The laws of imitation
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| The laws of imitation - by Gabriel de Tarde |
One of Sociology's Best Classics for Students
Excerpt from the introduction:
GABRIEL TARDE, whose most interesting and important book is here given to American readers, is a Professor of Modern Philosophy at the College de France, and a member of the Institute. A true philosopher, but also a man of affairs, with wide intellectual sympathies,
M. Tarde is a writer of great charm, and his influence among his own countrymen and abroad has steadily increased since he began, in 1880, to contribute to the Revue philosophique. American scholars, long familiar with M. Tarde's suggestive works, have felt that his thought should be made more accessible to English-speaking readers. Hitherto only a little book, Les Lois Sociales, presenting a mere outline of his philosophy, has been translated.
From his office as a magistrate, he observed the large part that imitation plays in criminal conduct. Does it play a smaller part in normal conduct?
Very rapidly M. Tarde's ardent mind ranged over the field of history, followed the spread of Western civilisation, and reviewed the development of language, the evolution of art, of law, and of institutions.
The evidence was overwhelming that in all the affairs of men, whether of good or of evil report, imitation is an ever-present factor; and to a philosophical mind the implication was obvious, that there must be psychological or sociological laws of imitation, worthy of most thorough study. At this time sociology was represented in France by disciples of Comte and by a few interested readers of Herbert Spencer.
The thoughts of the Comtists did not range far beyond the " hierarchy of the sciences," and the " three stages " of history.
To demonstrate the place of sociology in the " hierarchy," or to show that a social fact belonged to one or another " stage," was very nearly the limit of Comtist sociological ambition. The Spencerians, on the other hand, seizing upon Spencer's proposition that society is an organism, but neglecting most of the psychological and historical elements of his system, were busy elaborating biological analogies.
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