Abstract
The starting point of Tarde’s sociology is individuals. That does not make it a methodological individualism. Instead, it is a sociology of infinitesimal difference which finds in individuals an adequate reference for addressing social life, and that ends up by turning problematic the notion of both individual and society. Imitation is here an elemental form of social relation, but it is not the only one: opposition and invention are elemental social relations as well. Social life is made up of these relations—moving and differential relations that can, however, organize, or better yet integrate, both logically and teleologically, without being totalized by this integration. By relying on pluralistic ontological and epistemological positions which privilege difference over identity, time over space, the infinite over the finite, this sociology shows itself as off-center regarding former and current holisms and individualisms. Re-reading it as an infinitesimal sociology of flows and ensembles can open a way to go beyond the oppositions between individual and society, and between micro and macro approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
For this reason, Newton named his method fluxion calculus; in it changing quantities were called “fluent” and their changing velocities were called “fluxions”. Apparently, this denomination is partly due to his attempts to avoid infinitesimals. Regarding Leibniz, there is a discussion among specialists about his contradictory affirmations concerning the real or fictional character of infinitesimals. For a historical approach to calculus, see Boyer (1959), and for a philosophical one, see Brunschvicg (1912).
- 2.
Reading this micro-sociology in an ethical key, Bergson (1959: 333) comments: “it gives us a strong responsibility sense by showing how any of our initiatives can prosper with incalculable consequences, how a simple individual action, falling in the social context as a stone in the water of a pond, completely shakes it through imitation waves which expand themselves”.
- 3.
“Societies function by the gathering or concurrency of desires, of necessities. Beliefs, mainly religious and moral ones, but also legal, political and even linguistic ones … are societies’ plastic forces. Economic or aesthetical necessities [desires] are their functional forces” (Tarde 1890b: 158).
- 4.
“Every successful invention actualizes one of the thousand possible, or rather, given certain conditions, necessary, inventions, which are carried in the womb of its parent invention, and by its appearance it annihilates the majority of those possibilities and makes possible a host of heretofore impossible inventions. These latter inventions will or will not come into existence according to the extent and direction of the radiation of its imitation through communities which are already illuminated by other lights” (Tarde 1890a: 46).
- 5.
For myth’s peace, Tarde understands that there can actually be, and in fact there are, brilliant inventors—that is to say, individuals who produce magnificent creations characterized not only by the outstanding originality of their combinations, but also by their complexity and richness. Nonetheless, he understands that we must not see them as exceptional individuals for their miraculous capacity to create ex nihilo. What is exceptional is the number of accidental happenings that, so to speak, encountered in them by chance. They are individuals born with unusually powerful brains that must have counted on necessary cultural and social conditions, and on a rare vigor and tempering. Likewise, they must have also been located in a precise moment and place in order to constitute as the space of conjunction of pre-existing, not assembled, repetitions. A true miracle.
- 6.
For an analysis of Tarde’s micro-socio-logic grammar in Deleuze and Foucault, see Tonkonoff (2017).
- 7.
Like Virilio (1977), Tarde is conscious of the importance of trying to somehow measure the velocity of social communication. For both of them, the “science” or “logic” of velocity must include an analysis of communication media in as broad a sense as possible (from postal mail, telegraph and roads to newspapers, radio, etc.), since these media largely determine the velocity of social life.
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Tonkonoff, S. (2018). Sociology of Infinitesimal Difference. Gabriel Tarde’s Heritage. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_3
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