V. Methodology, Methods, and Quantification
12 EMPIRICAL BASES OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY *1 1883 Thanks to the archaeologists we learn where and when a new discovery first appeared, how far and how long it has spread, and by what roads it has travelled from the place of its origin to its adopted country. Although they may not take us back to the first furnace which turned out bronze or iron, they do take us back to the first country and century in which the pointed arch, printing, and oil-painting, and, still much more anciently, the orders of Greek architecture, the Phoenician alphabet, etc., displayed themselves to a justly marvelling world. They devote all their curiosity 1 and activity to following up a given invention through its manifold disguises and modifications, to recognising the atrium in the cloister, the praetorium of the Roman magistrate in the Roman church, the Etruscan bench in the curule-chair, or to tracing out the boundaries of the region to which an invention has spread through gradual self-propagation and beyond which, for yet to be discovered reasons (in my opinion they are always the competition of rival inventions), it has been unable to pass, or to studying the results of the intersection of different inventions which have spread so widely that they have finally come together in one imaginative brain. In short, these scholars are forced, perhaps unconsciously, into surveying the social life of the past from a point of view which is continually approximating that which I claim should be adopted knowingly and willingly by the sociologist. I refer here to the pure sociologist, who, through a necessary although artificial abstraction, is distinguished from the naturalist. In distinction to historians who see nothing else in history than the conflicts and competitions of individuals, that is, of the arms and legs as well as of the minds of individuals, and who, in regard to the latter, do not differentiate between ideas and desires of the most diverse origins, confusing those few that are new and personal with a mass of those that are merely copies; in distinction to those poor carvers-up of reality who have been unable to perceive the true dividing line between vital and social facts, the point where they separate without tearing, archaeologists stand out as makers of pure sociology, because, as the personality of those they unearth is impenetrable, and only the work of the dead, the vestiges of their archaic wants and ideas, are open to their scrutiny, they hear, in a certain way, like the Wagnerian ideal, the music without seeing the orchestra of the past. In their own eyes, I know, this is a cruel deprivation; but time, in destroying the corpses and blotting out the memories of the painters and writers and modellers whose inscriptions and palimpsests they decipher and whose frescoes and torsos and potsherds they so laboriously interpret, has, nevertheless, rendered them the service of setting free everything that is properly social in human events by eliminating everything that is vital *2 and by casting aside as an impurity the carnal and fragile contents of the glorious form which is truly worthy of resurrection. To archaeologists, then, history becomes both simplified and transfigured. In their eyes it consists merely of the advent and development, of the competitions and conflicts, of original wants and ideas, or, to use a single term, of inventions. Inventions thus become great historic figures and the real agents of human progress. The proof that this idealistic point of view is the just one lies in its fruitfulness. Through its [fortunate], although, I repeat, involuntary, adoption, do not philologist and mythologist, the modern archaeologist, under different names, cut all the Gordian knots and shed light upon all the obscurities of history and, without taking away any of its grace and picturesqueness, bestow upon it
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The University of Chicago Press, Ch
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THE HERITAGE OF SOCIOLOGY a Series
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Preface Some of the neglect of Tard
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Tarde’s own father (1797-1850) se
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death of the philosopher Nourrisson
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apotheosis of the tradition of Spon
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assumption that society consisted o
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III. The Structure of Tarde’s Tho
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aspects of invention and, at some p
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likely it is to be imitated. 41 A n
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society. This same basic principle,
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of domination by a single all power
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V. Methodology, Methods, and Quanti
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Letters have just about the same fo
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attainment of great wealth, demonst
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ailroad, the modern public could on
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and held that with increased commun
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not a hope or a desire, which was n
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psychological approaches, associate
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I. The Nature and Scope of Sociolog
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y the theologians and the authorita
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certain fruitfulness? I believe it
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science. III Now the problem is to
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this question can perhaps be resolv
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accepting facts which repeat themse
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a formula comparable to the type of
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significance of this proposition. T
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These non-imitative similarities be
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were these initiatives imitated, an
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values? This is a fairly well found
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service to the rank of wealth. Agai
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an idol, weaving a garment, cutting
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efore this aesthetic flower of civi
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. . . The greatest force governing
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deep, entirely psychological and co
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XXXI (1891): 123, 289. “L’art e
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Notes Introduction 1 On Tarde’s l
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64 Part IV, 11, below. 65 On early
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127 Daniel Essertier, Psychologie e
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“You would not assert that Promet
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*3 Organizations of workers in Fran
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eligious, scientific, economic, and