Tarde, all of reality, to the extent that it endures, has the charac-
ter of the Sartrean practico-inert, the cooled sediments of once
fluid social interactions. This implies that the apparent stability
of macroscopic material phenomena is, first, only provisional—
albeit on timescales vastly greater than that of a human society
or culture—and, second, the outcome of a co-ordination among a
huge number of elements whose being is not exhausted by their
belonging to a particular aggregate, and which collaborate more
or less willingly. As Latour puts it, Tarde refuses the distinction
between the law and what is subject to the law.9 That is, rather
than physical laws explaining the co-ordination and predictability
of natural movements, the former are rather explained by the lat-
ter—or more precisely, they are nothing more than the social or-
ganization of the elements such that their intentions and beliefs
are directed, by coercion or persuasion, towards a common goal.
These ostensibly law-governed forms of organization are akin
to political régimes, which may last for a considerable length of
time, but will sooner or later fall victim to some form of evolution-
ary or revolutionary transformation.
8. Elsewhere he criticizes them strongly, although for rather different reasons than those which concern us here (see Social Laws (Les Lois sociales), ch. I).
9. B. Latour, ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social’.
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75
The panpsychist side of the analogy is set out in terms of the
theory of belief and desire as ‘psychological quantities’. Without
going into the detail of the theory,10 it enables Tarde to elaborate
the mind- or self-like qualities of non-human things without as-
cribing to them, for example, a capacity for conscious thought or
cognition. At the most basic level, desire is manifest in inorganic
nature in the form of force, and belief as the constancy of material
substance. Material bodies enter into conflicts, exchanges or dia-
logues with one another, changing their positions and movements
as a result. The more complex systems of forces which act to co-
ordinate and organize matter into physical or organic structures
resemble institutions or ideologies which have the power to inti-
mately shape the selfhood of their members or adherents.
As noted, however, the argument from analogy is not intend-
ed to stand alone, although it forms the basis of many of the most
interesting theoretical elaborations of MS (and is not always ex-
pounded with absolute seriousness). There is also a conceptu-
al or perhaps epistemological argument.11 Tarde argues that we
know ourselves immediately and from within not only as think-
ing subjects, or pointlike centres of cognition. Rather, our in-
trospective self-knowledge is already complex and structured, in
two ways. First, we are both mind and body, embodied minds or
animate bodies. Second, we are members of a society, partici-
pants in a culture, and speakers of a language. He concludes by
arguing that this immediate knowledge of ourselves is the only
reliable knowledge of being we have, and in fact that the only
way we can understand what beings are is on the analogy of our
10. Further detail can be found in Tarde’s essay ‘Belief and Desire (‘La Croyance et le désir’, in Essais et mélanges sociologiques). On my reading, the value of this theory of ‘psychological quantities’ is heuristic rather than foundational; I would also argue that, considered as an ontological postulate rather than a methodological guideline, it is one of the weaker points of the argument. However, other readings place much greater emphasis on this aspect, including those as different from each other as Lazzarato’s and Latour’s (M. Lazzarato, ‘Gabriel Tarde: un vitalisme politique’, in G. Tarde, Monadologie et Sociologie, ed. cited; B. Latour,
‘Tarde’s idea of quantification’, in Candea, The Social, cited above).
11. In a fuller exposition, this argument might be reconstructed in a number of forms, for example, as a transcendental argument or one from conceptual par-simony. Hartshorne, following Whitehead (and independently of Tarde), nicely summarizes the general idea: ‘If feeling is the most general category of the immediately given, then we can form no more general category by which to describe existence in general than this very character’ (C. Hartshorne, Whitehead’s Philosophy, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1972, p.28).
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Afterword: Tarde’s Pansocial Ontology
own being, which is defined primarily by the relations of body to
mind and of individual to society.
The implications of this argument can be seen at both logical
and ontological levels. The logical implication is that relation is
prior to being (this, again, is why ‘ontology’ is not a strictly accu-
rate term for the Tardean theory). The idea of an entity which ex-
ists in itself is logically posterior to the complex structures of the
ensouled body and the social person, although simpler to describe.
In particular, the ideas of mind or material object, or person or so-
ciety, do not pre-exist this relation but rather are constituted by
and within it. The ontological implication is that the basic nature
of reality is animate and socially connected. For certain purposes
one may wish to abstract from this fundamental truth—for exam-
ple, in positing purely material things with no psychic aspect—
but this will be at the cost of ignoring their basic, relational, reality.
As against a large part of the mainstream philosophical
tradition,12 then, we do not first encounter ourselves, then a ma-
terial reality outside ourselves, and then other persons or selves
as the exterior of that exterior, but rather encounter first ourselves
as social and embodied beings, and then material reality as an ab-
straction from this social embodiment. It is at this point that the
conceptual argument for pansociality rejoins the argument from
analogy. Tarde sees the supposed characteristics of the physical
world—the forces of gravity or magnetism, or the solidity of mat-
ter itself—as humans’ introspective self-perceptions, externalized
and congealed to the point where their true origin is obscured. As
much as an animistic re-enchantment of the cosmos, this might
be seen as an extension of the Xenophanean or Feuerbachian cri-
tique of religion to the domain of physics. Where generations of
social scientists have followed Vico in holding that society is more
intimately and hence more adequately known than the natural
world, if less precisely, Tarde radicalizes this argument to the point
where only society is known, and the natural world can be known
only insofar as it is itself composed of societies.
Tarde elucidates the specificity of his position here (pp. 16ff.)
by comparison with the panpsychist but non-pansocial monis-
tic ontologies popular in his own time, which generally rest on
some form of dual-aspect strategy: that is, they hold that there is
a single (type of) substance, which has thought and materiality or
12. Roughly, the part which goes from Descartes to Husserl; see the latter’s sixth Cartesian Meditation.
theo Lorenc
77
extension as attributes, aspects, or descriptions, and thus that all
material things are capable of thought.13 The problem with such
theories is that the concept of thought has no ontologically signifi-
cant meaning in its own right, but derives its content purely from
an introspective sense of selfhood: hence it tends to become a
pure interiority without empirical content, merely doubling what
is already known with an illusion of depth. Indeed, for some of its
19th-century proponents this lack of content seems to have been
a major point in its favour, in that it facilitates the reconciliation
of Christian or quasi-Christian doctrines of an immaterial and
immortal soul with an avowedly materialistic account of the na-
ture of reality.
By contrast, the social-individual and mind-body relations
are both known immediately and introspectively and have com-
plex ontological structures of their own. Hence, our introspec-
tive knowledge of our own being is not separate from our un-
derstanding of the rest of reality, but of itself provides the logical
blocks from which the latter is built. As MS sets out to explain, the nature and coherence of the universe as a whole can be constructed from this basic relation. These two monolithic dual-
isms, mind against matter and structure against agency, whose
irresolution is the original sin of ontology and social theory re-
spectively, are not resolved by the pansocial theory so much as
generalized, and the tension they generate harnessed to the mo-
tor of cosmic evolution.
3. tArDe AND LeIbNIz
Pansocial ontology builds upon the work of previous thinkers
within the philosophical tradition. Space precludes an extensive
attempt to situate Tarde with respect to that tradition (or to con-
struct a monadological counter-tradition), and I will restrict myself
here to his most obvious predecessor, Leibniz. While MS does not
set out the connection at any great length, there is obviously a sub-
stantial debt, and the several continuities between the two systems
are of assistance in interpreting the theory of MS. There are three primary points of contact: the essentially composite nature of reality; the idea that substances must be souls, with the concomitant
13. Such panpsychist monisms are by no means moribund, as demonstrated
by the work of Galen Strawson. These ontologies are sometimes described as Spinozist; this seems wrong to me, for the reasons set out in the remainder of the paragraph.
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Afterword: Tarde’s Pansocial Ontology
sharp distinction between real substances and aggregates; and the
idea that every substance is affected by every other.
There are clearly also some points of divergence: Leibniz’ ten-
dency to reduce external relations to internal ones—famously
expressed as ‘the monads have no windows’ ( Monadology §7)—
seems uncongenial to Tarde, given that, as we have seen, he sees
relation as the fundamental reality. (This said, Leibniz did take
himself to be elucidating the ordinary concept of relation, rath-
er than explaining it away.) Leibniz’ strong emphasis on the in-
variability of the laws of nature, and his conviction that the age of
miracles is over, is also a point of disagreement. Finally, we might
observe that Leibniz is strongly committed to the principle of suf-
ficient reason, and to the idea that the concept of each substance
embodies its whole history, while Tarde’s theory emphasizes the
role of unpredictable collisions in explaining the nature of reality;
however, as we will see, they may not be as far apart on this point
as they initially seem.
The first point which Tarde takes from Leibniz, then, is that
the principles of reality are plural in nature: the most basic feature
of the universe is its consisting of a multiplicity of distinct sub-
stances or elements. In other words, reality is not a continuum di-
vided into parts, but a bringing together of entities which can in
principle be understood independently of the situations they thus
constitute (subject, for Leibniz, to their common dependence on
God). The treatment of space and time in monadological theories
is an example. Leibniz, in his debate with the Newtonian Samuel
Clarke, argues that space and time are not absolute nor prior to
the substances which occupy them, but relative to the relations
among substances. That is, it is the relations between the monads
which are basic; we then apprehend these as taking spatiotempo-
ral form, and finally abstract the concepts of space and time in
general. Along similar lines, Tarde argues against Kant that space
and time are not pure forms of intuition, or a kind of matrix of ex-
perience, but are rather experienced directly as ‘primitive concepts
or continuous and original quasi-sensations’ (p. 17).14 A corollary
of the insight that reality is composite is that the individuals which
compose it must be really, and not only numerically, different: they
14. Tarde’s formulation of this theory links space and time to belief and desire, respectively, such that physical or geometric space is one type of logical or thetic space (as for Leibniz), while the direction of time derives from the goal-oriented-ness of desire (see Universal Opposition (L’Opposition universelle), ch. VI, sec 4).
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79
are not only plural and distinct, but heterogeneous, such that each
is in principle distinguishable from all others.
The second point in common is that substances are souls,
which was examined in its Tardean form in the previous section.
The desire to ‘spiritualize the universe’ (p. 16) which both sys-
tems manifest is perhaps the most obvious point of commonality
in terms of traditional ontology, but there is more tension in this
aspect of the relationship than might appear at first sight. For one
thing, Tarde is not committed, as Leibniz is, to denying the real-
ity of the material as such. More deeply, Leibniz’ argument for
this conclusion places a heavy weight on the idea of unity and its
co-priority with being. That is, substance, or real entity, must be
a unity: ‘what is not truly one entity is not truly one entity either’
(letter to Arnauld, 30 April 1687). A material thing cannot be said
to be truly one, since it is divisible; only an entity with a substan-
tial form or entelechy akin to a human soul or self can be said to
be a substance. The Leibnizian ontology is therefore akin to the
Tardean in resting on a sharp distinction between substances and
mere aggregates, and in its insistence on tracing back the reality
of the composite to the elements of which it is composed;15 and for
both thinkers, this is closely linked to the panpsychist ascription
of mind-like qualities to all elementary substances. However, the
path which Leibniz traces—the plurality and distinctness of the el-
ementary substances implies their independent reality, which im-
plies their unity and coherence, which implies their kinship with
mind—is oblique to the Tardean argument, which rather rests on
the basic relational complexity of the embodied mind.
Regardless of this divergence, many of the corollaries which
Leibniz draws from this argument are also taken up by Tarde.
Three points are particularly relevant. First, the mind- or self-like
qualities of the elementary substances admit of degree. Unlike
15. Tarde relates this point to Leibniz’ invention of the differential calculus. The question of the relation between Leibniz’ metaphysics and the calculus is an issue we cannot here address, although it clearly has implications for the Tardean system. Part of the difficulty in establishing these implications is that, while Leibniz appears to have been committed to the reality of infinitesimals, the only viable interpretation of the calculus in Tarde’s time was the theory of limits, which preserves the mathematical utility of the method while not requiring the analyst to work with real infinitesimal quantities (and which still stands as the foundation of standard analysis, but now co-exists with the non-standard analysis introduced by Abraham Robinson in the 1960s, which treats infinitesimal quantities as perfectly valid entities).
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Afterword: Tarde’s Pansocial Ontology
the Cartesian world, in which subjects endowed with mind are
sharply separated from material reality (including non-human an-
imals), the Leibnizian is composed of monads of various levels of
perfection, from human souls through animal souls to the lesser
monads of the inorganic world. Second, a complex being such as
a living organism should be thought of as a complex arrangement
of monads within which there is a single directing monad (the or-
ganism’s soul) and a large number of subordinate monads which
correspond to the various bodily parts, a hierarchical arrange-
ment which is also of value in explicating Tardean monadology.
Third, these mind-like qualities are not exhausted by conscious
states: below the threshold of consciousness, there exist percepts
(for Leibniz) or beliefs and desires (for Tarde) which are different
only in degree from those which actually form part of experience.
The final point is that, for Leibniz, every monad is related
to every other and contains a representation of any other, such
that they mutually reflect each other to the greatest possible ex-
tent, and each one contains the whole universe in nuce. However,
in line with the preceding point, some relations are much closer,
and some representations much clearer and more adequate, than
others. To borrow a formula from an earlier monadologist: ‘ev-
erything is in everything, but appropriately’ (Proclus, Elements of
Theology §53). Tarde makes his commitment to this general princi-
ple clear in MS ch. III, and as I will argue, it plays a key role in the structure of his system, albeit in a very different form.
4. eLeMeNt AND AGGreGAte
The comparison with Leibniz helps to focus attention on the
strong emphasis of Tarde’s theory on the elements of reality. What
are these elements? At first sight, Tarde (like Leibniz) may seem
to offer contradictory answers. For example, he sees individual hu-
man beings as both exemplary monadic elements—this is indeed
one of the bases of the theory, as already noted—and as composed
of numerous elements. The key to resolving these difficulties is
to recall the priority of relation. It is not the element itself which
is the basis in Tarde’s theory but its relation to the social aggre-
gates of which it forms a part. Thus, the emphasis on identifying
the elementary components of reality does not require singling
out a class of entities which are elements in an absolute sense, al-
though this will generally be possible and useful once the domain
of the relation is held fixed, and there need be no contradiction in
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81
a single (type of) entity standing in this relation in both directions,
being an element while also being composed of elements.
Thus, when Tarde says that the principles of reality are to be
found in the domain of the ‘infinitesimal’, he means this term to
be taken literally, in that the elements are smaller than any assign-
able quantity or entity which can be identified, but also as relative to
a particular perspective.16 In this sense, the elements are whatever
exists on the scale smaller than the one which is the current focus
of one’s attention. ‘[T]hese ultimate elements which form the final
stage of every science … are ultimate only from the point of view of
their particular science’ (p. 8). So, for example, if one’s interest is
in human societies or animal species, the element will be the indi-
vidual human or animal; if in an organism, the cell; if in material
entities, the atom; if in spatiotemporal reality in general, it will be
the infinitesimal in the usual sense of the term. The fact that the
notion of element does not pick out a privileged stratum of reality
independently of a specific perspective is reflected in Tarde’s con-
viction that scientific explanation cannot, in principle, ever find an
ultimate reality at which it can rest. The discovery of ever-smaller
organisms, he hints, may not come to an end with single-celled
animalcules. Similarly, the discovery or theorization of ever more
basic building-blocks of matter will not end with the atom, which
will itself, sooner or later, be found to have a composite structure.17
Tarde’s ontology of the elementary can thus be seen as a mid-
dle way between holistic doctrines of emergent properties, which
grant the aggregate properties not present in the elements, and re-
ductionisms which identify a class of entities as basic and attempt
16. We could go one step further here and see the elements as purely differential or functional (this reading is suggested by Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London, Athlone, 1994, pp. 313-314, and developed in more detail by D. Debaise, ‘Une métaphysique des possessions: Puissances et sociétés chez Gabriel Tarde’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 60, no. 4, 2008, pp. 447-460, and I. Joseph, ‘Gabriel Tarde: Le monde comme féerie’, Critique, vol. 40, nos.
445/446, 1984, pp. 548-565). However, this reading seems to me to abstract too rapidly away from the role they play in specific contexts, and hence to lose much of what is distinctive in the ontology of MS, particularly regarding the monads’
tendency to universalization (see below).
17. Of course, while the biological point has fared less well, the physical point is convincingly borne out by subsequent history. Even today, it is not implausible that the most basic particles currently known, quarks and leptons, may have some composite substructure (models positing such structure have been widely canvassed and explored empirically at the Large Hadron Collider and other sites, although at currently attained energy levels, little confirmation has been forthcoming).
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Afterword: Tarde’s Pansocial Ontology
to construct others from them.18 He argues strongly and explic-
itly (against holism) that the element is ontologically prior to the
aggregate, but as argued above, pansocial ontology also implies
(against reductionism) that the relation between them is prior to
either of its terms, as the relation between the individual and soci-
ety is prior to either as an entity. This priority of the relation over
the relata is reflected in the vertiginous opening-up of ever small-
er scales beneath whatever stopping point we might have hoped to
form the basis of our explanations.
The absence of a real final term to the series also, to some
extent, undermines the attempt to domesticate it by thinking in
terms of nested levels of reality, of the form atom-molecule-pro-
toplasm-cell-organism-society (although MS does sometimes talk
in such terms, particularly ch. VI) and the concomitant tendency
to see pansociality itself through the prism of the hierarchy, such
that lower levels are societies in progressively more simplified and
attenuated ways.19 Rather than filtering downwards in stages from
the paradigmatic case of human persons and societies, the pan-
psychist and pansocial analogies radiate outwards, and illuminate
each case anew. The ontological structure induced by the analogy
might be compared to the traces of the more perfect radial symme-
try of supposedly lower forms which Nature retains beneath the
bilateral symmetry evolved for locomotion (ch. IV).20
Thus, despite the priority of element to aggregate, there is a
balance of power between the two in each domain of the Tardean
universe. To discern this balance within the various scientific the-
ories covering these domains will require some shifts of empha-
sis. In some cases, Tarde will need to argue against a too strong
subordination of elements to structure, as with the biological
thought of his time, where the prevailing emphasis on the unity
and self-organizing capacity of the organism must be countered
18. As already noted, Durkheimian sociology is the paradigm of holism; examples of reductionism in the sociological context might be individualisms of the rational-choice type, and in philosophical ontology the various flavours of physicalism.
19. There is reason to think that these hierarchical ontologies are the perennial temptation of monadological thought. They were also more a feature of Tarde’s philosophical surroundings than may appear at first glance; although generally unpalatable to 19th-century tastes in their raw Renaissance-Neoplatonist form, they retained considerable appeal when sublimated into a historical narrative, as in Cournot’s Treatise or, come to that, Hegel.
20. This might be described as ‘the lost symmetry of the blastosphere’ (J. G.
Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, St Albans, Triad Panther, 1979, p. 14).
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83
with an assertion of the independent viability, in principle,