements.

Physiologists, for their part, certainly do not subscribe to a belief in the unity of the protoplasm; only the solid part of a cell is in their view active and truly alive. The soluble part in its near entirety is no more than a provision of aliments and fuel (or a pile of excrement). And from the solid part itself, if only we knew it better, we would probably have to exclude nearly everything. Where else can these successive exclusions lead us, but to the geometrical point, that is to pure nothingness – unless as I explain below, the point we reach is a centre? For what is of paramount importance in the true histological element (for which the word cell is a poor approximation) is not its envelope, but this central focus-point [foyer], this source from which it aspires to radiate outwards indefinitely until that time when the cruel experience of outer obstacles forces it to close in self-defence – but we are anticipating.

There is no stopping on this slope before we reach the infinitesimal, which, unexpectedly, becomes the key to the whole universe. Hence perhaps the increasing importance of infinitesimal calculus; hence too the striking success of the doctrine of evolution. According to this theory, the specific type is – in geometrical language – the integer of innumerable differentials called individual variations; these variations are themselves due to cellular variations, at the heart of which we can discern myriad elemental changes. The source, the raison d’être of the finite, the clear-cut, is in the infinitely small, the imperceptible. This profound conviction inspired both Leibniz and our contemporary transformists.

Yet why does a transformation become understandable as the sum of infinitely small differences whereas, presented as the sum of finite, clear-cut differences, it would seem incomprehensible? We shall first show the truth of this contrast. Let us suppose that by miracle, a body were to disappear entirely from point A and reappear, re-enter into being at point Z, without having passed through the intermediary positions: our mind cannot fathom such a displacement, whereas we are not in the least surprised when this body goes from A to Z following a line of juxtaposed positions. And yet, note that our first surprise would have not been in the least reduced, if the disappearance and reappearance had occurred at a distance of half a metre, 30, 20, 10 or 2 centimetres, or indeed any perceptible fraction of a millimetre. Our reason, if not perhaps our imagination, would be as much struck by the last case as by the first. Similarly, if we are presented with two distinct living species, however distantly or closely related – a mushroom and a labiate, say, or two labiates of the same genus – we will never understand how in either case one could have suddenly turned into the other. But our incredulity will wane if we are told that as a result of interbreeding, the fertilised ovum of one plant has deviated from its usual path first imperceptibly and then by increasing degrees. Some will argue that is merely a prejudice, grounded in the association of ideas, which makes the first hypothesis seem impossible. This is quite true, and it proves that reality, the source of the experience which grounds this prejudice, conforms to the explanation of the finite by the infinitesimal. For pure reason, naked reason, would never have guessed it; it rather tends to look for the source of the small in the large, than the reverse. Such reason prefers to think of divine types, ready-made ab initio, which would suddenly come to envelop and penetrate a clump of earth, from the outside in. It would even follow Agassiz in claiming that from the very beginning, trees were already forests, bees were hives and men were nations. The rebellion of contradictory evidence has succeeded in banishing this perspective from scientific thought. To cite only the most elementary examples, we find that the immense sphere of light spreading out through space stems from the contagious and multiplied vibration of one single atom of ether; that the population of a species stems from a prodigious multiplication, a kind of generative radiation, of one original ovum; that the presence of the true astronomical theory in a million human brains stems from the multiple repetition of an idea which appeared one day in one of Newton’s brain cells. But once again, what conclusion can we draw? If the infinitesimal only differed from the finite in degree, if, at the bottom of things as on their perceptible surface, there were nothing but positions, distances, movements, why would a movement which remains inconceivable as a finite displacement become understandable as it became infinitesimal? We conclude that the infinitesimal is qualitatively different from the finite, that movement has a cause outside itself, that the phenomenon is not the whole of being. Everything begins with the infinitesimal and to it everything returns. Nothing – and this surprising fact doesn’t surprise anyone – nothing suddenly appears or disappears in the sphere of the finite and the complex. What other conclusion can we draw, but that the infinitely small, the element in other words, is the source and the end, the substance and the reason of everything. It is notable that whereas physics is increasingly quantifying nature in order to understand it, mathematics are increasingly striving to understand quantity by resolving it into elements that are not in themselves quantitative.

The increase of our knowledge in various fields thus points to the growing importance of the infinitesimal. This is all the more surprising given the fact that, in its vulgar form (without the monadological hypothesis), the infinitesimal is a mere mess of contradictions. I leave it to Mr Renouvier to point these out. How can such an absurd key allow the human mind to unlock the world? Is it not because this negative notion stands for a very positive one which we tend towards but have not reached, a notion we are looking at but do not see? We may not possess this notion but it should still feature ‘for the record’, in our intellectual inventory. This absurdity may well enclose and shroud a reality foreign to all that we know, external to everything, to space and to time, to matter and to spirit . . . foreign to spirit? The monadological hypothesis would then have to be rejected . . . but this requires further scrutiny. Be that as it may, those little beings we call infinitesimal would then be the real agents, and the little variations we call infinitesimal, the real actions.

The above even seems to suggest that these agents are autonomous, and that these variations clash as much as they collaborate. If everything starts from the infinitesimal, it follows that behind any change, be it movement, vital evolution, mental or social transformation, there is the initiative of one single element. The gradual and continuous appearance of such changes shows that the original initiative has met with resistance as well as support. Suppose that all the citizens of a State, without exception, were to adhere fully to a programme of political reorganisation born in one individual brain, and specifically in one point of this brain; the remodelling of the State according to this plan would happen suddenly and totally, rather than being laborious and fragmentary – and this however radical the project. The slow pace of such social changes is due to the effect of contrary projects of reform, contrary notions of an ideal State carried consciously or otherwise by each member of a nation. Similarly, if matter were as passive and inert as is commonly believed, there would be no reason for the existence of movement, that is for gradual motion; nor would there be any need for an organism to draw out its formation through the various embryonic phases: why such obstacles to the immediate realisation of the adult state, to which the seed [germe] aspires from the outset?

Let it be noted that the idea of the straight line is not exclusive to geometry – rectilinearity exists in biology as indeed in logic. The simplification of the movement between two points, the reduction of intermediate points, has a limit: the straight line. Similarly, there is an irreducible minimum of intermediate forms and states involved in the move from one specific form to another, from an individual state to another. This may be the only explanation for the embryo’s abbreviated repetition of some of the successive types whence it proceeds. Likewise, is there not in the explanation of a body of knowledge, a way of going straight from one thesis, from one theorem to another, which involves linking them through a chain of necessary intermediary logical positions? A surprising necessity indeed. Elementary textbooks, which summarise the work of centuries, are fond of this rational, rectilinear order of explanations, and it sometimes (but not always) coincides on a number of points (but not on all) with the historical sequence of the discoveries of which any science is the synthesis. Perhaps, in a similar way, the famous summary of phylogenesis in ontogenesis is a correction, and not merely a powerful acceleration, of the rather tortuous path travelled in former times by the ancestor forms, the series of biological inventions inherited by the ovum.

The doctrine of evolution thus clearly supports the monadological hypothesis; and this support will be clearer still if we consider the great system of evolution in the new and already perceptible forms into which it has begun to mutate. For evolutionism too is evolving. It is evolving, but not through a blind process of trial and error or through fortuitous and involuntary adaptations to observable fact – not in other words, through the process of transformation which it has erroneously attributed to natural life. Rather it is evolving through the cumulative efforts of scientists...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Social after Gabriel Tarde
• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Contributors
• Introduction to the Second Edition: Revisiting Tarde’s House
• PART I Two Essays
• PART II ‘The Distance that Lay Between’: The Tarde–Durkheim Debate Reconsidered
• PART III Quantifying, Tracing, Relating: Fragments of Tardean Method
• Afterword
• Index