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. . . The greatest force governing modern conversation is books and newspapers. Before the deluge
of these two, nothing varied more from one town to another, from one country to another, than
conversational subjects, tone, and style, nor was anything more monotonous. At present the reverse is
true. The press unifies and invigorates conversations, makes them uniform in space and diversified in
time. Every morning the papers give their publics the conversations for the day. One can be almost
certain at any moment of the subject of conversation between men talking at a club, in a smoking
room, in a lobby. But this subject changes every day and every week, except in the case, fortunately
very rare, of a national or international obsession with a fixed subject. This increasing similarity of
simultaneous conversations in an ever more vast geographic domain is one of the most important
characteristics of our time. . . .
Having spoken of the varieties of conversation, its transformations and causes, let us say something
about its effects, a subject we have barely touched upon. In order not to omit any, we shall classify
these effects according to the well-known broad categories of social relationships. From the
linguistic point of view, conversation conserves and enriches languages as long as it does not extend
their territorial domain. It stimulates literature, drama in particular. From the religious point of view,
it is the most fruitful means of proselytizing, spreading dogmas and skepticism in turn. Religions are
established or weakened not so much by preaching as by conversation. From the political point of
view, conversation is, before the press, the only brake on governments, the unassailable fortress of
liberty. It creates reputations and prestige, determines glory and therefore power. It tends to equate the
speakers by assimilating them to one another and destroys hierarchies by expressing them. From the
economic point of view, it standardizes judgments of the utility of various riches, creates and
specifies the idea of value, and establishes a scale and system of values. Thus, superfluous chatter, a
simple waste of time in the eyes of utilitarian economics, is actually the most indispensable of
economic agents, since without it there would be no opinion, and without opinion there would be no
value, which is in turn the fundamental notion of political economy and of many other social sciences.
From the point of view of ethics, conversation battles constantly and with frequent success against
egoism, against the tendency of behavior to follow entirely individual ends. It traces and lays out the
precise opposite of this individual teleology, an entirely social teleology whose salutary illusions or
conventional conversations give credit to lies by means of appropriate praise and blame which
spreads contagiously. By its mutual penetration of hearts and minds, conversation contributes to the
germination and progress of a psychology which is not exactly individual, but primarily social and
moral. From the aesthetic point of view, conversation engenders politeness first by unilateral, then by
mutual flattery. It tends to bring judgments of taste into agreement, eventually succeeds in doing so,
and thus elaborates a poetic art, an aesthetic code which is sovereign and obeyed in each era and in
each country. Conversation thus works powerfully for civilization, of which politeness and art are the
primary conditions. . . .
There is a tight bond between the functioning of conversation and changes of opinion, and on this
depend the vicissitudes of power. . . .
If a man of state, a Mirabeau or a Napoleon, could be personally known by all Frenchmen, he
would have no need of conversation to establish his authority; the French might be mute, but the
majority would still be fascinated by him. But since this cannot be, as soon as the extent of the state
has exceeded the limits of a small town, it is necessary for men to talk among themselves to create the
prestige which must rule them. After all, three-quarters of the time we obey a man because we see
him obeyed by others. The first people who obeyed this man had, or thought they had, reasons for
doing so: they had faith in his protective and guiding capabilities or his advanced age, high birth, his