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These non-imitative similarities between independent nations offer a very curious and vast subject
matter which I shall not attempt to explore here, having treated it elsewhere with some of its
implications, but I cannot by-pass it entirely. These similarities have served as pretexts for the social
evolution formulas that naturalistic sociologists have attempted, which, according to them, are the
whole of sociology. This is their favorite topic; hence the manifest tendency of these scholars on the
one hand to increase the proportion of the spontaneous similarities as much as possible by including
many imported or borrowed ones and, on the other hand, to reduce the importance of these borrowed
similarities as much as possible, to the point of saying that they are of no interest for the historical
philosopher and that spontaneous similarities alone should absorb his attention. They were led to this
grave error by failing to perceive the universal presence of imitation in all social action and its
extraordinary capacity for propagation. . . .
And yet I have been speaking of a simple invention, *2 of an idea so simple that it seems it must
have been born of itself among even the most backward people. But in fact it must have had multiple
centers of invention, each independent of the others. If it were a question of more complex ideas,
more difficult to conceive or to execute, this multiplicity would be less probable and in certain cases
even improbable. Here the accident of genius becomes necessary in order that the idea be conceived
and executed. But this is exactly what certain sociologists—those who consider the progression of
societies as a circular voyage more or less similar for all societies—do not want. Imbued with the
error of thinking that social science is not possible without this condition, they need to explain
everything by impersonal factors which eradicate the disturbing action of great men. This action
visibly bothers them because their obvious preoccupation is doing away with genius. We could ignore
the situation if genius alone were at stake in this serious problem; but it is not only genius but our
individual originality, the individual quality of genius in each of us, whose efficacity and very
existence are called into question; for in some way we all, whether obscure or famous, invent,
perfect, and vary at the same time that we imitate, and there is not one of us who does not leave his
mark, deep or imperceptible, on his language, his religion, his science, his trade, his art. If it had been
proved that the great inventors, the great creators of poetry, myths, dogmas, arts, and sciences, were
simple products of their times, illusory personifications of impersonal forces which acted through
them and would have acted just as well without them—if this were true, it would be still more true to
say that as great actions are a great illusion, the small action of each one of us is a small illusion, that
none of us has served for anything, that human personality is a decoy. This is what we must
necessarily concede if the true and sole actors in history are not men but the factors that we are told
about. We can avoid this consequence and restore to individuality its true value and true raison d’être
only by explaining history as a sequence of initiatives and repetitions, of inventions and imitations,
and by showing that through the imitative if not the inventive side of their actions, human individuals
are subject to laws that lend themselves to formulas very different from those of religious, political,
moral, and industrial evolution, where, in order to reveal only the similarities of various societies, so
much effort is expended to conceal their differences, their essential and characteristic aspects. The
theory of imitation, which implies a theory of invention, does not require such a sacrifice of socially
picturesque elements to social science. Rather it lets us include within the same point of view both
statistics, which measure series or groups of similar acts and clearly determine the sphere of
influence of different imitations, and archaeological exhumations, which disclose the successive
order of inventions and trace the irregular ramifications of their geneological tree.
We can only point out in passing this important subject of nonimitative similarities. Let us add that
precisely the most essential aspects of social life are those in which these non-imitative acts are