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apotheosis of the tradition of Spontaneity. Bergson, in turn, was a continuing source of inspiration for
Georges Sorel and Charles Péguy, as well as one of Tarde’s sons who was a law student, Alfred de
Tarde. (The aristocratic particle, while ignored by the father, was insisted upon by the son.) Writing
with another student under the nom de guerre of Agathon, Alfred de Tarde captured the antagonism
toward Durkheim of those committed to Spontaneity. A short passage from a volume by Agathon,
modestly entitled L’esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne: la crise de la culture classique, la crise du
français, 11 suggests the temper of the period:
Would it be M. Durkheim that M. Liard has charged with elaborating the new doctrine? The
powers that he has conferred to him in the organization of the New Sorbonne leave us with some
basis to fear that this is the case. He has made of him a sort of préfet d’études. . . . The case of
Durkheim is a victory of the new spirit. Charged with university pomp, he is the regent of the
Sorbonne, the all-powerful master, and it is known that the professors in the section of philosophy,
reduced to the role of humble civil servants, follow his every order, oppressed by his command. . . .
M. Durkheim has firmly established his intellectual despotism. He has made of his teaching an
instrument of domination.
Given the passionate commitment to opposing philosophies of persons very close to Durkheim and
Tarde, one is forced to admire the relative calm which they were able to assume in their
confrontations with one another. Although neither was totally immersed in one or the other mentality
—all such ideal typical formulations must be applied to concrete individuals only with qualification
—they could not resist being swayed by the charged atmosphere which characterized their immediate
surroundings. Readers habituated to a cooler intellectual climate should at least remain sympathetic
when they take note of an occasional dogmatism in the debate between Durkheim and Tarde.
The disagreement between the two men raised in the debate should nevertheless not obscure a
number of quite important underlying similarities. We will briefly consider some of these basic
similarities before turning to the areas of disagreement.
Tarde and Durkheim both recognized—although differing in their interpretations of the relevance
and significance of various contributors—the major historical antecedents of sociology in the works
of Montesquieu, Comte, Quetelet and Spencer. Agreement on these common historical roots, despite
disagreement on the inclusion of others, nevertheless distinguished Tarde and Durkheim from two
major clusters of social researchers in France at the time that would not admit to these same
antecedents: the social statisticians and most of the disciples of Le Play. 12
In what might be called their taxonomies of sociological work, there was also substantial
agreement between the two men. 13 On the lowest level were the activities associated with collecting
the raw materials for sociological production. Here, unlike certain more dogmatic contemporaries, as
well as certain later writers, Tarde and Durkheim agreed that ethnographic materials from preliterate
societies, case studies of selected aspects of contemporary societies, personal documents, legal
records, governmentally collected statistics, and researcher-collected data, among others, were all
valid and valuable types of materials for the sociologist. Both men were eclectics in terms of the data
with which they felt the sociologist should work. We might add, however, that neither was overly
concerned with improving specific procedures of data collection.
Intellectually meaningful results, they also both held, could only derive from specialization of
individuals on narrowly delimited topics. These specialists on various aspects of social life—
religion, law, the family, the economy, and so forth—in working closely with raw empirical
materials, would record their observations in the form of empirical generalizations and “partial