3658925934

stressed. But in contrast to certain of his contemporaries—most especially the English followers of
Galton—Tarde did not have recourse to racial explanations for national differences. The most striking
variations across countries were the result of different combinations of educational and intellectual
structures that facilitated or hampered inventiveness. On a methodological level he pointed out that to
measure national differences appropriately it was essential not to compare gross indicators reflecting
the diffusion of inventions, such as economic output, or the large-scale production of recent
inventions. One should compare indicators directly tapping inventiveness, such as patent licenses or
the inventions exhibited at an international fair. 38
The factors generating national differences in inventiveness are many and complex, but in isolation
we find one structural factor which neatly arose from Tarde’s general system with its stress on
communication as an antecedent to invention: the greater the isolation, ceteris paribus, the lower the
inventiveness. 39 Such ancient preliterate societies as those in Oceania, Tarde reasoned, had been held
back because of their extreme geographical and social isolation, while in the same years the societies
bordering on Mesopotamia rapidly developed inventions through a more dense network of
communications. The same principle of social isolation is thus applicable both to individuals and to
social groups.
Different cultural values, Tarde pointed out, also predispose societies toward different rates and
types of inventiveness. The values structure the goals of individual actors within each society,
emphasizing some types of activities over others. Due to their higher cultural evaluation, certain types
of activities attract more and better qualified persons, with the inevitable result of greater
inventiveness in these culturally preferred areas. At first glance it might appear that societies with a
greater stress on economic advancement would generate more inventions than other societies where
the satisfaction of immediate desires represent a higher cultural goal. But the same invention, Tarde
emphasized, can sometimes result from quite diverse goals. The Spanish and Portuguese, for example,
were often successful discoverers of new lands, not because they sought simply commercial gain or
religious conversion—the major goals of British and Dutch exploration—but also because they were
motivated by a spirit of lusty and passionate conquest. As a consequence, their discoveries were
often more spectacular. A cultural propensity toward immediate gratification, combined with
adventurousness, can generate invention by leaving a greater role to chance—not entirely random
chance, which always has some role, but a more structured sort of calculated risk, which, in some
cases, has an enormous pay-off, such as in the discovery of America.
Imitation.—Some inventions or discoveries—such as America—are more easily accepted than
others. Tarde, given the structure of his system, preferred to think in terms of the “imitation” instead of
the “acceptance” of inventions. As one of the three central processes of his system, imitation implied
a much broader concept than mere acceptance. In his volume The Laws of Imitation, Tarde offered no
explicit definition of the term, and when in the preface to the second edition he stated that he referred
to a “quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image,” he did not greatly clarify matters. 40 But
here, as in many other instances, we can best learn from Tarde not by criticizing his lack of precision
but by seeking out his insights.
One of the most fundamental “laws of imitation” was that the more similar are inventions to those
already imitated and hence institutionalized in a particular social system, the more likely they are to
be imitated. Restated as what Tarde referred to as a “logical law of imitation”—in which the
rational-logical aspects of imitation were emphasized—this general idea led to the principle that the
closer a particular invention is to the most advanced technological aspects of a society, the more