Knowing the population

At any given time there are huge areas of the unknown when it comes to the question, what do various members of our society care about? We have opinion research tools, of course. But we don't really have good answers to any of these questions:

• How do West Bloomfield teenagers think about their futures?
• Why do Kenyan truck drivers refrain from the most basic AIDS-prevention techniques?
• Are skateboarders disaffected from mainstream society?
• What does it mean when affluent suburban white kids wear hiphop gear?
• What do laid-off auto workers think about higher education for themselves?
• How do Mexican gang killers feel about their victims?

These questions fall in the general area of qualitative knowledge of social actors and groups. We want to know in some detail about the subjectivity of the members of these groups -- how they think, what they value, how they perceive the world.  There can be a quantitative side as well -- once we have information about some people in a group we can ask about the distribution of these characteristics over the group.

But here is the key question at the moment: where within the disciplines of the social sciences does inquiry into these questions fall?  And the simple answer is, none of them and parts of all of them. Ethnography is relevant; but anthropologists usually seem to have larger theoretical apples to peel. Political scientists are interested in a small subset of these questions -- basically, they are interested in measuring political attitudes and preferences.  And some branches of sociology have had an interest in this kind of concrete social description -- for example, Erving Goffman; but at present this kind of detailed inquiry into the lived experience of particular individuals and groups doesn't have much prestige in the field. It is hard to see AJS publishing a descriptive study of attitudes and values of West Bloomfield teenagers.

So two things seem to be true. First, there is an important kind of knowledge that we need to have in order to adequately understand society. And second, there doesn't seem to be a discipline in the social sciences that takes on this challenge.

So how should we think about the subjective experience and mental frameworks of a given social group?  A group is defined by some set of characteristics -- people from a certain region ("midwesterners"), people with a certain occupation ("insurance adjustors"), people with a certain national origin ("Irish-Americans"), people from a particular age cohort (Generation X), or people with a certain religion or value scheme ("Protestants," "Populists").  So by construction, members of the group share a few characteristics in common -- the "nominal" characteristics of the group.  But we also know that almost every group displays a great range of diversity with respect to other characteristics -- lifestyle, political attitudes, moral commitments, ...  So how should we think about the problem of coming to better understand the distinctive features of consciousness as well as the range of diversity and similarity among members of the group?  This raises a number of interesting questions.  For example:

• Are there similarities that members of this group possess over and above the nominal characteristics of the group?  Is there something distinctive about the experience and mentality of Gen X or "The Greatest Generation"?
• Are some groups more diverse than others with respect to a given set of social characteristics?
• Is it possible to explain some of the patterns of similarity that are discovered among members of the group?  

Suppose we are interested in K-12 school teachers: what makes them choose this work, what are some of the social backgrounds from which they emerge, how do they feel about their work, are they idealistic or jaded in their work?  How might we approach a subject like this from the point of view of social science research?

One possibility is to approach the task through survey research.  We might design a survey intended to measure attitudes, background, degree of commitment, etc.  The results of the survey can be presented as a set of descriptive statistics for each question, with standard deviations.  We might have a theory of how the questions cluster, and we might classify individuals into sub-groups sharing a cluster of properties.  Further, we might try to identify differences that exist among sub-populations (by race, age, or occupational group, let us say).  And we would probably want to see whether there are interesting correlations among some of the recorded variables.

Another possibility is to approach the task through interviews and qualitative research.  Here the investigator will work with a smaller number of cases; but he/she will get to know individuals well, and will come to see the nuance and detail of the multiple experiences that school teachers have of their work.  Here we might imagine several different kinds of findings:

"There is no typical school teacher; rather, each has a different profile." This researcher may not be able to summarize or analyze his/her findings, but rather needs to provide a descriptive narrative of a series of cases.  This is perhaps the kind of knowledge that Studs Terkel produces (link).  

Or: "A small set of common themes emerge from a number of the cases, so we can begin to classify teachers into a small set of similar groups."

It is also possible to code and aggregate the results of this sort of qualitative research.  This may permit us to discover that there are some broad groupings among the population surveyed.  We might find that there are fairly visible groupings among school teachers, with similar attitudes and commitments among individuals of group A that distinguish them sharply from individuals of group B.  (For example: "Inner city teachers differ significantly from suburban teachers;" "teachers in their 50s differ significantly from teachers in their 30s;" "white and black teacher differ significantly from each other.")  The researcher may then try to arrive at hypotheses about why the A's are so different from the B's: educational background, experience within a certain industry, gender or race characteristics, cohort-specific experiences, differences in the work-place environment.  This represents a slide from qualitative inquiry to quantitative analysis; ethnographic and individual-level investigation is aggregated into analytical categories.  Here the sociologically interesting question is that of social causation: what are the social influences that differently affected the two populations?

The key point here is that individuals have a rather specific socially constituted subjectivity -- a set of mental frameworks, concepts, modes of thinking, emotions, values, and aversions -- that distinguishes them from others.  This subjective framework provides a basis for their actions, choices, and preferences.  We also speculate, often, that there are important similarities in these frameworks within groups in dimensions that distinguish this group from that group.  It appears to be a fundamentally important task for the social sciences, to have means of investigating these empirical realities.  These questions are important, most fundamentally, because they give an indication of why people behave as they do.  And yet the existing disciplines have little interest in pursuing these types of questions.

Knowing the population

At any given time there are huge areas of the unknown when it comes to the question, what do various members of our society care about? We have opinion research tools, of course. But we don't really have good answers to any of these questions:

• How do West Bloomfield teenagers think about their futures?
• Why do Kenyan truck drivers refrain from the most basic AIDS-prevention techniques?
• Are skateboarders disaffected from mainstream society?
• What does it mean when affluent suburban white kids wear hiphop gear?
• What do laid-off auto workers think about higher education for themselves?
• How do Mexican gang killers feel about their victims?

These questions fall in the general area of qualitative knowledge of social actors and groups. We want to know in some detail about the subjectivity of the members of these groups -- how they think, what they value, how they perceive the world.  There can be a quantitative side as well -- once we have information about some people in a group we can ask about the distribution of these characteristics over the group.

But here is the key question at the moment: where within the disciplines of the social sciences does inquiry into these questions fall?  And the simple answer is, none of them and parts of all of them. Ethnography is relevant; but anthropologists usually seem to have larger theoretical apples to peel. Political scientists are interested in a small subset of these questions -- basically, they are interested in measuring political attitudes and preferences.  And some branches of sociology have had an interest in this kind of concrete social description -- for example, Erving Goffman; but at present this kind of detailed inquiry into the lived experience of particular individuals and groups doesn't have much prestige in the field. It is hard to see AJS publishing a descriptive study of attitudes and values of West Bloomfield teenagers.

So two things seem to be true. First, there is an important kind of knowledge that we need to have in order to adequately understand society. And second, there doesn't seem to be a discipline in the social sciences that takes on this challenge.

So how should we think about the subjective experience and mental frameworks of a given social group?  A group is defined by some set of characteristics -- people from a certain region ("midwesterners"), people with a certain occupation ("insurance adjustors"), people with a certain national origin ("Irish-Americans"), people from a particular age cohort (Generation X), or people with a certain religion or value scheme ("Protestants," "Populists").  So by construction, members of the group share a few characteristics in common -- the "nominal" characteristics of the group.  But we also know that almost every group displays a great range of diversity with respect to other characteristics -- lifestyle, political attitudes, moral commitments, ...  So how should we think about the problem of coming to better understand the distinctive features of consciousness as well as the range of diversity and similarity among members of the group?  This raises a number of interesting questions.  For example:

• Are there similarities that members of this group possess over and above the nominal characteristics of the group?  Is there something distinctive about the experience and mentality of Gen X or "The Greatest Generation"?
• Are some groups more diverse than others with respect to a given set of social characteristics?
• Is it possible to explain some of the patterns of similarity that are discovered among members of the group?  

Suppose we are interested in K-12 school teachers: what makes them choose this work, what are some of the social backgrounds from which they emerge, how do they feel about their work, are they idealistic or jaded in their work?  How might we approach a subject like this from the point of view of social science research?

One possibility is to approach the task through survey research.  We might design a survey intended to measure attitudes, background, degree of commitment, etc.  The results of the survey can be presented as a set of descriptive statistics for each question, with standard deviations.  We might have a theory of how the questions cluster, and we might classify individuals into sub-groups sharing a cluster of properties.  Further, we might try to identify differences that exist among sub-populations (by race, age, or occupational group, let us say).  And we would probably want to see whether there are interesting correlations among some of the recorded variables.

Another possibility is to approach the task through interviews and qualitative research.  Here the investigator will work with a smaller number of cases; but he/she will get to know individuals well, and will come to see the nuance and detail of the multiple experiences that school teachers have of their work.  Here we might imagine several different kinds of findings:

"There is no typical school teacher; rather, each has a different profile." This researcher may not be able to summarize or analyze his/her findings, but rather needs to provide a descriptive narrative of a series of cases.  This is perhaps the kind of knowledge that Studs Terkel produces (link).  

Or: "A small set of common themes emerge from a number of the cases, so we can begin to classify teachers into a small set of similar groups."

It is also possible to code and aggregate the results of this sort of qualitative research.  This may permit us to discover that there are some broad groupings among the population surveyed.  We might find that there are fairly visible groupings among school teachers, with similar attitudes and commitments among individuals of group A that distinguish them sharply from individuals of group B.  (For example: "Inner city teachers differ significantly from suburban teachers;" "teachers in their 50s differ significantly from teachers in their 30s;" "white and black teacher differ significantly from each other.")  The researcher may then try to arrive at hypotheses about why the A's are so different from the B's: educational background, experience within a certain industry, gender or race characteristics, cohort-specific experiences, differences in the work-place environment.  This represents a slide from qualitative inquiry to quantitative analysis; ethnographic and individual-level investigation is aggregated into analytical categories.  Here the sociologically interesting question is that of social causation: what are the social influences that differently affected the two populations?

The key point here is that individuals have a rather specific socially constituted subjectivity -- a set of mental frameworks, concepts, modes of thinking, emotions, values, and aversions -- that distinguishes them from others.  This subjective framework provides a basis for their actions, choices, and preferences.  We also speculate, often, that there are important similarities in these frameworks within groups in dimensions that distinguish this group from that group.  It appears to be a fundamentally important task for the social sciences, to have means of investigating these empirical realities.  These questions are important, most fundamentally, because they give an indication of why people behave as they do.  And yet the existing disciplines have little interest in pursuing these types of questions.

Knowing the population

At any given time there are huge areas of the unknown when it comes to the question, what do various members of our society care about? We have opinion research tools, of course. But we don't really have good answers to any of these questions:

• How do West Bloomfield teenagers think about their futures?
• Why do Kenyan truck drivers refrain from the most basic AIDS-prevention techniques?
• Are skateboarders disaffected from mainstream society?
• What does it mean when affluent suburban white kids wear hiphop gear?
• What do laid-off auto workers think about higher education for themselves?
• How do Mexican gang killers feel about their victims?

These questions fall in the general area of qualitative knowledge of social actors and groups. We want to know in some detail about the subjectivity of the members of these groups -- how they think, what they value, how they perceive the world.  There can be a quantitative side as well -- once we have information about some people in a group we can ask about the distribution of these characteristics over the group.

But here is the key question at the moment: where within the disciplines of the social sciences does inquiry into these questions fall?  And the simple answer is, none of them and parts of all of them. Ethnography is relevant; but anthropologists usually seem to have larger theoretical apples to peel. Political scientists are interested in a small subset of these questions -- basically, they are interested in measuring political attitudes and preferences.  And some branches of sociology have had an interest in this kind of concrete social description -- for example, Erving Goffman; but at present this kind of detailed inquiry into the lived experience of particular individuals and groups doesn't have much prestige in the field. It is hard to see AJS publishing a descriptive study of attitudes and values of West Bloomfield teenagers.

So two things seem to be true. First, there is an important kind of knowledge that we need to have in order to adequately understand society. And second, there doesn't seem to be a discipline in the social sciences that takes on this challenge.

So how should we think about the subjective experience and mental frameworks of a given social group?  A group is defined by some set of characteristics -- people from a certain region ("midwesterners"), people with a certain occupation ("insurance adjustors"), people with a certain national origin ("Irish-Americans"), people from a particular age cohort (Generation X), or people with a certain religion or value scheme ("Protestants," "Populists").  So by construction, members of the group share a few characteristics in common -- the "nominal" characteristics of the group.  But we also know that almost every group displays a great range of diversity with respect to other characteristics -- lifestyle, political attitudes, moral commitments, ...  So how should we think about the problem of coming to better understand the distinctive features of consciousness as well as the range of diversity and similarity among members of the group?  This raises a number of interesting questions.  For example:

• Are there similarities that members of this group possess over and above the nominal characteristics of the group?  Is there something distinctive about the experience and mentality of Gen X or "The Greatest Generation"?
• Are some groups more diverse than others with respect to a given set of social characteristics?
• Is it possible to explain some of the patterns of similarity that are discovered among members of the group?  

Suppose we are interested in K-12 school teachers: what makes them choose this work, what are some of the social backgrounds from which they emerge, how do they feel about their work, are they idealistic or jaded in their work?  How might we approach a subject like this from the point of view of social science research?

One possibility is to approach the task through survey research.  We might design a survey intended to measure attitudes, background, degree of commitment, etc.  The results of the survey can be presented as a set of descriptive statistics for each question, with standard deviations.  We might have a theory of how the questions cluster, and we might classify individuals into sub-groups sharing a cluster of properties.  Further, we might try to identify differences that exist among sub-populations (by race, age, or occupational group, let us say).  And we would probably want to see whether there are interesting correlations among some of the recorded variables.

Another possibility is to approach the task through interviews and qualitative research.  Here the investigator will work with a smaller number of cases; but he/she will get to know individuals well, and will come to see the nuance and detail of the multiple experiences that school teachers have of their work.  Here we might imagine several different kinds of findings:

"There is no typical school teacher; rather, each has a different profile." This researcher may not be able to summarize or analyze his/her findings, but rather needs to provide a descriptive narrative of a series of cases.  This is perhaps the kind of knowledge that Studs Terkel produces (link).  

Or: "A small set of common themes emerge from a number of the cases, so we can begin to classify teachers into a small set of similar groups."

It is also possible to code and aggregate the results of this sort of qualitative research.  This may permit us to discover that there are some broad groupings among the population surveyed.  We might find that there are fairly visible groupings among school teachers, with similar attitudes and commitments among individuals of group A that distinguish them sharply from individuals of group B.  (For example: "Inner city teachers differ significantly from suburban teachers;" "teachers in their 50s differ significantly from teachers in their 30s;" "white and black teacher differ significantly from each other.")  The researcher may then try to arrive at hypotheses about why the A's are so different from the B's: educational background, experience within a certain industry, gender or race characteristics, cohort-specific experiences, differences in the work-place environment.  This represents a slide from qualitative inquiry to quantitative analysis; ethnographic and individual-level investigation is aggregated into analytical categories.  Here the sociologically interesting question is that of social causation: what are the social influences that differently affected the two populations?

The key point here is that individuals have a rather specific socially constituted subjectivity -- a set of mental frameworks, concepts, modes of thinking, emotions, values, and aversions -- that distinguishes them from others.  This subjective framework provides a basis for their actions, choices, and preferences.  We also speculate, often, that there are important similarities in these frameworks within groups in dimensions that distinguish this group from that group.  It appears to be a fundamentally important task for the social sciences, to have means of investigating these empirical realities.  These questions are important, most fundamentally, because they give an indication of why people behave as they do.  And yet the existing disciplines have little interest in pursuing these types of questions.

Gabriel Tarde's rediscovery

Gabriel Tarde was an important rival to Emile Durkheim on the scene of French sociology in the 1880s and 1890s.  Durkheim essentially won the field, however, and Tarde's reputation diminished for a century. Durkheim's social holism and a search for social laws prevailed, and the sociology of individuals and the methodology of contingency that Tarde had constructed had little influence on the next several generations of sociologists in France.  In the 1990s, however, several important strands of thought were receptive to a rediscovery of Tarde's thinking; Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour each found elements in Tarde's thinking that provided intellectual antecedent and support for ideas of their own.  In the past fifteen years or so there has been a significant revival of interest in Tarde.

An important volume edited by Matei Candea represents the most extensive reconsideration of Tarde's views of sociology to date.  Contributors to The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments provide highly provocative and stimulating discussions of various aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology, and the book represents an important contribution to new thinking about the social sciences.  The introductory essay by Candea is very useful and is available for free as a sample of the Kindle edition.  Bruno Latour's contribution to the volume is available on Latour's website (link), as are two short pieces on Latour's thoughts about Tarde (link, link).

Several aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology stand out.  First is his rejection of Durkheim's holism.  He was consistently critical of the idea of finished social wholes; instead, he recommended a focus on the components of social interactions and practices.  This might be understood as a focus on the individual and his/her psychological properties (methodological individualism); but it also might be seen as a more radical disassembly of the social into sub- and supra-individual constructions.  This is where Latour finds inspiration; he suggests that Tarde is an intellectual precursor to Actor Network Theory (ANT), which does not give ontological priority to either individuals or social wholes.

Another important feature of Tarde's philosophy of the social is his emphasis on heterogeneity and contingency within the social.  He revels in the fact of variation among and within social processes, and he emphasizes the deep degree of contingency that characterizes social outcomes.  Here is one example in Social Laws: "Science is the co-ordination of phenomena regarded from the side of their repetitions.  But this does not mean that differentiation is not an essential mode of procedure for the scientific mind" (8).

The contributors to the Candea volume illustrate this deep contingency in a different way; they ask the question of how the science of sociology might have developed differently if Tarde's views had taken deeper root.  Here is how Candea puts this point in the opening words of the volume:

Some theorists have intersected with history in such an odd way that they seem to require an introduction in the form of a thought experiment: What if Durkheimian sociology had had, from the very beginning, a thoughtful and vocal opponent; one who queries the 'thingness' of the social and the holistic, bounded nature of societies and human groups; one who accused Durkheim of disregarding the contingency of history in the search for scientific 'structure'; one who proposed a radical reversal of the organic analogy, claiming that organisms are societies and not the other way around; one who foregrounded imitations, oppositions and inventions where Durkheim saw conformism to a rule as the key component of the social; one who had already found a way to dissolve the linked contrasts between individual and society, micro and macro, agency and structure, freedom and constraint -- Durkheim's main (and for many, troublesome) legacy to twentieth-century social science?

And, of course, that critic is none other than Tarde.

Here are a few of Tarde's ideas as expressed in his 1897 volume, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (translated into English in 1899).

Thus science consists in viewing any fact whatsoever under three aspects, corresponding, respectively, to the repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations which it contains, and which are obscured by a mass of variations, dissymmetries, and disharmonies. The relation of cause to effect, in fact, is not the only element which properly constitutes scientific knowledge. (9)

Here is a schematic philosophy of science -- an account of what sociology consists of.  Tarde emphasizes the discovery of both regularities and variations:

These reflections were needed in order to show what sociology must be, if it is to deserve the name of science, and along what paths sociologists must guide its course, if they wish to see it assume, unchallenged, its proper rank. Like every other science, it will attain this only when it has gained, and is conscious of possessing, its own domain of repetitions, its own domain of oppositions, and its own domain of adaptations, each characteristic of itself and belonging wholly to itself. Sociology can only make progress when it succeeds in substituting true repetitions, oppositions, and harmonies for false ones, as all the other sciences have done before it. And in place of repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations that are true but vague, it must find others that become ever more exact as it advances. (10)

And on a central tenet of methodological individualism--the idea of the strict determination of the whole as a consequence of the characteristics of indistinguishable individual components:

I believe that none of the above-mentioned differences, including even the mere variety of arrangement and random distribution of matter throughout space, can be explained on the theory of exactly similar atomic elements—an hypothesis so dear to chemists, who are in this respect the real metaphysicians; I do not see that Spencer’s so-called law of the instability of the homogeneous explains anything. And hence, I believe that the only means of explaining this exuberant growth of individual differences upon the surface of phenomena is by assuming that they spring from a motley array of elements, each possessing its own individual characteristics. (15)

And rather than seeking out high-level generalizations and regularities about the social world, Tarde advocates for more specific and granular studies:

Fortunately, screened and sheltered from view by these ambitious generalizations, certain less venturesome workers strove, with greater success, to formulate other more substantial laws concerning the details. Among these should be mentioned the linguists, the mythologists, and above all the economists. These specialists in sociological fields discovered various interesting relations among successive and simultaneous facts, which recurred constantly within the limits of the narrow domain they were examining. (18)

Tarde explicitly rejects John Stuart Mill's particular version of methodological individualism:

In some quarters the feeling has existed that we must look to psychology for any general explanation of the laws and pseudo-laws of economics, language, mythology, etc. No man held to this view with greater force and clearness than John Stuart Mill. At the end of his Logic he represents sociology as a species of applied psychology. Unfortunately he did not analyze the concept carefully enough; and the psychology to which he looked for the key to social phenomena was merely individual psychology—the branch which studies the interrelations of impressions and imagery in a single mind, believing that everything within this domain can be explained according to the laws of association of these elements. Thus conceived, sociology became a sort of enlarged and externalized English associationism, and was in a fair way to lose its originality. (19)

And here is an explicit rejection of a particular kind of Durkheimian social fact -- the idea of a national character:

Sooner or later, one must open his eyes to the evidence, and recognize that the genius of a people or race, instead of being a factor superior to and dominating the characters of the individuals (who have been considered its offshoots and ephemeral manifestations) is simply a convenient label, or impersonal synthesis, of these individual characteristics; the latter alone are real, effective, and ever in activity; they are in a state of continual fermentation in the bosom of every society, thanks to the examples borrowed and exchanged with neighboring societies to their great mutual profit. (27)

Here is how Bruno Latour summarizes his appreciation of Tarde in "Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social" (link):

And yet, I want to argue in this chapter, through a close reading of his recently republished most daring book, Monadologie et sociologie (M&S), that Tarde introduced into social theory the two main arguments which ANT has tried, somewhat vainly, to champion:

a) the nature and society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions ;

b) the micro/macro distinction stifle any attempt at understanding how society is being generated.

In other words, I want to make a little thought experiment and imagine what the field of social sciences would have become in the last century, had Tarde's insights been turned into a science instead of Durkheim's. Or may be it is that Tarde, a truly daring but also, I have to admit, totally undisciplined mind, needed a rather different century so as to be finally understood. 

Latour ends his contribution to the Candea volume with an intriguing section called "Digital traceability ... Tarde's vindication?".  The key idea here is that the twenty-first century permits social scientists to go decisively and transparently beyond the primitive aggregative statistics that underlay Durkheim's approach to the "social whole."  Tarde, and Latour, look at Durkheim's social whole as no more than a crude statistical aggregation of data; and, according to Latour, Tarde had envisioned a time when the statistics and quantitative data deriving from social behavior would be transparent and visible.  This, Latour suggests, is becoming true.  Today we can look at social data at a full range of levels of aggregation, moving back and forth from the micro to the macro with ease.  Here is Tarde's version of the vision:

If Statistics continues to progress as it has done for several years, if the information which it gives us continues to gain in accuracy, in dispatch, in bulk, and in regularity, a time may come when upon the accomplishment of every social event a figure will at once issue forth automatically, so to speak, to take its place on the statistical registers that will be continuously communicated to the public and spread abroad pictorially by the daily press.

And here is Latour's comment:

It is indeed striking that at this very moment, the fast expanding fields of "data visualization", "computational social science" or "biological networks" are tracing before our eyes, just the sort of data Tarde would have acclaimed. ... Digital navigation through point-to-point datascapes might, a century later, vindicate Tarde's insights.

This is only the briefest of samplings from Tarde's work, from one short book.  But it is perhaps enough to give substance to the idea that Tarde is as much of an innovative founder of scientific sociology as Weber, Marx, or Durkheim; and he is a thinker from whom a new generation of sociologists can gain new ideas.

Gabriel Tarde's rediscovery

Gabriel Tarde was an important rival to Emile Durkheim on the scene of French sociology in the 1880s and 1890s.  Durkheim essentially won the field, however, and Tarde's reputation diminished for a century. Durkheim's social holism and a search for social laws prevailed, and the sociology of individuals and the methodology of contingency that Tarde had constructed had little influence on the next several generations of sociologists in France.  In the 1990s, however, several important strands of thought were receptive to a rediscovery of Tarde's thinking; Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour each found elements in Tarde's thinking that provided intellectual antecedent and support for ideas of their own.  In the past fifteen years or so there has been a significant revival of interest in Tarde.

An important volume edited by Matei Candea represents the most extensive reconsideration of Tarde's views of sociology to date.  Contributors to The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments provide highly provocative and stimulating discussions of various aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology, and the book represents an important contribution to new thinking about the social sciences.  The introductory essay by Candea is very useful and is available for free as a sample of the Kindle edition.  Bruno Latour's contribution to the volume is available on Latour's website (link), as are two short pieces on Latour's thoughts about Tarde (link, link).

Several aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology stand out.  First is his rejection of Durkheim's holism.  He was consistently critical of the idea of finished social wholes; instead, he recommended a focus on the components of social interactions and practices.  This might be understood as a focus on the individual and his/her psychological properties (methodological individualism); but it also might be seen as a more radical disassembly of the social into sub- and supra-individual constructions.  This is where Latour finds inspiration; he suggests that Tarde is an intellectual precursor to Actor Network Theory (ANT), which does not give ontological priority to either individuals or social wholes.

Another important feature of Tarde's philosophy of the social is his emphasis on heterogeneity and contingency within the social.  He revels in the fact of variation among and within social processes, and he emphasizes the deep degree of contingency that characterizes social outcomes.  Here is one example in Social Laws: "Science is the co-ordination of phenomena regarded from the side of their repetitions.  But this does not mean that differentiation is not an essential mode of procedure for the scientific mind" (8).

The contributors to the Candea volume illustrate this deep contingency in a different way; they ask the question of how the science of sociology might have developed differently if Tarde's views had taken deeper root.  Here is how Candea puts this point in the opening words of the volume:

Some theorists have intersected with history in such an odd way that they seem to require an introduction in the form of a thought experiment: What if Durkheimian sociology had had, from the very beginning, a thoughtful and vocal opponent; one who queries the 'thingness' of the social and the holistic, bounded nature of societies and human groups; one who accused Durkheim of disregarding the contingency of history in the search for scientific 'structure'; one who proposed a radical reversal of the organic analogy, claiming that organisms are societies and not the other way around; one who foregrounded imitations, oppositions and inventions where Durkheim saw conformism to a rule as the key component of the social; one who had already found a way to dissolve the linked contrasts between individual and society, micro and macro, agency and structure, freedom and constraint -- Durkheim's main (and for many, troublesome) legacy to twentieth-century social science?

And, of course, that critic is none other than Tarde.

Here are a few of Tarde's ideas as expressed in his 1897 volume, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (translated into English in 1899).

Thus science consists in viewing any fact whatsoever under three aspects, corresponding, respectively, to the repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations which it contains, and which are obscured by a mass of variations, dissymmetries, and disharmonies. The relation of cause to effect, in fact, is not the only element which properly constitutes scientific knowledge. (9)

Here is a schematic philosophy of science -- an account of what sociology consists of.  Tarde emphasizes the discovery of both regularities and variations:

These reflections were needed in order to show what sociology must be, if it is to deserve the name of science, and along what paths sociologists must guide its course, if they wish to see it assume, unchallenged, its proper rank. Like every other science, it will attain this only when it has gained, and is conscious of possessing, its own domain of repetitions, its own domain of oppositions, and its own domain of adaptations, each characteristic of itself and belonging wholly to itself. Sociology can only make progress when it succeeds in substituting true repetitions, oppositions, and harmonies for false ones, as all the other sciences have done before it. And in place of repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations that are true but vague, it must find others that become ever more exact as it advances. (10)

And on a central tenet of methodological individualism--the idea of the strict determination of the whole as a consequence of the characteristics of indistinguishable individual components:

I believe that none of the above-mentioned differences, including even the mere variety of arrangement and random distribution of matter throughout space, can be explained on the theory of exactly similar atomic elements—an hypothesis so dear to chemists, who are in this respect the real metaphysicians; I do not see that Spencer’s so-called law of the instability of the homogeneous explains anything. And hence, I believe that the only means of explaining this exuberant growth of individual differences upon the surface of phenomena is by assuming that they spring from a motley array of elements, each possessing its own individual characteristics. (15)

And rather than seeking out high-level generalizations and regularities about the social world, Tarde advocates for more specific and granular studies:

Fortunately, screened and sheltered from view by these ambitious generalizations, certain less venturesome workers strove, with greater success, to formulate other more substantial laws concerning the details. Among these should be mentioned the linguists, the mythologists, and above all the economists. These specialists in sociological fields discovered various interesting relations among successive and simultaneous facts, which recurred constantly within the limits of the narrow domain they were examining. (18)

Tarde explicitly rejects John Stuart Mill's particular version of methodological individualism:

In some quarters the feeling has existed that we must look to psychology for any general explanation of the laws and pseudo-laws of economics, language, mythology, etc. No man held to this view with greater force and clearness than John Stuart Mill. At the end of his Logic he represents sociology as a species of applied psychology. Unfortunately he did not analyze the concept carefully enough; and the psychology to which he looked for the key to social phenomena was merely individual psychology—the branch which studies the interrelations of impressions and imagery in a single mind, believing that everything within this domain can be explained according to the laws of association of these elements. Thus conceived, sociology became a sort of enlarged and externalized English associationism, and was in a fair way to lose its originality. (19)

And here is an explicit rejection of a particular kind of Durkheimian social fact -- the idea of a national character:

Sooner or later, one must open his eyes to the evidence, and recognize that the genius of a people or race, instead of being a factor superior to and dominating the characters of the individuals (who have been considered its offshoots and ephemeral manifestations) is simply a convenient label, or impersonal synthesis, of these individual characteristics; the latter alone are real, effective, and ever in activity; they are in a state of continual fermentation in the bosom of every society, thanks to the examples borrowed and exchanged with neighboring societies to their great mutual profit. (27)

Here is how Bruno Latour summarizes his appreciation of Tarde in "Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social" (link):

And yet, I want to argue in this chapter, through a close reading of his recently republished most daring book, Monadologie et sociologie (M&S), that Tarde introduced into social theory the two main arguments which ANT has tried, somewhat vainly, to champion:

a) the nature and society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions ;

b) the micro/macro distinction stifle any attempt at understanding how society is being generated.

In other words, I want to make a little thought experiment and imagine what the field of social sciences would have become in the last century, had Tarde's insights been turned into a science instead of Durkheim's. Or may be it is that Tarde, a truly daring but also, I have to admit, totally undisciplined mind, needed a rather different century so as to be finally understood. 

Latour ends his contribution to the Candea volume with an intriguing section called "Digital traceability ... Tarde's vindication?".  The key idea here is that the twenty-first century permits social scientists to go decisively and transparently beyond the primitive aggregative statistics that underlay Durkheim's approach to the "social whole."  Tarde, and Latour, look at Durkheim's social whole as no more than a crude statistical aggregation of data; and, according to Latour, Tarde had envisioned a time when the statistics and quantitative data deriving from social behavior would be transparent and visible.  This, Latour suggests, is becoming true.  Today we can look at social data at a full range of levels of aggregation, moving back and forth from the micro to the macro with ease.  Here is Tarde's version of the vision:

If Statistics continues to progress as it has done for several years, if the information which it gives us continues to gain in accuracy, in dispatch, in bulk, and in regularity, a time may come when upon the accomplishment of every social event a figure will at once issue forth automatically, so to speak, to take its place on the statistical registers that will be continuously communicated to the public and spread abroad pictorially by the daily press.

And here is Latour's comment:

It is indeed striking that at this very moment, the fast expanding fields of "data visualization", "computational social science" or "biological networks" are tracing before our eyes, just the sort of data Tarde would have acclaimed. ... Digital navigation through point-to-point datascapes might, a century later, vindicate Tarde's insights.

This is only the briefest of samplings from Tarde's work, from one short book.  But it is perhaps enough to give substance to the idea that Tarde is as much of an innovative founder of scientific sociology as Weber, Marx, or Durkheim; and he is a thinker from whom a new generation of sociologists can gain new ideas.

Gabriel Tarde's rediscovery

Gabriel Tarde was an important rival to Emile Durkheim on the scene of French sociology in the 1880s and 1890s.  Durkheim essentially won the field, however, and Tarde's reputation diminished for a century. Durkheim's social holism and a search for social laws prevailed, and the sociology of individuals and the methodology of contingency that Tarde had constructed had little influence on the next several generations of sociologists in France.  In the 1990s, however, several important strands of thought were receptive to a rediscovery of Tarde's thinking; Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour each found elements in Tarde's thinking that provided intellectual antecedent and support for ideas of their own.  In the past fifteen years or so there has been a significant revival of interest in Tarde.

An important volume edited by Matei Candea represents the most extensive reconsideration of Tarde's views of sociology to date.  Contributors to The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments provide highly provocative and stimulating discussions of various aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology, and the book represents an important contribution to new thinking about the social sciences.  The introductory essay by Candea is very useful and is available for free as a sample of the Kindle edition.  Bruno Latour's contribution to the volume is available on Latour's website (link), as are two short pieces on Latour's thoughts about Tarde (link, link).

Several aspects of Tarde's philosophy of sociology stand out.  First is his rejection of Durkheim's holism.  He was consistently critical of the idea of finished social wholes; instead, he recommended a focus on the components of social interactions and practices.  This might be understood as a focus on the individual and his/her psychological properties (methodological individualism); but it also might be seen as a more radical disassembly of the social into sub- and supra-individual constructions.  This is where Latour finds inspiration; he suggests that Tarde is an intellectual precursor to Actor Network Theory (ANT), which does not give ontological priority to either individuals or social wholes.

Another important feature of Tarde's philosophy of the social is his emphasis on heterogeneity and contingency within the social.  He revels in the fact of variation among and within social processes, and he emphasizes the deep degree of contingency that characterizes social outcomes.  Here is one example in Social Laws: "Science is the co-ordination of phenomena regarded from the side of their repetitions.  But this does not mean that differentiation is not an essential mode of procedure for the scientific mind" (8).

The contributors to the Candea volume illustrate this deep contingency in a different way; they ask the question of how the science of sociology might have developed differently if Tarde's views had taken deeper root.  Here is how Candea puts this point in the opening words of the volume:

Some theorists have intersected with history in such an odd way that they seem to require an introduction in the form of a thought experiment: What if Durkheimian sociology had had, from the very beginning, a thoughtful and vocal opponent; one who queries the 'thingness' of the social and the holistic, bounded nature of societies and human groups; one who accused Durkheim of disregarding the contingency of history in the search for scientific 'structure'; one who proposed a radical reversal of the organic analogy, claiming that organisms are societies and not the other way around; one who foregrounded imitations, oppositions and inventions where Durkheim saw conformism to a rule as the key component of the social; one who had already found a way to dissolve the linked contrasts between individual and society, micro and macro, agency and structure, freedom and constraint -- Durkheim's main (and for many, troublesome) legacy to twentieth-century social science?

And, of course, that critic is none other than Tarde.

Here are a few of Tarde's ideas as expressed in his 1897 volume, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (translated into English in 1899).

Thus science consists in viewing any fact whatsoever under three aspects, corresponding, respectively, to the repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations which it contains, and which are obscured by a mass of variations, dissymmetries, and disharmonies. The relation of cause to effect, in fact, is not the only element which properly constitutes scientific knowledge. (9)

Here is a schematic philosophy of science -- an account of what sociology consists of.  Tarde emphasizes the discovery of both regularities and variations:

These reflections were needed in order to show what sociology must be, if it is to deserve the name of science, and along what paths sociologists must guide its course, if they wish to see it assume, unchallenged, its proper rank. Like every other science, it will attain this only when it has gained, and is conscious of possessing, its own domain of repetitions, its own domain of oppositions, and its own domain of adaptations, each characteristic of itself and belonging wholly to itself. Sociology can only make progress when it succeeds in substituting true repetitions, oppositions, and harmonies for false ones, as all the other sciences have done before it. And in place of repetitions, oppositions, and adaptations that are true but vague, it must find others that become ever more exact as it advances. (10)

And on a central tenet of methodological individualism--the idea of the strict determination of the whole as a consequence of the characteristics of indistinguishable individual components:

I believe that none of the above-mentioned differences, including even the mere variety of arrangement and random distribution of matter throughout space, can be explained on the theory of exactly similar atomic elements—an hypothesis so dear to chemists, who are in this respect the real metaphysicians; I do not see that Spencer’s so-called law of the instability of the homogeneous explains anything. And hence, I believe that the only means of explaining this exuberant growth of individual differences upon the surface of phenomena is by assuming that they spring from a motley array of elements, each possessing its own individual characteristics. (15)

And rather than seeking out high-level generalizations and regularities about the social world, Tarde advocates for more specific and granular studies:

Fortunately, screened and sheltered from view by these ambitious generalizations, certain less venturesome workers strove, with greater success, to formulate other more substantial laws concerning the details. Among these should be mentioned the linguists, the mythologists, and above all the economists. These specialists in sociological fields discovered various interesting relations among successive and simultaneous facts, which recurred constantly within the limits of the narrow domain they were examining. (18)

Tarde explicitly rejects John Stuart Mill's particular version of methodological individualism:

In some quarters the feeling has existed that we must look to psychology for any general explanation of the laws and pseudo-laws of economics, language, mythology, etc. No man held to this view with greater force and clearness than John Stuart Mill. At the end of his Logic he represents sociology as a species of applied psychology. Unfortunately he did not analyze the concept carefully enough; and the psychology to which he looked for the key to social phenomena was merely individual psychology—the branch which studies the interrelations of impressions and imagery in a single mind, believing that everything within this domain can be explained according to the laws of association of these elements. Thus conceived, sociology became a sort of enlarged and externalized English associationism, and was in a fair way to lose its originality. (19)

And here is an explicit rejection of a particular kind of Durkheimian social fact -- the idea of a national character:

Sooner or later, one must open his eyes to the evidence, and recognize that the genius of a people or race, instead of being a factor superior to and dominating the characters of the individuals (who have been considered its offshoots and ephemeral manifestations) is simply a convenient label, or impersonal synthesis, of these individual characteristics; the latter alone are real, effective, and ever in activity; they are in a state of continual fermentation in the bosom of every society, thanks to the examples borrowed and exchanged with neighboring societies to their great mutual profit. (27)

Here is how Bruno Latour summarizes his appreciation of Tarde in "Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social" (link):

And yet, I want to argue in this chapter, through a close reading of his recently republished most daring book, Monadologie et sociologie (M&S), that Tarde introduced into social theory the two main arguments which ANT has tried, somewhat vainly, to champion:

a) the nature and society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions ;

b) the micro/macro distinction stifle any attempt at understanding how society is being generated.

In other words, I want to make a little thought experiment and imagine what the field of social sciences would have become in the last century, had Tarde's insights been turned into a science instead of Durkheim's. Or may be it is that Tarde, a truly daring but also, I have to admit, totally undisciplined mind, needed a rather different century so as to be finally understood. 

Latour ends his contribution to the Candea volume with an intriguing section called "Digital traceability ... Tarde's vindication?".  The key idea here is that the twenty-first century permits social scientists to go decisively and transparently beyond the primitive aggregative statistics that underlay Durkheim's approach to the "social whole."  Tarde, and Latour, look at Durkheim's social whole as no more than a crude statistical aggregation of data; and, according to Latour, Tarde had envisioned a time when the statistics and quantitative data deriving from social behavior would be transparent and visible.  This, Latour suggests, is becoming true.  Today we can look at social data at a full range of levels of aggregation, moving back and forth from the micro to the macro with ease.  Here is Tarde's version of the vision:

If Statistics continues to progress as it has done for several years, if the information which it gives us continues to gain in accuracy, in dispatch, in bulk, and in regularity, a time may come when upon the accomplishment of every social event a figure will at once issue forth automatically, so to speak, to take its place on the statistical registers that will be continuously communicated to the public and spread abroad pictorially by the daily press.

And here is Latour's comment:

It is indeed striking that at this very moment, the fast expanding fields of "data visualization", "computational social science" or "biological networks" are tracing before our eyes, just the sort of data Tarde would have acclaimed. ... Digital navigation through point-to-point datascapes might, a century later, vindicate Tarde's insights.

This is only the briefest of samplings from Tarde's work, from one short book.  But it is perhaps enough to give substance to the idea that Tarde is as much of an innovative founder of scientific sociology as Weber, Marx, or Durkheim; and he is a thinker from whom a new generation of sociologists can gain new ideas.

Protest and the politics of dissent

There are several different moral and practical stances that people can take in relation to their social worlds.  The scenes above depict one of these possibilities: vociferous protest and active opposition to specific social and political policies.  Individuals and groups have ideas about justice and legitimacy.  And they have specific material interests that are affected by state policies.  When their values and interests are offended by the actions of their government or other collective actors, they may choose to mobilize around overt opposition and collective action.  Street demonstrations, protests, boycotts, and destruction of property may be the result.  Anti-globalization protests in Toronto in 2010, anti-war protests in 1968 and 2004, demands for aggressive AIDS policies in the 1990s, anti-racism protests in 1968, French protests against President Sarkozy's policies in 1999, and anti-NATO protests in Strasbourg in 2009 -- each scene represents an extensive movement against the actions of governments, international organizations, and social institutions.

What are some of the goals of public protests?  One is obvious: to exert direct pressure on governments and other powerful organizations to change their policies and actions.  Organizers and followers often have very concrete goals in mounting a protest, with an explicit theory of how the protest action will lead to the possibility of change of policy.  This is most evident in the demonstrations that took place in France in 2009 in opposition to the government's neo-liberal economic reform policies.  Organizers, organizations, and unions had very specific notions about how mass protests in Paris, Dijon, Marseille, and Lyon could succeed in forcing the government to retreat.  In this case the action is purposive and instrumental: choose this strategy to bring about that result.

Another possible goal is more expressive than this description would suggest.  People may mobilize around a demonstration out of their simple desire to express their moral dissent; to offer a moral example to the world of the wrongness of the targeted policy.  Some strands of the US civil rights movement had this character; demonstrations served to cast a light on the fundamental injustice of US race relations and laws, and many supporters participated simply out of moral solidarity with these values.

A third possibility combines the expressive and instrumental types of collective action.  Leaders and followers invested in a particular issue may want to publicize their values and their critique in order to persuade the broader public to share these values.  So a goal of the demonstration is to illustrate the moral and political values that are involved, and to attempt to sway other citizens to share these values.  This was part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s theory of change: a strategy of non-violent protest could change attitudes throughout the country and eventually lead to very substantial change in law and practice.  It also seems to be a part of the transnational movement of activists against neo-liberal globalization: help the mass of citizens of the developed world to see the harms created by the neo-liberal regime.

The occurrence of protest and demonstration is a commonplace.  But it is also a central focus of scientific study by scholars such as Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, or Doug McAdam under the topics of social movements and social contention. Here are several important recent contributions.  Tarrow and Tilly published Contentious Politics in 2006.  Tarrow's New Transnational Activism focuses on the anti-globalization protests that have occurred since Seattle's WTO meetings in 1999. McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 offers a detailed analysis of the mobilization processes that culminated in the US Civil Rights movement.  Each of these works, and dozens of others, have offered careful insights and theories about the mechanisms of social mobilization.

Social scientists have focused on several aspects of protest movements: for example, motivations of the followers; social characteristics of followers; characteristics of leaders; the organizations that serve to mobilize and coordinate protest; the networks of information and other resources that link separate organizations together; the nature of the grievances that stimulate prolonged protest movements; and the efficacy of protest movements.  Quite a few important ideas have come out of these research efforts.  For example, Charles Tilly introduced the important idea of "repertoires" of protest, making the point that different communities have developed different scripts for presenting their protests to the public and to the government.  And Tilly, Tarrow, and McAdam have argued for an innovative approach to the study of contention, in the form of a methodology of the range of social mechanisms that can be identified in a variety of instances of mobilization.

One important fact that comparative study of protest movements and organizations demonstrates, is the common feature of diversity of purposes, goals, and strategies among the individuals and groups who support a movement.  The US anti-war movement is a good example; the coalition that came together to create large demonstrations and public actions in various cities in the 1960s commonly represented a very wide range of political perspectives and goals, from Quakers to Progressive Labor activists.  This range of political positions reflected significant disagreement about the goals of protest; but it also represented serious disagreement about the strategies of protest as well.

A crucial dividing line among anti-war organizations was the use of deliberate destruction of property as a tool of protest.  Probably the majority of individuals and groups opposed the use of violence, whereas small organizations deliberately sought out opportunities for "trashing".  The slogan, "Days of Rage," captures this perspective.  This same divide was evident in the G20 demonstrations in Toronto last month, with Black Bloc activists deliberately finding opportunities for burning police cars and smashing shop windows.  (Here is a manifesto from the Wombles on the subject of violence in demonstrations.)  Peter Ackerman demonstrates in Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century that non-violent protest has a very wide range of strategies at its disposal, and that these mechanisms have often proven very effective in achieving the goals of the protest.

(Quite a few earlier posts have focused on examples of social mobilization and theories of how groups become engaged in collective action; these can be found in the collective action thread.)