Methodological Individualism

36 Backgroundabove individual human beings ([1894] 1969: 114ff). In a debate with Durkheimin 1903, he is reported to have said:Does Mr. Durkheim think that social reality is anything other than individualsand individual acts or facts? ‘If you believe that,’ said Mr Tarde, ‘Iunderstand your method, which is pure ontology. Between us is the debatebetween nominalism and scholastic realism. I am a nominalist. There canonly be individual actions and interactions. The rest is only a metaphysicalentity, mysticism’.(Tarde, [1904] 1969: 140)In contradistinction to Durkheim, Tarde maintains that ‘it is imitation which isthe elementary and universal social fact’ ([1898] 1969: 54). All social phenomenaare transmitted not collectively, but individually, ‘from one individual – parent,teacher, friend, neighbour, comrade – to another’. This is not to deny, however,that the collective result often is fairly constant. According to Tarde, it is this factwhich ‘gives rise to Mr Durkheim’s ontological illusion. For there is no doubt thatit is veritable scholastic ontology that the learned writer is undertaking to injectinto sociology in place of the psychology he opposes’ ([1894] 1969: 115). ‘Tosum up the question which I began by asking: What is society? I have answered:Society is imitation. We have still to ask: What is imitation? Here the sociologistmust yield to the psychologist’ ([1890] 1962: 76). Tarde, then, reaches the sameconclusion as did Mill, and it is possible to see in the laws of imitation anattempt to realise Mill’s unfinished project of a science of ethology (see pp. 45f ).Tarde, then, is highly critical of Durkheim’s idea of social facts sui generis and,it might be added, of his associated idea of a ‘collective consciousness’, which isdistinct from the individual consciousness of human beings. According to Tarde,there is nothing but individual consciousness. This does not imply, however, thatthere is nothing but individual psychology. Sociology is collective, or social,psychology, even if it depends on individual psychology.Collective psychology, inter-mental psychology, that is sociology, is thuspossible only because individual psychology, intra-mental psychology, includeselements which can be transmitted and communicated from one consciousnessto others, elements which, despite the irreducible hiatus betweenindividuals, are capable of uniting and joining together in order to formtrue social forces and quantities, currents of opinion or popular impulses,traditions or national customs.(Tarde [1898] 1969: 95)In the debate between Durkheim and Tarde, it eventually turned out that alsothe former saw sociology as a kind of social psychology. Does this mean thatthere is no important difference between their respective versions of sociology? Ibelieve there is, but I am not going to argue this point here. It may be added,though, that Tarde was critical of other aspects of positivist sociology, as well,