Blackwell Reference Online

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Gabriel Tarde developed a comprehensive general theory of society based on the notion of imitation. His sociological program was very influential in late nineteenth-century French sociology as well as in early twentieth-century American sociology, but later generations largely ignored his work, although a recent revival of Tarde's thought is detectable. Tarde's starting point was a cosmological theory of universal repetition. While the physical world is characterized by repetition through vibration, and organic life by repetition through heredity, social life for Tarde is characterized by repetition through imitation. Indeed, in his sociological masterpiece, Laws of Imitation , he defined society as imitation. Imitation constitutes a social bond in that it signifies how one person approaches another's taste, gestures, choices, and so on. Tarde applied his theory of imitation to various fields, such as crime, crowd behavior, power, and economics. According to Tarde, imitation is a kind of somnambulism, which indicates that imitation is similar to a hypnotic process. Even when we think that we act individually and originally, we often merely imitate the actions of others. This led Tarde to describe his sociology as an interpsychology: it demonstrated the action at a distance of one mind upon another. The somnambulistic conception of imitation, and thereby society, implied a clear ... log in or subscribe to read full text