Person
Gabriel Tarde
French judge and sociologist (1843–1904); he developed the laws of imitation and the distinction between crowd and public, and saw the newspaper as the maker of the public.
Biography
Gabriel Tarde was born on 12 March 1843 in Sarlat and died in 1904. He studied law in Toulouse and Paris; from 1869 to 1894 he held various judicial posts in his home town, and then became director of criminal statistics at the Ministry of Justice in Paris (1894–1900). The introduction to Elsie Clews Parsons’s English translation of 1903 reports that he served as an examining magistrate in his home town for nearly eighteen years and had written for the Revue philosophique since 1880. From 1900 until his death he held the chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France.
The core of his theory is imitation. In Les lois de l’imitation (1890) he argues that society is held together by imitation; the summary sentence in the English translation is that society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism. Invention, imitation and opposition are the three interrelated processes of his social analysis.
In L’opinion et la foule (1901) he separates the crowd from the public. A crowd is a gathering of bodies in which feeling spreads by contact; a public is made of people who are physically dispersed and held together only mentally. He says that this second kind has been growing since the invention of printing, that the newspaper creates the public, and that the psychology of the public has yet to be written. He is reported to have thought that newspapers could even increase individual autonomy, as people talk with one another about what they read.
He attracted little attention in his own country, while American sociologists and social psychologists read him closely. In the two years before his death he is known to have debated with Durkheim.
In this course
In Mass Society and Mass Culture Theory he appears with the crowd/public distinction and the media’s role as “maker of the public”.
Key works
- Tarde, Gabriel (1890). Les lois de l'imitation: étude sociologique. Paris: Félix Alcan. — The laws of imitation; “society is imitation”.
- Tarde, Gabriel (1901). L'opinion et la foule. Paris: Félix Alcan. — The public/crowd distinction; the newspaper as creator of the public.