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Letters have just about the same format, the same type of envelope and seal, the same type of address. . . . But open the letters and
what characteristic differences, profound and substantial, you find, despite the constant element of the ritual formulas at the beginning
and the end! Adding up such heterogeneous things is therefore not doing very much. We know their number but not even their length.
It would be interesting to find out, at any rate, if as they become more numerous they become shorter, which seems likely, and more
prosaic [plus sèches] as well. 80
In his study on conversation, where he develops many of his ideas on the importance of personal
influence, Tarde comments on the desirability of a statistique des conversations. Recorded accounts
of the congresses of learned societies provide a first step in this direction, as would extensive
personal diaries if they were kept accurately enough. 81 A first type of interesting analysis for a
“statistics of conversation” would be the measurement of the speeds at which different types of
conversations take place:
The average walking speed of pedestrians in various capitals of the world has been measured, and the statistics that were published
showed rather large differences in speeds, as well as steadiness, from one to the next. I am persuaded that, if it were considered
worthwhile, it would be possible to measure the speed of conversation in each city as well, and that it would differ a great deal from
one city to another as well as from one sex to another. It seems that as people become more civilized, they walk and talk more
rapidly. . . . Many travelers have also commented on the slow speed at which Arabs and other primitive peoples converse. Does the
future belong to peoples that speak slowly or rapidly? To those that speak rapidly, probably, but it would be worth the trouble, I believe,
to examine this side of the question with numerical precision; the study could develop into a sort of social psychophysics. The
elements, for the moment, are lacking. 82
A final source of empirical information that Tarde discussed was archaeology. Although it may
appear rather unusual to contemporary sociologists, archaeology was one of two methods (with
statistics) discussed in detail in a methodological chapter of the Laws of Imitation. The concern with
archaeology was understandable given Tarde’s historical and comparative interests. Its value, he
held, lay in its ability to force historians—”those poor carvers-up of reality who have been unable to
perceive the true dividing line between vital and social facts” 83 —to become more abstract and to
focus on the essential details of human existence. It is, then, the “archaeologists [who] stand out as
makers of pure sociology because, as the personality of those they unearth is impenetrable . . . they
hear, in a certain way, like the Wagnerian ideal, the music without seeing the orchestra of the past.” 84
With the methods and procedures of archaeology it is possible to document the historical periods
and geographical locations of particular discoveries. And with the same evidence one can also trace
the paths of imitation followed by discoveries as they spread from one time and place to the next.
Here, Tarde’s concerns stimulated those of cultural anthropologists working on analogous topics. 85
But although archaeology yields valuable information for extinct societies, the sorts of data it
provides are far less rich than those of statistics. At least this is true in so far as data regarding
imitations are concerned: for information on invention archaeology may yield valuable information
whereas most statistics are virtually worthless.
A particularly appealing aspect of statistics for Tarde was the possibility it offered of subjecting
changes in particular phenomena to precise examination over time: such data would enable an
investigator to refine and extend the laws of imitation. His general procedure for examining time
series was to seek out progressions, the slopes of which could be expressed in equations and thus
compared with others. Progression is the “natural” tendency of a time series, in Tarde’s view, since it
represents cumulative imitation of a particular invention throughout a social system. Regression, on
the other hand, is not a “natural” process but occurs because of the displacement of one innovation by
another. 86 Thus, to explain the decline in use of horses, the increasing series of trains and automobiles