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psychological approaches, associated, respectively, with the competing volumes by Ross and
McDougal, is well known. 137 In the 1920’s, the simple version of the instinct theory was largely
dismissed, but imitation was also criticized as at once too simple and too general. 138 C. H. Cooley
and G. H. Mead started with the same proposition that Tarde had used in so many different ways—
social interaction leads to the formation of common norms—but they went beyond Tarde to examine
in more detail the processes by which interaction leads in turn to changes in personality. 139 Most
subsequent social psychologists have moved in the same direction, fusing the general idea of imitation
with various conceptions of personality to generate theories of socialization and learning. 140
Anthropologists were likewise indebted to Tarde’s work on imitation when they formulated
various models of cultural diffusion. The Laws of Imitation was recognized as one of the most
outstanding works in the area, and it “profoundly impressed” the first dean of American
anthropologists, Franz Boas, “and, through him, dozens of anthropologists in the United States.” 141
The spread of cultural elements through different societies could be interpreted with the principles
developed by Tarde; Boas drew on them to help explain such phenomena as the patterns of growth of
secret societies on the coast of British Columbia. 142 Paradoxically, however, Tarde could provide
stimulation both for partisans of cultural diffusion and those of independent invention in the debate
that so divided anthropologists between the wars, since he had formulated basic principles about both
phenomena. 143
Tarde was equally stimulating for sociologists concerned with diffusion in contemporary societies.
As a student under Giddings, Ogburn apparently was influenced by ideas deriving from Tarde, and in
his Social Change, 144 as well as many subsequent studies, 145 he went on to refine precisely the sort of
analysis of inventions, social trends, and diffusion that Tarde had initiated. Chapin’s well-known
study of diffusion of the city manager form of government formulated the idea of an “S-curve” of
adoption of innovations, 146 which subsequently became refined by many others. 147 A number of
disparate traditions of research on diffusion developed in anthropology, sociology, rural sociology,
education, and other substantive areas throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and only quite
recently have systematic attempts been made to synthesize the findings emerging from these several
areas and to isolate empirically validated principles. 148
Tarde’s writings were used by such contemporaries as A. Lawrence Lowell in treating questions of
public opinion and by Scipio Sighele, Gustave Le Bon, and Robert Park 149 in their works on publics
and crowds. It was largely through Park that the Chicago sociologists of the interwar years became
acquainted with Tarde. Although, as Everett Hughes points out, 150 not one single excerpt from Tarde’s
work was republished in “Park and Burgess,” the Bible of interwar year Chicago sociologists, it
nevertheless contained more references to Tarde than to Comte, Cooley, Durkheim, Simmel, Thomas,
or Weber. 151 Through Park one can find the stamp of Tarde’s ideas on such later writers on publics,
collective behavior, and mass communications as Herbert Blumer, Morris Janowitz, Ralph H. Turner
and Lewis M. Killian, and Kurt and Gladys Engel Lang. 152 Edward Shils’s writings on center and
periphery would have delighted Tarde. 153
One might expect that studies on mass communications and public opinion at Columbia University
in the 1940’s and ’50’s, which did so much to stress the role of personal influence, 154 might have
drawn on Tarde’s insights, but Lazarsfeld and most of his associates were unfamiliar with Tarde’s
work in this area at the time. 155
In part because lawyers, judges, and criminological theorists in France were generally trained not