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assumption that society consisted of an aggregate of atomistic individuals. Whether it was John Stuart
Mill, who went from this assumption to conclude that sociology could develop from the law of
association combined with the basic principles of logic, 15 or the contract theorists, who presented
society as a collection of formal dyadic relationships, 16 Tarde and Durkheim forcefully opposed these
conclusions. In dismissing the contact theorists’ assumption that men could solve their basic needs
through elaborating a series of contractual relationships, Tarde and Durkheim both emphasized the
necessity of including the normative framework imposed by the broader society for any meaningful
social analysis. But they did not go so far as some who chose to view society as a great organic
whole. While not necessarily allied with utilitarianism—although it happened to be in the work of
Herbert Spencer—the organismic analogy provided another popular basis for elaborating much of
what passed for sociological theory in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was largely under
the combined attacks of Tarde and Durkheim that the organismic analogy largely disappeared from
informed sociological discourse after the turn of the century in France.
Thus, in terms of their definition of historical antecedents of sociology, their taxonomy of
sociological work, their general logic of analysis, and common opposition to certain competing
currents of thought, Tarde and Durkheim overlapped significantly. But after this point, as each man
began actually to lay down the essentials of his system of thought, a number of divergencies
appeared. 17
Tarde held that a prerequisite for any science was the repetition of some basic measurable
phenomenon. The arts were concerned with the examination and portrayal of unique, individual
phenomena; science, based on generalization from a large number of cases, could only begin through
observing some kind of repetition. As the object of study for sociology is man, but man in a social
context, sociology must find its basic focus of inquiry, its fundamental “social fact,” in some aspect of
man which is characteristically social. The aspects of man thus open to the sociologist must be
distinguished from his physical and biological, as well as his “intra-mental,” or psychological,
aspects. What remains are the “inter-mental” aspects of men, or man insofar as he is influenced by
other men. The basic process by which this inter-mental influence takes place, and the basic social
fact for sociology, Tarde holds, is imitation. Social relations are essentially imitative relationships.
But sociology need be concerned with only those aspects of the psyche which are transmitted between
minds. Here, the two basic psychic units, the two elementary particles of imitation, are what Tarde
isolated in an early essay as “belief” and “desire,” the one cognitive, the other emotive. The final
result of imitation for the individual is a “mental imprint,” an impression on the mind similar to the
imprint on a photographic plate. Thus, psychology cannot be excluded from sociology as social
processes consist, in the final analysis, of inter-mental relations.
It was precisely at this point that Tarde and Durkheim found themselves in radical disagreement.
Durkheim posited as the essentially social fact not that which was imitated, but that which was
exterior to the individual and imposed on him through a sort of constraint. Firmly committed to the
position elaborated by his professor, Boutroux, that sciences developed on successive emergent
levels, and that the basic principles of a science must be found distinctly on its “own level,”
Durkheim refused to accept that sociological principles should be grounded in psychology. Sociology
as a distinctive science, he held, must take as its object of study social facts; and these social facts
must find their causes as well as their consequences in other distinctly social facts. An apparently
logical extension of this reasoning, which Tarde as well as Durkheim occasionally drew, was that the
subject matter of sociology, being exterior to each individual, was consequently outside of all
members comprising a given social group. But such a conclusion was absurd: take away all