Gabriel Tarde Quotes on Politics
Gabriel Tarde's L'Opinion et la foule (Opinion and the Crowd, 1901) gave fin-de-siècle French political psychology one of its most influential studies of the modern public as a distinctive political formation. The framework distinguishes the crowd, which gathers in physical proximity and shares an immediate emotional contagion, from the public, which is a dispersed mental collectivity united by a common attention to the same newspapers, subjects, and conversational currents — and argues that the modern political condition is shaped primarily by the latter. The framework anticipates much of the twentieth-century literature on mass communication and supplies the principal alternative to Le Bon's more pessimistic crowd psychology.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“Society is imitation, and imitation is a kind of somnambulism.”
-
Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“Every social phenomenon is the product of imitation, opposition, or adaptation.”
-
Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“The social is the inter-mental.”
-
Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“Innovation is the source of all real social change.”
-
Attributed to Gabriel Tarde:
“The crowd is the social body in its inferior state; the public, in its superior.”
-
“Life in a world centred on function is liable to dispair because in reality the world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resist this temptation it is only to the extent that there comes into plat from within it and in its favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognise.”
Wikiquote