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conception of the individual psyche as independent of the impact of social factors. The results were
devastating for the development of social psychology in France. 127 Remarkably little progress in the
discipline was made from the time of Tarde’s work until after World War II, when the American
version of the new field was imported into France. 128
Still, Tarde was not entirely without followers in France. At the peripheral institutions where he
taught, as well as at the eminent Collège de France, no doctoral dissertations were prepared. So,
directing neither dissertations nor a laboratory, he never developed a cluster of disciples in the usual
sense of the term. Where he did have a more enthusiastic following was among a middle-aged group
of lawyers, lycée professors, government officials, and freelance writers of various sorts who were
associated with the institutions created by René Worms: principally the Société de Sociologie de
Paris, the Institut International de Sociologie, and the Revue Internationale de Sociologie. 129 Tarde
was one of the leading intellectual lights of these organizations, and while he found in them few true
disciples, his influence was noticeable on the thoughts of many. His early battles to exclude biology
from sociology were continued in spirited discussions held in these institutions where he attacked
social Darwinists, racial criminologists, and partisans of organismic analogies.
René Worms radically modified his sociology from his first major synthesis, Organisme et société,
to his later Philosophie des sciences sociales largely under the influence of Tarde’s criticisms. 130
Gaston Richard, a disciple of Durkheim until he was appointed to a Bordeaux professorship, was one
of several who found respite from the Durkheimians in the Tarde-Worms cluster of institutions.
Throughout the interwar years, he led attacks on the sociologism of the Durkheimians. 131 Raoul de la
Grassière, particularly active with the Revue, found much inspiration in Tarde’s work. The same was
true of G. L. Duprat, who, working closely with Worms in Paris, later became professor at the
University of Geneva, thus underlining the international orientations of the cluster. Both Richard and
Duprat were subsequently editors of the Revue Internationale de Sociologie. Near the end of the
interwar years the efforts of such men as Daniel Essertier and Charles Blondel to reconcile the
warring camps and establish the bases for a mutually productive merging between the disciplines of
psychology and sociology gradually began to succeed. But it is notable that it was not until nearly
World War II that a consensus began to emerge, influenced by such younger men as Georges Gurvitch
and Jean Stoetzel, who helped develop social psychology in France after the war. 132 In working out
an acceptable statement of the relations between the individual and society, and in undertaking social
psychological research after the war, the French drew on the experience of the Americans who had
been less hampered by ideological debate.
American social scientists, at an earlier stage, had learned much from Tarde. Among his leading
American contemporaries Tarde was widely acclaimed. For Baldwin he was “one of the most
authoritative and distinguished living writers in sociology and social psychology.” 133 Albion Small
considered him “very prominent, perhaps the most prominent, figure just at present among the
founders of the new science” of sociology. 134 Lester Ward praised Tarde as “one of the leading
thinkers of our time.” 135 Giddings wrote an adulatory introduction to the English translation of The
Laws of Imitation.
Equally enthusiastic, and more intellectually indebted to Tarde, was E. A. Ross, whose 1908
Social Psychology served as probably the most important single vehicle for the diffusion of Tarde’s
thought in America. 136 With Baldwin, Ross, and others, Tarde became identified as one of the
proponents of imitation as a basic principle of explanation of human behavior, the major alternative
of which was represented as instinct in one form or another. The rivalry between these more social or