Echoes of Gabriel Tarde: What We Know Better or Different 100 Years Later

project.

PART I:

Press–Conversation–Opinion–Action:

An Introduction

by

Elihu Katz, Christopher Ali & Joohan Kim

Gabriel Tarde’s Deliberative Democracy

Shortly after his arrival in Paris—amidst the turbulence of the 1890s surrounding the Dreyfus Affair—Gabriel Tarde published two essays on what today—100 years later—would be called deliberative democracy (see Tarde, 1901). One of these, Opinion and Conversation is the subject of this book. It reflects on a system of interaction among press, conversation, opinion, and action—how each relates to the others and to democratic governance. Long neglected, it deserves to be canonized as a foundational document, a benchmark, in the study of political communication. Allow us to convince you!i

While a range of definitions is available, there is general agreement that deliberative democracy idealizes (1) open-minded citizens, who (2) are interested in public affairs, (3) are attentive to the several sides of issues, (4) have access to safe spaces for deliberation, (5) engage in agonistic conversation with each other, (6) on an equal and mutually respectful basis, (7) form considered opinions after weighing the competing arguments, (8) prioritize the common good over self-interest, (9) act to advance their opinions in public, and (10) have the ear of policy-makers. Spurred largely by the work of Jurgen Habermas (1984, 1987, 1989, 2006), and by continuing echoes of the debate between Lippmann and Dewey (Schudson, 2008), social scientists have become increasingly interested in both normative and empirical aspects of the question, whether conversation is (or should be) the soul of democracy (Schudson, 1997).

Unlike Habermas, Tarde did not set out to advocate deliberative democracy, a term he would not have recognized, and certainly not its rationalistic and altruistic biases. His essay is essentially descriptive of a system of interacting elements that anticipate, and contribute to, the present-day debate. In his system, the press is assigned the role of creating a public and, like Anderson, (1991), the role of creating a nation. The press also set agendas for conversation in the cafes, where opinions are clarified and crystallized; and then translated into individual actions in the worlds of politics, fashions, consumer behaviors, etc. At the collective level, these public opinions are reincorporated into the press and serve as a brake on government.

Our book is divided into three parts. Part I is this introduction to Tarde, person and scholar, culminating in our analysis of his essay. In Part II, we present the essay itself, in English, and in full (for the first time). In doing so, we have also highlighted the hypotheses and propositions that are embodied in the text. Our commentary on each of these propositions constitutes Part III, where we ask ourselves (and our readers), what do we know, better or different, more than a century later? Following Lazarsfeld’s idea of How to Read a Book, Part III reformulates Tarde’s propositions in researchable terms, while our commentary enlists a large number of relatively recent studies in response. If the reader finds the sum of our comments somewhat biased; in the sense that they more often support Tarde rather than refute him, we plead guilty, and invite our readers to right our wrongs.

While the print version of the book is divided neatly into these three parts, the interactive version, our e-book provides an opportunity for the reader to navigate between Tarde’s original essay and our commentary through hyperlinks, thus effectively collapsing Parts II and III into an interactive guide for studying Tarde’s communication theories.

Our aim is not only to reawaken attention to Tarde’s text, but to assess the progress of communications research in its light. Through these interconnected dialogues, it will become obvious that Tarde’s essay may be read as an anticipation of contemporary concerns with issues such as agenda setting, public opinion formation, the diffusion of innovation, the two-step flow of communication, the role of the press in nation-building, new media technologies, the normative role of the press in a democracy, media events, and the like. A bibliography of these references completes the book.

Tarde’s work has been neglected for a long time. Although he was a major figure in 19th century France—as provincial judge, novelist, criminologist, statistician and social-psychologist, he was overtaken by a younger rival, Emile Durkheim, (Clark, 1969; Lukes, 1985) who denigrated Tarde’s thinking as too psychologistic, and too individualistic, to qualify as foundational for a science of sociology. The essay we present here will question that allegation, drawing on some of our own work (Katz, 2006, 2012; Katz et al., 1998; Kim, Wyatt, & Katz, 1999) and on the work of fellow Tardians such as Terry Clark (1969), Jaap van Ginnken (1992), Serge Moscovici (1985), Bruno Latour (2002, 2010), Louise Salmon (2005a, 2005b, 2005c), and others. A new French edition of Tarde’s L’opinion et la foule, which includes Opinion and Conversation has also recently appeared, edited and introduced by Dominque Reynie (1989), as have two new volumes on Tarde by Matei Candea (2010; forthcoming). Clark’s now 50-year-old book (recently republished) remains the standard bearer, in English, of the Tardian revival. Among the scholars who have more recently advocated for a re-evaluation of Tarde’s place in the canon of sociology (i.e., Candea, 2010a; Toews, 2003; Tonkonoff, 2013), none has been more vocal than French social theorist Bruno Latour (2002, 2005, 2010).ii

Still, it would be most fitting to dedicate this book to Terry Clark (1969) who, more than anybody writing in English, has kept Tarde alive as a pioneer in the study of communication and social influence. Clark will forgive us, we hope, if we postpone this well-deserved salute in favor of remembering James Carey (1935–2006), who probably was unaware of how closely his interests resembled those of the Tarde we are celebrating here. Although Carey (1989) may never have stumbled on Tarde’s essay, it is difficult to think of a more exemplary follower. Both men were passionate about the press and conversation, and their role in the workings of democracy. Had Carey encountered the early Tarde—the criminologist and diffusionist—he might have dismissed him as a theorist of transmission, a research trajectory that Carey sought to discourage. Indeed, it is true that Tarde’s most famous work The Laws of Imitation (1890), dealt with the dynamics of the diffusion of ideas. Had Carey perused the present essay, however, he would have realized that, like himself, Tarde was deeply interested in what Carey called the rituals of journalism and conversation, and the ways in which they hold society together. In other words, we wish here to propose that Tarde deserves a joint appointment, as both patron saint of transmission and as co-saint, with Durkheim, of ritual, at least as far as political communication is concerned. Max Weber (1946), Philip Elliott (1980), and Bernard Berelson (1948) belong in these ranks as well.

Unlike Carey or Habermas, the focus on deliberative democracy came very late to Tarde. His central academic interest, as already noted, was in a theory of how opinions and practices spread through social networks, or what we call today, the diffusion of innovation (Katz, Levin, & Hamilton, 1963). The second of his major interests was in criminology, and the statistics of crime. This focus led, somewhat later, to an interest in types of crowds, including criminal crowds. Tarde realized that the crowd was being superseded by a new social formation that organized itself, virtually, around the daily newspaper. Rather than a physical assembly, the public was, in effect, a dispersed crowd that imbibed the daily agenda of the press and then reassembled, physically, in cafes, coffeehouses and salons to discuss current affairs, and form public opinion. By asserting that a theory of diffusion had to take account of social formations like crowds, publics, conversations, fashion, scandal, rumor, and public opinion Tarde was, in effect, inventing the field of collective behavior, as Clark (1969) has also noted. This marginal branch of sociology refers to dynamic formations that break away from the rules governing more static social structures such as class, ethnicity or bureaucracy. This is an area where communications research may have outdistanced sociology. We daresay that it was the potential of the computer for the study of social networks and the rapid rise of communication research that offered a new home to collective behavior. Making this very point, Bruno Latour (2002) says that Tarde

…needed a rather different century so as to be finally understood. It could be argued that a thinker of networks before their time could not transform his intuitions into data because the material world he was interested in was not there yet to provide him with any empirical grasp. Things are different now that the technological networks are in place and that many of the arguments of Tarde can be turned into sound empirical use. (p. 118)

It wasn’t until the turn of the century that Tarde outlined what we have anachronistically labeled a theory of deliberative democracy. It is likely that it was the Dreyfus Affair, the media event of the turn of the century that led him to put the pieces together, that is, to connect the everyday of government-press-conversation-opinion that might contrast, at least implicitly, with the turmoil of a still-nascent democratic society confronted with an all-absorbing event that threatened to tear it apart. As is well-known, the French army had accused one of its officers, a Jewish captain, of providing the Germans with state secrets, and it took seven years of trials, disgrace, exile, racism, and vehement debate—in the courts, in the press, in the streets, and in the salons—before Alfred Dreyfus was exonerated. As Halasz (1955) puts it, the press offered not only a day-to-day recording of the mass delusion and its heroic cure, but was also the medium through which the event itself came to pass (p. 268). There is reason to believe that Tarde did not much like what he saw (Salmon, 2005a). He was wary of the biases and batings of the press, of the frenzy of the crowds and even of the publics, as well as the sometimes destructive and leveling effects of democracy (1898, in Salmon, 2005a, para.17). Although he barely mentions the Affair in his published work, his private notes (Salmon, 2005a) show how carefully he followed the events, and how much these observations led him to perceive a system that combined both the transmission and the ritual aspects of mass and, interpersonal communication. Experts on Tarde are disappointed that he failed to take a public stand among the Dreyfussards, as did LeBon and Durkheim, but there is little doubt about his concern, his sympathy and his insight into the collective behavior that surrounded the event. By the time the Affair had been settled in 1899, Dreyfus pardoned, Esterhazy convicted, and Emile Zola returned from exile, Tarde had published the first iteration of L’opinion et la conversation.

The Move to Paris

Tarde’s life and career have been amply documented, reflecting the reawakened interest in his importance.iii Born in the pastoral town of Sarlat, Gabriel de Tarde, experienced something of his family’s aristocratic lifestyle, and followed the family’s footsteps into the practice of law, eventually becoming a judge in 1875 (van Ginneken, 1992, p. 191). Crippled by physical and emotional impediments throughout his life, Tarde tenaciously pursued an interest in mathematics, tried his hand at verse and drama, and, during the years of his judgeship, gained prominence as author of books and essays on political economy and criminality from a psychological point of view (Candea, 2010b). By the early 1890s, Tarde also began to gain notoriety as a social theorist. The centerpiece of this later work was the publication in 1890 of his Laws of Imitation. This was a full-dress rehearsal for the confrontation, in Paris, with his younger contemporary, Emile Durkheim. He succumbed to frailty and illness during the height of these debates, and died at the age of 61.

Tarde did not arrive in Paris until 1894 at the age of 51, but it is this move that seems to hold the key to that turning point in his intellectual biography that interests us here (see Salmon, 2005c). To be sure, Laws of Imitation and his other works on criminology were well known before he left Sarlat to assume the post of Director of Criminal Statistics at the Ministry of Justice as well as various other distinguished posts inside and outside the University system. But it was in Paris that he had to defend his reputation, and clarify his position, especially in the confrontations with Durkheim. And it was in Paris, in the shadow of Dreyfus, that he was inspired to integrate and expand the ideas that he had earlier developed about the workings of a democratic system.

It is important, therefore, to recall his earlier work in this new light. Most important, perhaps, is his basic idea of imitation. By means of this perhaps unfortunate label—he would have fared better had he used the term influence—Tarde called attention to the networks of interpersonal (intermental) communication that converge to create the norms and other cultural constraints that Durkheim and his followers take as their starting point. Using concepts such as invention, opposition, and imitation, Tarde tried to explain the dynamics of how ideas conflict and coalesce as they travel through the networks, strata, and regions that constitute society. The resultant of these interactions constitutes public opinion, infuses public policy, and contributes to social stability and change. Van Ginneken (1992) suggests that Tarde’s society was like one large irrigation system, with currents, undercurrents and countercurrents in constant flux. For Durkheim, we might say, a tsunami just blows in from the sea; ready-made; Tarde wants to know how it was assembled.

A second concept which Tarde brought with him was that of the crowd. Before coming to Paris, Tarde’s interest in crowds derived from his own research and observation, and from Le Bon’s (1895) famous proclamation that theirs was the era of the crowd. In the metropolis, Tarde had more of a close-up of crowds and their variety, particularly in connection with Dreyfus, but by then, he began to contrast crowds with publics. He saw that the newspaper was a mobilizer of publics, who were more temperate and less single-minded than crowds. Tarde came to Paris as a theorist of crowds, and settled there as a student of publics. As he saw it, this was no longer an era of crowds but a time of the public (Clark, 1969, p. 53).

A third aspect of Tarde’s transformation is evident in the strong interest he developed in comparativism. He set off in this direction in his first book, on comparative criminality (Clark, 1969), but his Opinion and Conversation is full of comparisons. Rural-urban comparisons are especially prominent, but he also speculates on cultural and historical differences. In the city, writes Tarde,

the various social strata strike up a conversation more easily, and as a result of emigration from field to town, the process of urbanization of the very countryside, the improvement in the average level of education, the nature of conversation changes utterly, with new topics replacing the old.

The salience of these comparisons probably also led Tarde to an awareness of the importance of Opinion. If we may be permitted to speculate further, it seems likely that he made note of the rapid transition to modernity and how it accelerated the turnover of opinions and fashions, and gave the public—not only the elites—a larger share in their initiation. His belief that Opinion is typically the outcome of a tug of war between Reason and Tradition yields to his perception that Opinion has come into its own, often triumphing over the other two.iv

The view from the city also provided him with new perspective on the integration of the larger society. Here, too, Tarde imagined a trickle-down of imitation and influence from the elites of the capital cities down to the rest of the populace, first in cities, then in peripheral towns and agricultural communities. Today, he writes,

it is from Paris that the tone and menu of daily conversation spread everywhere: they are imitated by the larger cities, then the medium-sized ones, then the small towns, right down to the last village where the locals read the papers, whether Parisian or a telegraphed echo of the Paris news.

‘Opinion and Conversation’: The Essay

Perhaps because he was also a very good writer, some critics feel that Tarde lacks discipline (Latour, 2002). We beg to disagree. In this essay, Tarde wants to take us by the hand and walk us through the components of his deliberative democracy. One by one, he introduces us to the press, opinion, conversation and action—offering a definition of each, a prehistory of each, and illustrations of how they interact. As we shall see, it is easy to divide the essay into four parts, taking one component at a time, defining it, outlining its history, its functions at the time, and its role in the overall system.

At first, it looked like we could walk through Tarde’s essay linearly inasmuch as press stimulates conversation, conversation percolates opinion, opinion cascades into Public Opinion, which assigns values to people and things, which in turn, motivate action, both individual and collective. In the end, however, we decided that a more systemic model is a better fit than a linear one, inasmuch as the components are, often, mutually influential. We will save this model for the end.

To begin, then, let us examine these components as Tarde does, one at a time, and in interaction with the others. We deviate from Tarde only in the order of their presentation. Whereas Tarde begins with Opinion and follows with Press-Conversation-Action, we will order them Press-Conversation-Opinion-Action so as to emphasize the implicit relations of causality. Although Tarde’s argument, we think, follows the logic we ascribe to him, we suspect that he chose to begin with Opinion because this was the modern form that he had discovered.

1. Press

Although he will insist, as we shall see, that the influence of the press is mediated by informal conversation, Tarde cannot refrain from expressing his fascination with its seeming omnipotence which he dates to the French Revolution. While little interested in the history of print technology–compared to his interest in the institutional histories of conversation and opinion—he pauses to note in another essay titled The Public and the Crowd that printing, the railroad and the telegraph combined to create the formidable power of the press, that prodigious telephone which has so inordinately enlarged the former audiences of preachers and orators (in Clark, 1969, p. 281). He believes that the newspaper evolved from personal letters and from books, even if these are more international than national.v

Given the right combination of a loyal audience and a newspaper that reflects its particular interests and moods, the journalist, says Tarde, sits on a virtual throne. When the reader finds a paper which pleases and flatters his prejudices and passions, the journalist has hold of a reader to his liking, docile and credulous whom he can easily direct with a few concessions analogous to the oratorical precautions of the ancient orators (1901, in Clark, 1969, p. 283). Tarde fears the power of this kind of compatibility, that is, the vulnerability of self-selection, of avoiding dissonance. The sectarian press is far from his ideal. Tarde, in fact, warns of the implications of sensational events captured by the press—what he calls the

bloody spectacle that is utterly indispensable to and holds all contemporary peoples under its spell…. focusing the eyes of vast numbers of scattered spectators (an immense and invisible Colosseum) for weeks on end on the same drama of crime.vi

Tarde asserts that the newspapers began by expressing opinion, first the completely local opinion of privileged groups, a court, a parliament, a capitol, whose gossip, discussions or debates they produced. Carey (1995) augments this list, noting that the earliest newspapers included

…speeches, orations, sermons, offers of goods for sale, and political opinions of those who gathered in public places—largely merchants and traders. In other words, the content of the press was by and large the spoken word, the things being said by public men in public places. In turn, conversation and discussion, public speech, was animated by what was read in the newspapers that circulated in the same public houses. (p. 380)

Schudson (1978) concurs that the earliest newspapers told elites about themselves, (while) later technologies made for the popular press and its readership. Tarde’s time was somewhere in-between.

It is evident that Tarde (and Carey) are reaching far beyond mere transmission. Indeed, Tarde’s sociological discussion of the press posits, that the press contributed (1) to the integration of the collectivity that is the nation, (2) to the democratization of the nation, (3) to the design and procedures of its legislature, and, of course, (4) to individual and Public Opinion.

Tarde believed that the consciousness of the similarity of ideas among the members of a society is the very definition of a nation. Notice the emphasis placed on the consciousness of similarity, which is analogous, of course, to Anderson’s (1991) imagined community. Applying his theory of diffusion, Tarde goes on to ask

Must not the cause of this similarity be the manifestation in words, in writing, or the Press, of an idea that was individual at first, then gradually generalized little by little? The transformation of an individual opinion into a social opinion, then, into Opinion, is due to public discourse in classical times and in the Middle Ages, to the press of our own time, and at all times, most particularly to the private conversations which we shall discuss shortly.

Much earlier, de Tocqueville applied the same idea to any and all association, namely, that the newspaper takes up the notion or the feeling which had occurred simultaneously, but singly to each of them...(it) brought them together and keeps them united (in Lang 1996, p. 6). To this, we might add that Hegel, too, saw reading the newspaper as replacing prayer in our collective morning ritual (Anderson, 1991, p. 35).

Before there was democracy, says Tarde, there was the king whose body (as in Kantorowicz, 1957) held the pieces together. Province A had no idea what was going on in Province B. Only the King knew, thanks to his agents and spies. With the coming of the Press, the parts learned about each other, and the polity could dispense with the King. For Tarde, then, the press deposed the king.

The earliest legislatures, says Tarde, were assemblies of regional dignitaries from the different provinces, with no obligation to accept majority rule. The sense of shared nationhood changed that, too. Rule by majority followed the introduction of the press, and, more generally, the press advanced our reliance on numbers. Numeratur, says Tarde, has displaced the wisdom of ponderatur, alluding to the yet-to-be-established opinion poll and the gradual displacement of elite wisdom by majority rule (Herbst, 1993; Peters, 2005; Schudson, 1995).

Even in his examination of the influence of the press on conversation and opinion, Tarde strains to emphasize the rituals and contexts of this process no less than its role in transmitting an agenda and biasing opinion. On the one hand, he repeats that the press ended up directing opinion almost as they wished, and on the other hand, he places his strongest emphasis on the role of the press in triggering conversation—here and now. At his most eloquent, Tarde writes,

We shall never know and can never imagine to what degree newspapers have transformed, both enriched and leveled, unified in space and diversified in time, the conversations of individuals, even those who do not read papers but who, talking to those who do, are forced to follow the grooves of their borrowed thoughts. One pen suffices to set off a million tongues.

2. Conversation

Conversation is the centerpiece of this essay. The word appears 209 times, almost doubling that of opinion which appears 113 times. Other keywords include art (providing a glimpse into Tarde’s concern for the quality of civilization) and nation, the social system which communication holds together.

Tarde takes great care in defining conversation (as he does also for opinion but not for press). At this point in our argument, it would have been reasonable to expect that Tarde is referring to political talk (Gamson, 1992). But no. His emphasis is on the non-purposiveness of conversation, that is, any dialogue without direct and immediate utility, in which one talks primarily to talk, for pleasure, as in a game, out of politeness. This definition, he writes,

…excludes judicial inquiries, diplomatic or commercial negotiations or councils, and even scientific congresses, although the latter abound in superfluous chatter. It does not exclude flirtations or amorous exchanges generally, despite the frequent transparence of their goals, which does not keep them from being pleasing in themselves. It includes all nonessential discussions (entretiens de luxe) even among barbarians and savages.

Like Lazarsfeld et al. (1944), he believes that face-to-face communication, because it demands concentration, is the most powerful of the media.

So fascinated is he by conversation, Tarde searches for its origins in evolution and in child development. He finds an innate sociability and an aesthetic impulse everywhere, but traces the emergence of conversation for its own sake, and among equals, from primordial task-related talk and in medieval obeisance to feudal rulers. He thinks that, in general, monologue preceded dialogue, but contemporary socio-linguists are not at all sure (Hamo & Blum-Kulka, 2007). He enumerates a long list of factors—regimes, leisure time, gender, occupation—that are associated with variations in conversation, and its changes in time and space.

It is striking how many other scholars agree that non-purposive conversation serves democracy,