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multiplicity of points and contiguous moments whose integration is an enigma.” 59 Thus, Tarde was at
least entirely candid in admitting the limits of his and others’ knowledge on central questions of
personality.
In his discussion of personality structure he was careful to avoid the extremes both of empiricism
and of a prioristic thinking. But a basic weakness of his discussion stems from the fact that he did not
include any specific internal mechanisms for changes in personality. Over time, additional beliefs and
desires are internalized by individuals through the ever present process of imitation, he tells us, but
beyond statements on this general level, he says very little. Had he focused more specifically on
socialization and developmental processes, he might have been led to resolve some of the difficulties
he experienced. Social psychologists concerned with personality development and learning theory—
from Cooley to Miller and Dollard—have rightly identified the absence of a truly dynamic concept of
personality as a particularly unfortunate weakness in Tarde’s thought. 60 Here, as with most other
aspects of his work on personality, we should nevertheless not be too hard on Tarde; he was certainly
no more at fault than most other writers of his time. Freud’s great contribution did not come until a
generation later, and it was well into the twentieth century before more satisfactory social
psychological theories of socialization began to take shape.
But if Tarde’s considerations of socialization and personality change are wanting, his conception of
the close articulation between the individual personality, patterns of imitation, and social structure
and culture still deserves our attention. The beliefs and desires of each individual personality are to
some extent a result of probabilistic conditions that Tarde referred to as “credibility” and
“desirability.” In some cases the external conditions impose general limits on the types of beliefs that
individuals are likely to have—for example, the knowledge that there are ten tickets in an urn leads us
to believe with a high degree of probability that any one drawn will bear a number between one and
ten. These external conditions influence patterns of internal belief. But while he pointed to some
general limits on the type of belief and desire that were likely in an individual in the presence of
certain external conditions, Tarde posited no systematic pattern of causality.
More valuable than his treatment of the origins of belief and desire was Tarde’s discussion of the
institutionalization of elements corresponding to them (see the figure above). When particular beliefs
or desires begin to diffuse through social imitation, they generate the corresponding states of
“credulity” or “docility” 61 as they gradually become institutionalized. When beliefs about a particular
matter, or desire for a given object, spread further to become generalized throughout a society, they
result in “public opinion,” on the one hand, and the “general will,” on the other. 62 Over time, certain
beliefs and desires become so firmly embedded in society that they come to define, in turn, what shall
be recognized as “truth” or “value.” 63 Tarde occasionally uses these particular terms in his works
without making clear their systemic origins: the distinctions he draws between certain aspects of
social belief or basic cultural elements may only be understood as an elaboration of the basic
concepts of belief and desire.