ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way in which Tarde understands social morphology. According to him, crowds, corporations and publics are—along with individuals—the most active actors in post-traditional societies. They represent morphological milestones in the becoming of humankind: in his view, the crowd is the first form of social grouping in history and the public is the last one. In Modern societies, they both co-exist in the same social field and also transform into one another unceasingly. Hence, there is a synchronic continuity and smooth transitions amongst all these different social formations. We show that a great deal of our social, political, cultural and economic life is basically found in this game of continuous metamorphoses and their consequences.
