Abstract
The initial chapter seeks to present the main hypothesis of this book: a singular paradigm in social theory can be discovered by reconstructing the conceptual grammar of Tarde’s microsociology, and by following the way in which Deleuze’s micropolitics and Foucault’s microphysics find in it a major pivot-point. This grammar is articulated according to the basic series: social multiplicity-invention-imitation-opposition-open system-social multiplicity. Guided by an infinitist ontology and an epistemology of infinitesimal difference, this paradigm offers a micro-socio-logic capable of producing new ways to understand social life and its vicissitudes. The major concepts of this approach take place in an in-between space lying among the social sciences’ classical polarities (individualism/holism, micro/macro and structure/agency). In the field of social theory, this can be called infinitesimal revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
James’s statement was quoted by Wallas in The Great Society:
The late Professor William James was, in temperament and method, far removed both from the externalism and from the hasty psychological assumptions which are characteristic of Tarde and the other “Crowd-Psychologists”, but I have before me a letter from him, written in 1908, in which he says, “I myself see things à la Tarde, perhaps too exclusively” and in his great Principles of Psychology (1890) he had already adopted from Bagehot that view of instinctive Imitation which Tarde systematized in 1896. “From childhood onward”, says James, “man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educability, and in fact the whole history of civilization, depend on this trait”
(Wallas 1916:121). It is worth pointing out that Tarde published “The Laws of Imitation” in French in 1890, but the key chapter “What Is a Society?” had appeared six years earlier, in 1884, in the Revue philosophique.
Regarding pragmatism, let’s assert with Max Jammer that it contributed, together with the existentialism and logical empiricism, to configure the intellectual climate in which the revolution of atomic physics would be produced. “Their affirmation of a concrete conception of life and their rejection of an abstract intellectualism culminated in their doctrine of free will, their denial of mechanical determinism or of metaphysical causality. United in rejecting causality though on different grounds, these currents of thought prepared, so to speak, the philosophical background for modern quantum mechanics. They contributed with suggestions to the formative stage of the new conceptual scheme and subsequently promoted its acceptance” (Jammer 1966:166/7).
To the encounter between Bohrn and the philosophy of William James, see the interview done by Thomas Khun, published on the American Institute of Physics website: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4517-5.
To a brief history of microphysics, see, for example, Jordan (1944). There, he starts with a simple and useful distinction: “It is customary to speak of macroscopic physics (or macrophysics) when referring to those investigations in which the presence of atoms is not discernible; on the other hand research which penetrates into the atomic detail of matter is denoted as microphysics” (Jordan 1944:2).
- 2.
Comte writes: “In one sense social physics – that is to say, the study of the collective development of the human race – is really a branch of physiology, or the study of man conceived in its entire extension. In other words, the history of civilization is nothing but the indispensable result and complement of the natural history of man” (Comte 1998:62). The “unique aim” of the coordination of human efforts is “the general action of men over nature” in order to ensure human subsistence and general progress. But the efficiency of this action requires social division of labor. Hence his theorem: social organization is nothing but the regulation of social division of labor. Division that entails all human species. From that, the perfect social order would consist in a perfect social division of labor.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Here it is worth remembering the words of William James: “if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in IST. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences”(James 1981:50).
- 6.
It is possible to say that Bergson is an heir of Tarde both in intellectual and institutional terms. Bergson became Tarde’s successor in the Chair in Modern Philosophy at the College of France and, even more importantly, recognized in Tarde’s work “a great thought.” Summarizing it, Bergson said:
“[this thought] conducts us in a thousand different manners to see in individual initiatives, and in the establishment of these initiatives in his surrounding, the real cause of what it is happening in society, and even of what it is happening in the world. Seduced by the success of physical sciences, we are too prone to develop the social sciences with the same model, to postulate that the evolution of society must obey the ineluctable laws.
Likewise, we represent historical events as the necessary results of blind and impersonal forces that would mechanically compose with each other. All Tarde’s philosophy protests against this natural trend of our minds. Without a doubt, human endeavors are traversed by currents; but in the source of each current there is an impulse, and that impulse comes from a man. Undoubtedly, the evolution of societies is governed by the laws, but these laws are the same ones which rule the formation and development of our individual character. As the history of each of us is explained by the initiatives taken and the habits contracted, so life of societies is made of inventions that have arisen here and there, and of the durable changes they have brought when adopted. As in each of us, once the habit has been contracted, it repeats and copies from itself, thus, in a society, all men indefinitely imitate each other. Imitation is then the real law, as universal in the world of spirits as gravity is in the world of bodies. However, unlike the law of gravity, it is a soft and flexible law, as well as all that is human. Letter quoted by Mossé-Bastide (1955:333). For a philosophical and epistemological approach to the relation of Bergson with Tarde, see Milet (2006).
- 7.
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, an intense reflection regarding the philosophical and scientific possibilities implied in the infinitesimal calculus took place in France. Deleuze assumed this discussion in his own terms in The Bergsonism (1988), Difference and Repetition (1994), and in “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque” (1993). Bergson, who along with Tarde and Deleuze believes there is an implicit epistemological revolution in that mathematical tool, is a key figure in this context. He wrote, for example, that “modern mathematics is precisely an effort to substitute for the ready-made what is in process of becoming, to follow the growth of magnitudes, to seize movement no longer from outside and in its manifest result, but from within and in its tendency towards change, in short, to adopt of the mobile continuity of the pattern of things” (Bergson 1965:190). In Matter and Memory, he makes explicit mention of how it works in philosophy: “the task of the philosopher…closely resembles that of the mathematician who determines a function by starting from the differential. The final effort of philosophical research is a true work of integration” (Bergson 1991:185). It can be said that this is not different from what Tarde and Deleuze tried to do in the field of social theory. However, the analysis of Bergson’s place in the theoretical constellation we are trying to describe falls outside the present study.
- 8.
For philosophical aspects of Leibniz’s doctrines on infinity and infinitesimals see Russell (1971), Rescher (1967), Serres, M. (1968), and Deleuze (1993). Concerning this, it is worth mentioning Deleuze’s note in his book about Leibniz: “In his groundbreaking article ‘Monadologie et sociologie’ Gabriel Tarde puts forth this substitution of hiving for being as a true inversion of metaphysics that issues directly from the monad” (Deleuze 1993:158).
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Tonkonoff, S. (2017). Microsociology, Micropolitics, and Microphysics: Toward the Paradigm of Infinitesimal Difference. In: From Tarde to Deleuze and Foucault. Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55149-4_1
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