Imitation

The notion of imitation was to a great extent at the root of what later came to be defined as the great opposition between individualism and holism. Tarde, theorist of individuality, or rather of inter-individuality, is traditionally also presented as the theorist of imitation as mould of the social relation, an early counterpoint to the Durkheimian holism which eventually triumphed – both institutionally and methodologically – in France. According to this account, the first consequence of the foundation of positivist sociology was the irrevocable rejection of the notion of imitation. Imitation is an inter-individual relation and as such does not give us purchase on what is properly termed a social relation, since the latter should be conceived of as breaking with and external to the individualities it connects. In accordance with the principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, the proper way to reach the whole is not to build it up from the parts, but to grasp it in a qualitative leap, by fusion or integration. Imitation, being no more than an ‘individual rebound’ (Durkheim 1987: 12; 1986: 119), may be a relevant object for psychology, but is of no interest whatsoever from a specifically sociological perspective. The clearest indication of this fact is that imitation cannot be taken as evidence of solidarity. Solidarity, irrespective of its empirical variations – from the mechanical to the organic, the two poles defined in The Divison of Labour in Society – is in a formal sense a type of totalization which is neither summative nor aggregative and which reverses the relation between a whole and its parts. This is in accordance with the Comtian positivist principle: whereas the inferior sciences proceed from the parts to the whole, the higher sciences, beginning with biology and moving up the scale, must proceed from the whole to the parts. ¹