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of domination by a single all powerful corporation in each industry. It may just as well assume the
form of a national or international association among numerous small and middle-sized companies,
each of which retains some individual autonomy within the larger complex.
A third area of opposition where a similar transformation takes place is in discussion. Discussion
is implied in the first two areas, but under this heading Tarde focuses more specifically on the
exchange of intellectual content in such matters as science, religion, and law. Verbal discussions
between two men tend to be replaced by coteries, later by major schools, and finally by nationally
integrated communities. What may have been a general tendency for certain intellectual currents in
France—especially pronounced there because of the centralized and monolithic university,
administrative, and ecclesiastical systems—was elevated by Tarde into universal principle. Once
again, he exceeded the limits of plausibility even while calling attention to an important pattern.
In numerous discussions, such as the one dealing with changing patterns of conflict, Tarde sought to
elaborate certain general principles to describe these “transformations.” The term was used
consciously to distinguish it from the simplistic universal theories of “evolution” so current at the
time he wrote. Tarde’s conception of transformation was perhaps more ambitious than more recent
social scientists would like, but he was much more supple and sensitive in isolating patterns of
transformation than many others of the period. 55 He stressed the voluntaristic element of individual
action which would influence the directions and rates of particular transformations, and in conceiving
of alternative branching patterns of development, he served as a basic source of inspiration for the
anti-evolutionary theories later elaborated by such anthropologists as Boas. 56 With the renewed
interest in evolutionary thought among sociologists in recent years, 57 after several decades of
avoiding the topic, Tarde’s transformistic propositions are both relevant and timely.
IV. Personality, Culture, and Social Structure: Belief and Desire
Tarde’s contributions to the study of personality per se were less than outstanding; but he did see what
many others did not: that close ties bound the structure of personality to culture and social structure in
the broader society. As a psychologist, Tarde was a social psychologist par excellence. In all
fairness, however, it must be recalled that his major paper on personality, “Belief and Desire,” was
published in 1880, a time when personality theory was as yet a nascent area of study. Tarde never
seriously reopened the subject in later years, for his basic ideas, as expounded in “Belief and
Desire,” provided a sufficiently coherent basis for the elaboration of his general system that he felt no
need to revise them.
The two fundamental elements of personality, 58 for Tarde, provided the title of his classic paper:
belief and desire. Belief referred to the cognitive component of personality, and desire to the
affectual; in this respect Tarde’s thought maintained a distinction that could be found as early as the
Greeks, but he did little to sharpen the general dichotomy. He even confessed, in attempting some
small minimum of precision, that in response to the question that “one might ask in passing, just what
is belief, what is desire?” he was forced to reply, “I admit my inability to define them.” His only
consolation was that, prior to him, “others have failed at it,” such as Hume and J. S. Mill. He did,
however, reject the simple associationistic thesis, maintaining that “belief, no more than desire, is
neither logically nor psychologically subsequent to sensation; that, far from arising out of an
aggregation of sensations, belief is indispensable both to their formation and their arrangement; that
no one knows what remains of sensation once judgment is removed; and that in the most elementary
sound, in the most indivisible colored point, there is already a duration and a succession, a