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closely associated without ever seeing or knowing one another. 106
Tarde views the creation of intermediate-level organizations and extended patterns of loyalties as a
doubly liberating phenomenon; like Simmel, he shows that corresponding to an increase in the size of
a group is a decrease in the integration of individual members, hence an increase in personal
freedom. 107 Moreover, as the number of groups with overlapping memberships increases, the
extended and conflicting loyalties of members enable groups to shift ideological perspectives, form
coalitions, and even make international alliances with greater flexibility.
As mentioned in the discussion on opposition, Tarde analyzed the processes through which conflict
originating in the mind of a single person can precipitate social conflict among families, communities,
regional groups, and even national societies, possibly terminating in international conflagration. A
functional prerequisite for the eruption of violent conflict beyond the intercommunity level, however,
is an effective communication system. For although international wars may have existed practically as
long as nations themselves, in preindustrial societies wars were actually quite narrowly limited;
officially, entire nation-states declared war on one another, but the widely-observed rules of chivalry
effectively restricted the actual hostilities. In order for international conflict to grow to the extent of
arousing the passions of entire populations and mobilizing national economies, it was imperative to
establish communication and transportation networks connecting all sectors of a nation.
But although the social transformations associated with the newspaper increase the potential threat
of large-scale conflicts, other modifications, to Tarde, tip the balance toward peace: in the long run,
he felt, the outstanding contribution of the newspaper would be its civilizing and rationalizing
influences. 108
If we conceive of the set of changes just discussed primarily as modifications on a social structural
level, we may view a second set of developments as predominantly cultural. Tarde envisaged a
constant interweaving of influences between these two levels: technological developments make
newspapers possible, newspapers promote the formation of broader publics, and they, by broadening
the loyalties of their members, create an extensive network of overlapping and shifting groupings.
These groupings facilitate the formation of broader ideological perspectives; rationality, tolerance,
international peace, and understanding are the eventual results.
Thus, mass media can work for good and for ill, the former perhaps neutralizing or minimizing the
latter. But Tarde was sorrowfully imprecise in these matters. Neither rationality nor civilization are
given any more precise meanings than those of general conversational usage. And just how influential
a role newspapers actually play in the overall process varies from one presentation to the next.
In some places, newspapers are treated as a primordial factor effecting the transformation of
societies into aggregates of increasingly broad and overlapping publics. And, occasionally,
civilization and rationality (the cultural changes) flow almost automatically from the subsequent
reorganization of social groupings (the social structural changes). 109 Thus, although the tendency of
his analysis is in the same general direction as that, for example, of Tönnies, Simmel, Weber, or
Durkheim in pointing out the fundamental movement in industrializing societies from smaller, more
intimate, and highly integrated social groupings toward broader, more distant, and more complex
networks of relationships, Tarde differs from the German writers, and to some degree from Durkheim
as well, in several respects. He is, for one, less systematic than they in analyzing the dynamics of the
overall process. He also does not share their pessimistic view—a partial carry-over from German
romanticism—that with further industrialization men will become cold, calculating, and
“dehumanized.” Quite on the contrary, Tarde enthusiastically greeted the developments he observed,