Gabriel Delays

Biography

He was professor with the Collège de France, holder of the modern pulpit of philosophy. Regarded as a large thinker by his contemporaries, it was an adversary of Emile Durkheim, which was worth to him to be almost forgotten in France after the First World War, period during which the durkheimism dominated the institutions. It is only among certain American thinkers, who regarded it as a founder of the social Psychologie, that his thought remained.

Indeed, while Durkheim proposed the Règles of the sociological method (1896), that it tried to circumscribe a new object - the " fact social" - never yet studied as such and independently of individual decisions, and that he claimed that one grants to sociology the statute Science with whole share, Tarde chooses to develop a theory of the companies based on primarily individual criteria; it thus chooses to explain the social one by the individual, and thus binds his reading of social with a certain metaphysics, opens the study of the company to the research of the principles first of the man, traces a way which would lead the social one to be it as being.

Where Durkheim affirms that the social one escapes the individual, Tarde tent thus to show that the social one is other thing only the expression of individual forces, psychological forces, which are divided between Croyance and Desire, forces developed, as catalyzed, by the Imitation and the Invention, which are then the two great inter-psychological movements - " relations inter-mentales" , to take again the terms of Delays.

Nowadays, its work, redécouverte primarily in France by Gilles Deleuze, know an increasing renewed interest. The majority of its works are in republication.

But to oppose Tarde to Durkheim is only one short cut, certainly convenient, but which, without being inaccurate, is too fast: with good to look at there, the essence of the effort of Delays moved towards problems, not of sociological theory, but of criminology, right, policy. He thus, and with strength, was very early opposed to the theories of Cesare Lombroso of a biological origin of criminality: for Delays, the origin of the crime is before very social.

Sociological theory

Delay proposes two concepts to explain the social movements: the imitation and the invention. Each one imitates what he admires, which he considers able good and to be used to him as model, but arranges, in an original way, by their mixture, the imitations chosen with several sources. Thus the History is presented in the form of a succession of different imitative flows, a succession of models ready to cause an imitation by a great number of individuals. Why the imitation? Because Tarde designs the individuals as a great whole of reflections (it takes up the idea of the monades of Leibniz), i.e. each one sees its similar and in them itself is found. It is a play of mirror which is in the middle of the life in society, in the direction where each time one is judge and judged, vis-a-vis the others and the others vis-a-vis us, so that naturally one comes from there to do like the other, so that him recognizes itself in you and conversely, you of him, so that this life in society, all in all, are coherent and possible, division of common points and not opposition of dissimilarities - relation where even the tendency to opposition becomes common point: “Two opposed things, opposite, opposites, have as a character clean to present a difference which even consists in their similarity, or, if one likes better, to present a resemblance which consists in differing” ( as much as possible the universal opposition: test of a theory of the opposites , 1897).

At the base of the imitation and invention, which are acts, processes, Tarde place belief and the desire, which are individual psychological characters: “Belief and the desire: here is thus the substance and the force, here as the two psychological quantities as the analysis finds at the bottom of all sensational qualities with which they combine; and when the invention, then the imitation, seize some to organize them and employ them, they are there, pareillement, the true social quantities” (in laws of the imitation (1890)). Still delay known as, in sociological Essais and mixtures : “My thought in this respect is summarized in the double following statement, which it would be too long to develop: 1• At the bottom of the internal phenomena, whatever they are, the pushed analysis with end never discovers but three irreducible terms, the belief, the desire, and their point of application, to feel it pure, - extract, by abstraction and assumption, of the cluster of proposals and volitions where it is committed. 2• The first two terms are the forms or forces innate and constitutive of the subject, the moulds where it receives rough materials of the feeling. It is the two only categories of which one did not think, probably because they jumped to the eyes, and the two only ones which, I believe, deserve this name”.

One sees here that there is no contradiction between presenting the total movements of the company and placing at the base of a reflection on this one, a radical individualism. It is that the sociology of Delays is a microsociology, in the sense that it rests on individual psychological mechanisms, and thus leaves with the individual all his importance.

By belief Tarde understands to indicate the credit that an individual can carry to a whole of representations, with a person who conveys them, with a particular system of value. It is the belief which allows the imitation; and it is desire which allows invention, since by desire it is a question of indicating the reinvestment of the various beliefs which are confronted, in a perpetual motion, the belief nourishing the desire, which itself nourishes it.

According to Delays, the imitation operates according to two fundamental laws: initially, belief and desire are individual psychological specificities, i.e. their propagation, through the imitation, is made interior towards outside, of the thought to the acts; then, the movement is made elites towards the people, individuals supposed in top of the social hierarchy (scientists, artists, eminences specialists), to the bottom of the company, classes presumedly lower (workmen, not qualified individuals).

Delay compares this process with a “kind of social water tower from where the continuous cascade of the imitation must go down”. And if the elite of a company, at the top of the “water tower”, does not propose any more an innovation and remains on its old “inventions”, heard within the meaning of Tarde, become beliefs, traditions for “imitating” popular classes, then “one can say that its philosopher's stone is made and its advanced decline”.

“The social link thus has three components according to Tarde: the imitation, the opposition and the adaptation”, as summarize it Denis Touret. It is a question of saying here that the process imitation - invention is a problematic process: imitative flows are contradictory, and their agreement, which corresponds to a relative stability of the company, is not done without there being fight, resistance of the old models to the new models. But there is adaptation: fight between different imitative flows, it does not result from radical victory of the one over the other, but a compromise, a mixture, which is him, fully new - until a new model comes to compete with it…

Laws of the imitation

Delay makes Imitation the base of the Social link and this one covers all the aspects of the social life (religious, political, right, industries, language, etc). There are initially innovations or discoveries, which can be only one so weak improvement is it. These “renovating initiatives” are propagated then by imitation and repetition, extend from social environment towards another, a village with another, a country with another, etc conquering civilizations imitate conquered civilizations thus and vice versa.

The imitations are not always exact copies, but can be similarities (what returns, for Tarde, with imitations); each copy is a model for the following copy. The imitation is propagated thus by undulation on the company, with the proviso of not meeting obstacles, a such rock which produces undulations once thrown in water. Those extend with more facility as the techniques of communication and transport develop.

The imitation forms for Tarde a cycle, where it makes initially vis-a-vis a resistance before there is adaptation. When a civilization imitates some another, resistance will be larger and the imitation will undergo greater transformations.

In its theory, Tarde leaves place to autonomy little. Each discovery or trade comes from an analogy with a preceding discovery which in copy a common principle. For example, starting from a first exchange of goods, other exchanges could take place until the development of the modern economy.

Press, public and corporation

Press

For Tarde crowd is a phenomenon passion, instinctive and dangerous because unverifiable. The behaviors of carried out tend towards the uniformity and the unanimity by phenomenon of emotional imitation.

It is Gustave the Good (1841-1931), with which Tarde frequently corresponded, which will be pursued the study of these " groups of the instant" what constitutes crowd and with their particular collective psychology which does not return them only potentially " criminelles" as Tarde thought it, but also capable of love, sacrifice, heroism. In Crowd psychology , appeared in 1895, it counts various kinds of crowd and analyzes various logics which are there in work (cf Catherine Rouvier, political ideas of Gustave the Good , political PUF collection of today, 1986).

On page 9 of Crowd psychology Gustave Good writing: " thousands of separate individuals can at a given time, under the influence of certain violent emotions, a national great event for example, to acquire the characters of a crowd psychologique". There is there an anticipation of the concept of " public" who will be born with the development from the cinema, very right overdraft at the time or the Good writing these lines, then radio and television, concept developed today by Dominique Wolton (Re-examined Hermes ) or Governed Debray (course of " médiologie").

Gabriel Tarde had also had a presentiment of the phenomenon in an article " The psychology of the jury" appeared in the Opinion in 1898, p 498-500 and in the opinion and crowd , appeared in 1902.

Public

August 1st

Corporation

It is a durable crowd, organized, hierarchical and regular. For example: the Church, the State,…

Works

compared Criminality (1890)
penal Philosophy (1890)
Laws of the imitation (1890)
Transformations of the right. Sociological study (1891)
Monadologie and sociology (1893)
social Logic (1895)
Fragment of future history (1896)
universal Opposition. A tentative a theory of the opposites . (1897)
Written social psychology (1898)
social Laws. Outline of a sociology (1898)
economic Psychologie , Paris, Felix Alcan (1902)
the Opinion and crowd (1901) (republished in 2006)

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