Powers of pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde

This art icle was downloaded by: [ Goldsm it hs, Universit y of London] On: 31 March 2015, At : 22: 41 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Economy and Society Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ reso20 Powers of pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde Albert o Toscano Published online: 21 Sep 2007. To cite this article: Albert o Toscano (2007) Powers of pacif icat ion: st at e and empire in Gabriel Tarde, Economy and Societ y, 36: 4, 597-613, DOI: 10. 1080/ 03085140701589471 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03085140701589471 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sublicensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Economy and Society Volume 36 Number 4 November 2007: 597
613 Powers of pacification: state and empire in Gabriel Tarde Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 Alberto Toscano Abstract The thought of Gabriel Tarde has recently been presented as a radical alternative to a modernist tradition in social theory that continues to rely on supposedly moribund concepts of class, action, statehood, and the like. Focussing on Tarde’s political writings, this article seeks to counter this prevalent vision of Tarde as a thinker of molecular social processes who provides us with the tools to think beyond the parameters of sovereignty and to embrace a transnational understanding of social change. Tarde’s thinking of politics is analysed in terms of its reliance on a political anthropology of obedience, its ambivalent attitude towards the democratization of the political sphere, its image of the state as an enabler and filter of inventions, and its attempts to articulate the relation between the social and the political. By means of the notion of ‘empowering pacification’, the article concludes that the significance of Tarde for the present lies in his contradictory and symptomatic conceptualization of the persistence of political power and institutional centralization in the midst of a tendency towards the global expansion of the field of social interactions, as well as in his strategic attempt to imagine forms of power that would neutralize the possibility of social turmoil and class conflict. Keywords: colonization; democratization; empire; imperialism; invention; the political; political anthropology; the social; state; tendency; value. It is tempting to read Gabriel Tarde today as the prophet of a planetary network society that has rendered sovereignty obsolete, of a molecular politics of difference that seeps through the cracks of the molar identities of class or nation, of a social theory sensitive to the vicissitudes of affect and freed from modernist models of social action and collective behaviour. The recent Tarde renaissance (Toews 2003; Latour 2004; Katz 2006) is marked by a perception Alberto Toscano, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London SE14 6NW, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Copyright # 2007 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online DOI: 10.1080/03085140701589471 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 598 Economy and Society of Tarde’s kind of social science as the path not taken, as an alternative foundation that could free us from the congenital impasses of modern social thought, especially in what concerns its political horizon, whose coordinates are marked by ominous master signifiers: class, labour, nation, economy, the state. Tarde’s monadological revolution, his focus on inventions not norms, on flows not entities, on desire and belief rather identity and conflict, would open up avenues of research hitherto blocked by social theory’s own stubborn belief in (and desire for) modernity. The conviction that governs this essay is that the contemporary interest of Tarde’s work lies elsewhere than in his position as herald and precursor, as the yet-unrecognized harbinger of our emancipation from the ponderous constraints inherited from the ‘classics’ of social thought. Rather, I contend that attending to Tarde’s conception of politics reveals a thinker whose ideas on the state and on the handling of potentially explosive social needs and conflicts bespeaks a definite strategic vision which, far from having been lost to the ‘great politics’ of the twentieth century, has both endured and indeed found numerous paths for its realization.1 Moreover, Tarde’s understanding of politics
most explicitly laid out in the 1899 Les transformations du pouvoir
is enmeshed in a set of specific political sympathies, which are evident in the prospect of the harmonization of social opposition and in the spirited defence of the producers of value, understood not as labourers but as inventors (and investors in inventions).2 The political context and historical resonance of Tarde’s theoretical intervention should thus be kept in mind, not so that the challenge of his thought can be ‘reduced away’, but rather in order to restore force and coherence to what is a an original thinking of political power. In order to shed some light on this somewhat ignored aspect of Tarde’s work, which I think crucial to his contemporary reevaluation, I propose to approach it in terms of three interlinked dimensions of his thought: 1) Tarde’s conception of the transformation in political forms, conceived as a tendency towards Empire; 2) his definition of the relationship between politics and the social; 3) his understanding of the state, its structure and dynamic. What will emerge from this investigation is a vision of the state determined by what we could call an ideal of empowering pacification , which is accompanied by a sustained polemic against socialist politics, the promotion of a state politics of invention, and a sober assessment of the ambivalences and setbacks intrinsic to the overall tendency towards the harmonious, cosmopolitical extension of the domain of the social. Tarde’s thinking of social transformation takes its distance from an epochal thinking of social evolution
a concept too close to the organicism he criticizes in his sociological forebears and peers
for the sake of an approach which orbits around a notion of tendency. Such a notion allows for a modicum of logic and regularity in the interaction of belief and desire, as well as in the sequences of invention and imitation, but it also permits, in line with Tarde’s invariant commitment to individual initiative and contingency, a non-deterministic grasp of social novelty, attentive to the singularity of given acts, complexes and relations. Echoing Tocqueville’s writings on the inexorable process of Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification 599 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 democratization sweeping America (Therborn 1976: 171), but according such a tendency a naturalized ‘cosmic’ valence, Tarde, in the concluding pages of Lois de l’imitation , affirms that the tendency to a cosmopolitan and democratic assimilation is an inevitable historical tendency [pente ], for the same reason that the uniform and complete inhabitation of the globe and the uniform and complete heating of space are in the wishes of the living Universe and the physical universe. That is necessary, because of the two capital forces
invention and imitation
which we use to interpret the entirety of history, the first, the source of privileges, monopolies, aristocratic inequalities, is intermittent, basically rare, erupting in certain faraway epochs, whilst the second, so democratic and levelling, is continuous and incessant, like the sedimentary action of the Euphrates or the Nile. (Tarde 2001 [1890]: 439
40) No surprise then that Tarde, in his attempt to think through the social and historical trends leading to an empowering peace, blesses the role of Empires or universal federations as agents of pacification (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 172, 205).3 But this tendency is not unequivocally destined to social equalization; it is not per se ‘democratic’. Rather, the ‘growing assimilation’ of inventions by way of imitation is only the ‘fabric’ of society, meaning that it can still be organized by ‘social logic’ into new forms of hierarchy, through a ‘specialization of intelligences’
though these hierarchies will not take a classical aristocratic-hereditary form once that form is undone. Thus, Tarde predicts the development in the future of a ‘colossal Empire’, which will quash, by the sheer power of numbers, the possibility of a ‘war between a little State and a great one’ (Tarde 2001 [1890]: 441). Indeed, the tendency to Empire also manifests itself as a radical inequality among nations, leading Tarde to argue that this ‘amplifying evolution, this gradual expansion in the domain of registered inequalities, does not cease’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 121). On the basis of the over-determination of power by invention
a gesture characteristic of his thought
Tarde sees this trend to expansion as correlated with the invention of ever more powerful means of communication. However, and here lies the interest of his phenomenology of Empire, the expansive, irradiating sequence of invention
imitation is linked to the more cyclical patterns of fashion and custom, which establish a certain intensive limit to the expansion of the state into an Empire. As Tarde reasons: ‘to the extent that the unification or at least the federation of civilized nations becomes more desirable and more ardently wished for, the obstacles that are thrown up to its realisation
pride and patriotic resentments, national prejudices, badly understood or narrowly conceived collective interests, accumulated historical memories
do not cease to grow’ (Tarde 2001 [1890]: 442).4 The democratizing tendency to a kind of empire of communication is thus countered, according to Tarde, by an inertia of custom and particularity. Thus, we experience a civilizational ‘ordeal’, the ‘mirage of a universal and perpetual peace’ which is never entirely forthcoming. The only shape that such an Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 600 Economy and Society Empire can take, Tarde concludes, is that of a limited pax imposed by a people, whose security and drive to ‘universal similarity’ will make room for the blossoming of ‘more radical, more intimate and truer individual divergences than the destroyed dissimilarities’. It is in the context of such a partial and impermanent Empire that a ‘cosmopolitan flood’ will wash away the massive and extrinsic forms of difference represented by traditions and national belonging (with its attendant xenophobia). Resonating in his own way with Marx’s declarations on the homogenizing powers of the bourgeoisie, Tarde cannot but link this imperial tendency to the one represented by economic repetition (or reproduction), when he speaks of ‘the propagation of special judgments and needs which give riches all their value’, such that ‘the tendency of this propagation to irradiate indefinitely [is] the cause of the growth in markets and industries’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 153). Moreover, economic irradiation, ‘the imitiative assimilation of needs and products’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 160), is viewed as intrinsic to the expansion of the political field itself. It is worth noting in this respect that in the Lois Tarde indicates an ambivalence in the possible results of such an undermining of static identities: on the one hand, he presages an experience of collective change beyond tribe and nation, on the other, he muses about the possibility of a kind of ‘generalized misanthropy’ that would seek to defend itself against the frenzy of communication and exchange by a retreat into individuality, thereby sublating, in a move ‘from elementary diversity to personal physiognomy’, the monotony and subjection of social life into aesthetic life, the flourishing of the ‘profound and fugacious singularity of persons’ (Tarde 2001 [1890]: 445). This is the moment of the passage
outlined by Tarde in the second volume of his E´conomie psychologique
from an ‘extensive culture’ to an ‘intensive culture’, responding to the elimination of an imperialist outside with the development of singularization and differentiation in the ‘internal outside’ of Empire (Lazzarato 2002: 382
3). On the basis of this paradoxical conjunction of universal intercourse and aesthetic individualization, Tarde ultimately links the theme of Empire to what he sees as the fundamental dynamic governing the development, communication and proliferation of social bonds: the ‘expansion of the social field’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 223). The interest of approaching Tarde from a political angle, in this regard, is that it dispels an excessively irenic image of him as a thinker of the harmonious formation of a global village through purely social, or infrasocial means. On the contrary, Les transformations displays a persistent concern with the role of conflict as the motor of social expansion (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 211), as well as with the combination of an overall subterranean tendency to harmonization, on the one hand, and the violent political and martial instruments needed by this tendency to realize itself in varying configurations, on the other. Thus, the concept of an imperial tendency, so to speak, permits Tarde both to posit a logic for this expansion, and to allow for its contingent historical forms. The logic of expansion is one that goes from unruly differences and oppositions to their systematization and intensification. Tarde Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification 601 thus speaks of the expansion of the social field as a tendency that moves towards both a maximum and a kind of equilibrium (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 223), in a shift from external-contradictory differences to internal and harmonized ones. It is axiomatic in this regard for Tarde that the origin of social development is always to be found in a kind of wild heterogeneity, and that the expansion of the social field combines difference and inequality, on the one hand, with sympathy and cooperation, on the other.5 As we will see below, his logic of empowering pacification is politically qualified by Tarde in a manner that militates against a rhizomatic or molecular reading of his work. For Tarde, the expansion of the social field is a tendency that cannot simply be defined as social, since it requires a specific political form. This form is centralization . As Tarde puts it, ‘the centralisation of powers (whether in the hands of one man, or a group of men, Parliament, Constituent Assembly, Convention) is the necessary and transitory precondition for the transformation of an illogical diversity into a logical diversity ’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 229). This necessity of an accumulation and centralization of power for the sake of a maximization of harmonious difference within a complex political system is according to Tarde a matter of both internal and foreign policy
of the internal monopolization of power and of the agglomeration of states into larger units. As he declares: ‘if one wants peace, within and without, it is necessary to begin by centralizing all the powers of the State and by unifying all the States in a single great State or a single great international Union’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 231). And it is only this necessary stage of centralization that will permit the harmonious or adaptive proliferation of differences
rather than the explosion of drastic, oppositional differences, chief among them the class struggle. Powers, for Tarde, begin as divided and centralize in order to then divide themselves in a harmonious manner
a dialectic that in many respects explains the attraction for Tarde of federalism as a political form (Lazzarato 2002: 369). We can thus say that Tarde is in key respects a sociologist of the age of imperialism, but in a manner very different than, say, Weber (Therborn 1976: 216). Where the latter writes in terms of the ‘objective’ inevitability of expansionism within the constraints of capitalism, and from the subjective standpoint of a defender of the claims of the German nation, Tarde’s ‘diplomatic’, cosmopolitan view of ‘expansion’ sees both commerce and war as transitional means for the harmonious amplification of compatible, communicating differences. This cosmopolitan, or even proto-ultraimperialist, perspective (Kautsky 1970 [1914]: 46) rests on Tarde’s conviction that the process of socialization
of expanded and intensified communication and cooperation in and through difference
is also one of denationalization (Lazzarato 2002: 370), in the sense that Tarde speaks of the prospect of an ‘immense Empire’ that will vault over distances through novel ‘means of communication and means of denationalisation’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 172). But again, far from postulating a smooth and imperceptible transition, Tarde, though hostile to the organicist and rationalist bases of the Hegelian dialectic Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 602 Economy and Society (Lazzarato 2002: 333), discerns a certain cunning of reason at work in the political aspects of this imperial or denationalizing tendency. This is strikingly clear in the case of colonialism, which Tarde tellingly interprets in affective, mass psychological terms as a ‘fever’, a manner of ‘being in heat’, a ‘fertile illness’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 141)
regarding it from the perspective of its ‘new e´lan’ as concerns French colonial pretensions in the fin de sie`cle. For Tarde colonialism is precisely the kind of phenomenon which, especially in the dynamic of settling and founding of ‘new’ cities (New Amsterdam, New York, New Haven ), demonstrates the powerful links between political invention and political imitation. Already beginning with the maritime proliferation of Greek cities, colonization is thus defined as a phenomenon of ‘imitative generation’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 157). Colonization is thus the geopolitical and geosocial counterpart of the fundamental dynamic with which Tarde seeks to explain social transformation, that of ‘amplifying repetition’; colonization is defined as the product of the repetition of ‘groups of examples’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 167). This ‘ontologization’ of the phenomenon of colonization is also a naturalization and indeed a kind of justification, inasmuch as (colonial) imitation is always founded on the ‘adapted, harmonious and logical’ character of the imitated model (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 167). Rather than searching for a merely ‘material’ explanation, it is the tendency to amplifying repetition itself which explains colonization, understood primarily from the perspective of the settler: ‘Given that colonisation is a concrete and complete large-scale imitation, why would there not be laws of colonisation as there are laws of imitation, and derived from the latter? Is there not, for example, a tendency of every social group to emigrate and colonise in order to multiply itself by reflecting itself?’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 168). Whether colonization is a ‘type’ of amplifying repetition or indeed a historically specific paradigm for Tarde’s social ontology is an open question, but it is worth noting that his thinking of the colonial-imperial tendency
qua geopolitical aspect of the expansion of the social field
is also marked by the above-noted apologia for the necessity of centralization. The overall moralhistorical criterion for Tarde involves the relative expansion or contraction of the social field (with the latter being the closest to a notion of social ‘evil’). So, whilst the partition of countries by great powers is frowned upon (as he declares, ‘this national vivisection is one of the greatest collective crimes that the sun can shine on’), colonial divisions, of the kind witnessed in the scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference of 1884 (recall that Tarde is writing in 1899), are viewed through the lens of a white man’s burden that takes the form of colonial accumulation and centralization: ‘when the countries to be divided are populated by savage or barbarous tribes always at war with one another, the benefit of the peace which is imposed upon them at the cost of a submission accepted without revolt is often inestimable and realises, in the long run, a prodigious fertilisation of the social field’. But Tarde also registers the setbacks and ambivalences of such ‘tendencies’, and thus continues, in a more pessimistic vein somewhat reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s writings on Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification 603 imperialism, that the ‘misfortune is that these dissections of barbarous countries among civilised nations often have as their effect to barbarise the latter, by overexciting in them their predatory instincts, rather than to civilise the former’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 278). This tendency to Empire and its intrinsic ambivalence, or even reversibility, is manifest in Tarde’s sociological science fiction, Fragment d’histoire future, translated into English as Underground Man , with a preface by H. G. Wells. Some of key moments in this novella provide us with clues regarding the manner in which Tarde envisages the specificity of politics, the tendency to Empire and the role of inventions. In brief, Tarde stages a formidable sociological thought experiment: the extinction of the sun forces humanity to burrow into the earth and invent itself anew. This scenario allows Tarde to speculate on the being of a society that has been thoroughly purified of its mediation by nature, with all the needs and complications such a mediation entails. This ‘purification of society’ takes place through ‘the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man only excepted’ (Tarde 1905: 111). Secluded thus from every influence of the natural milieu into which it was hitherto plunged and confined, the social milieu was for the first time able to reveal and display its true virtues, and the real social bond appeared in all its vigour and purity. It might be said that destiny had desired to make in our case an extended sociological experiment for its own edification by placing us in such extraordinary conditions. (Tarde 1905: 111) The tendency to Empire is already present for Tarde in the state of affairs that immediately precedes the solar catastrophe (initially perceived as ‘solar anaemia’): ‘For the last fifty years, he writes, the final establishment of the great Asiatic
American
European confederacy, and its indisputable supremacy over what was still left, here and there, in Oceania and central Africa of barbarous tribes incapable of assimilation, had habituated all the nations, now converted into provinces, to the delights of universal and hence inviolable peace’.6 And Tarde, in line with his own variant of the cunning of reason, cannot but assert the extent to which this apparently perpetual peace has depended on the horrors and oppositions of war: ‘It had required not less than 150 years of warfare to arrive at this wonderful result’ (Tarde 1905: 23; compare Tarde 2003 [1899]: 205). The economic aspect of amplifying repetition
the link between invention, imitation (communication), and commerce, or between idea and value
is also present in this image of a peaceable federation: ‘It was no longer millions but thousands of millions that the least newly discovered improvement in industry brought to its inventor; for henceforth there was no barrier to stop in its star-like radiation the expansion of any idea, no matter where it originated’ (Tarde 1905: 30). But, almost to dramatize the limits of ‘extensive culture’, as noted above, this great cosmopolis, which seems to presage an eternity of pacified Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 604 Economy and Society intercourse, and a somewhat emasculating ennui (Tarde amusingly notes that the only malady that remains is the acute and widespread myopia born of addiction to the printed word), is forced by the solar catastrophe to a radical refoundation, to the positive ‘involution’ that gives rise to the underground civilization. It is at this point, where the social tendency is rudely interrupted by a kind of general strike of nature, that the virtues of communicative society become useless, and the principle of individual initiative, which is to say of invention, comes to the fore.7 Underground Man thus dramatizes the idea of invention as political foundation
an idea that governs Tarde’s study of the significance of capital cities as centres of political accumulation and social irradiation in Les transformations (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 133).8 Just as in the examples brought forth in the 1899 book, the salvation of humanity depends on a contagious invention by a kind of anomalous individual: ‘In this extremity a man arose who did not despair of humanity he had only half sympathised with the prosperity of the Neo-Grecian world with its levelling and enervating tendencies he . . . belonged to those who reverently guarded in the depths of their heart the germs of recusancy’ (Tarde 1905: 63
4). Though Tarde recognizes the preparation of the act of invention by an unconscious background of imitations (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 140)
of what we could call, paraphrasing Leibniz, petites inventions
it remains the case that for the contagion and amplification to take place an individual must undertake the constructive act of transvaluation. As he notes, regarding the fraught and bloody genesis of the new underground Empire, ‘we remain overwhelmed with wonder when we consider the incalculable degree of courage and intelligence lavished on such a work, and solely called into being by an idea which, starting from one individual brain, has leavened the whole globe’ (Tarde 1905: 104). This ‘epidemic’ model of political invention, which is itself contained within the overall tendency to the ‘expansion of the social field’, reveals how Tarde seeks to displace the Durkheimian problem of the relation between the social totality and the individual: from the level of collective representations to that of subconscious beliefs and desires; from a notion of communal compulsion to one of molecular contagion (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 269); from a problem of the integration of individuals to one of the diffusion or irradiation of ‘examples’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 160). Indeed, it is the presence of ‘individual factors’ that explains the interruptions, reversals and deviations of what would otherwise be the rigid path dependency of a social process dominated by ‘anonymous and impersonal factors’ (Tarde 1895). Thus, Tarde presents us with the imbrications of a ‘globalizing’ tendency to ‘impersonalization’, on the one hand, and the intensification of the role of individual invention and indeed leadership, on the other. He thus notes, in a manner all too germane to our own epoch of ‘soft bonapartism’ (Losurdo 1993), that the process of levelling and massification of the socio-political arena is accompanied by an endurance, or even exacerbation of the function of leadership (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 58). In this respect Tarde is not so distant from the reflection of the early theorists of political elites and oligarchies (Mosca, Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification 605 Michels, Pareto), who identified the concomitant expansion of a mass politics of affect and emotion, on the one hand, and the personalization and concentration of power, on the other (Therborn 1976). Note that for Tarde this twofold tendency is not primarily linked to the laws of organization (such as Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’), but to the primacy of invention. As with the maverick figure of Miltiades in Underground Man (tellingly named after an ancient Greek tyrant and military strategist), even when it lies at the origin of a capillary movement of democratization, the moment of political invention (or of moral transvaluation) is inherently anti-democratic. For Tarde, in politics as in society, the vertical seems to have logical and temporal precedence over the horizontal, or, as he puts it himself in a kind of axiom: ‘the unilateral precedes the reciprocal’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 242). Contrary to some recent interpretations of his work, the political aspect of the movement of amplifying repetition seems to be schematized as a top
down process, where equality attained within a ‘social elite’ (an aristocratic court for instance, or a body of military officers) is seen to spread to inferior strata (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 181). This is, for instance, how Tarde interprets the revolutions of 1848, as developing though ‘germs’ of democracy, of imitation among equals
who are the first to perceive and formulate new social questions
and only then descending to affect the unequal masses (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 108). This anti-democratic, trickle-down, elite group theory of democracy, explicitly counterpoised to anarchist and socialist theories of mass politics from below (though perhaps secretly related to certain visions of vanguard revolutionary politics), finds sustenance in Tarde’s conception of political anthropology. Referring directly to the works of Etienne La Boétie, Tarde links the problematic of political power to an affective anthropology of obedience, a vision of the passive subjects of power as inhabited by a need for security in submission. Voluntary servitude is not just a rational calculation for security, however, but a ‘passionate kneeling’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 69), based on the presence among men of ‘a general need for subordination and obedience’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 68) which gives submission to authority a kind of libidinal content, to the extent that political power is supposedly perceived as a salve against the anxious malady of doubt and uncertainty.9 As one of the few authors to treat Tarde’s doctrine of the state summarized: ‘The real and vital source of political authority is to be found in the universal need on the part of individuals to be directed and commanded’ (Barnes 1919: 256). This anthropology rests, of course, on Tarde’s interpsychology, and its supposition of the two fundamental sources of behaviour, desire and belief. As Tarde writes, in a passage that is tellingly articulated around the issue of possession: ‘men, ever since their tender infancy, tend always to submit themselves to those who they believe most capable of protecting the goods they most desire to keep, and to lead them towards those goods which they most desire to acquire’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 79).10 Moreover, it is the deep logic of imitation that can turn men into obedient creatures, into ‘a nation of copyists’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 156). Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 606 Economy and Society But, more precisely, what are the concepts of power and politics that emerge from Tarde’s reflections on social tendencies and political anthropology? Tarde defines political sociology as the science of power, as a science that would study ‘the genesis and conservation of political power, its transformations, its distribution, its exercise, its oppositions and harmonisations’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 47). But it is difficult not to concur with Barnes’s early estimation that word pouvoir here in Tarde is ‘extremely ambiguous’
covering as it does psychological or physical capacity, authority, prestige, sovereignty, and institutions or departments of government (Barnes 1919: 254). What is more, Tarde also distinguishes
in a terminological choice which is in a sense the inverse of the one famously made by Negri after Spinoza
the national pouvoir of politicians, resting to some extent or another on moral authority and suasion, from the puissance that dominates international relations.11 Yet throughout all these semantic variations, the personal or individual model prevails, to the degree that power qua authority is ‘the right or privilege of being obeyed’ (Barnes 1919: 255; Tarde 2003 [1899]: 59), and is thus the strict correlate of the political anthropology of obedience sketched above. Thus the primacy of the univocal over the reciprocal (of invention over imitation) seems to determine the science of power. But Tarde remains ambivalent about the relationship between social and political power, or between the social and the political tout court . On the one hand, a number of passages in Les transformations strongly suggest that politics is to be viewed as a source of social formations. As Tarde declares: ‘Everything which is simply social began by being political’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 54). In a manner reminiscent of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, Tarde even considers laws to be nothing more than ‘peace treaties’ that hide their foundations in political conflict and invention (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 50). Even the individual personality can be regarded in terms of a primacy of the political over the social. As Tarde notes, ‘my private life comprises a series of solutions successively found to a series of political problems’. This strand in Tarde’s theory of power can be encapsulated in the idea that social life is the effect of a sedimentation of political inventions; that, in his geological metaphor: ‘Social life is the alluvium slowly deposited by the currents of political life’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 54). But, to the extent that Tarde’s concept of power remains ambiguous, this primacy of political invention is not unequivocal. First, the notion of a sedimentation of political invention into social imitation is reversible. Thus, politics can also be conceived as a moment of intensification of the social, when society is either ‘blocked’ or ‘over-excited’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 48). It is at such moments that the ‘art’ of politics intervenes (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 255). Second, the idea of a primacy of the political is unsettled by another thesis put forward by Tarde, that of the dependence of forms of authority on social and technical inventions. This aspect of Tarde’s thought is perspicuously grasped by Barnes, who concludes in his presentation of Tarde’s ‘philosophy of the state’ that Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification 607 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 it is to inventions that one must look for the ultimate cause of the transformations of political control. Political transformations are, thus, but a function of the more general mutation of beliefs and desires within a society. It is not only, or even primarily, the inventions in the field of politics which produce the transformations of political authority, but rather the innovations in every field of social activity which tend to alter the beliefs and desires of the community. (Barnes 1919: 257) What are we to make of this tension between the primacy of politics, especially in the form of charismatic, inventive initiative, and the idea of the infrapolitical vicissitudes of belief and desire as the sources of change in the forms of political authority? Tarde himself argues that authority changes with the invention and discovery of new needs, and that inventors, those who face ‘the universal outside’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 80), are consequently crucial to an understanding of the transformations of power. In order to grapple with this question, I think it is important to consider Tarde’s attempt to produce a concept of the state adequate to his monadological sociology of invention and imitation. First of all, recalling the question of centralization dealt with above, we should note that Tarde does not equate the expansion of the social field with an overcoming of the state. He explicitly argues, for instance, for the inexorable character of political sovereignty (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 192). This does not mean, of course, that Tarde thinks we can remain within the framework of traditional political philosophy. Rather, the management of populations (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 47) demands a thinking of political power in terms of a government of multiplicities aimed at the prevention of radical opposition (class struggle) and the promotion of invention and interchange. However, the intensification of social intercourse and the expansion, and relative democratization, of the social field require a new type of state, a state of inventions which in many respects presages key aspects of reflections on the state in a post-Fordist scenario
from Deleuze’s influential notes on the society of control to Bob Jessop’s recent attempts to think the transformations of the state in the context of a ‘knowledge-based economy’, but also the conception of the state as an enabler of ‘the process of spontaneous growth’, proposed by Hayek (Hayek 1960), investigated in Foucault’s studies of neoliberal governmentality in his Collège de France lectures (Lazzarato 2005) and recast by Donzelot with his notion of the ‘animator state’ (Donzelot and Estèbe 1994). Against the prophecies of a post-political industrial society, where a harmonization of productive forces could bypass the dimension of the state altogether
a position already present in the laissez-faire visions of Herbert Spencer, but also exemplified by contemporary arguments regarding the purely parasitical character of state or imperial power
Tarde argues that the very tendency leading to the expansion of the social field cannot be disjoined Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 608 Economy and Society from the associated process of centralization and accumulation of power, so that the consequence of increased sympathy and communication, of the globalization, as it were, of society, is an even greater role for political authority, often of a personal kind. Tarde is adamant that the increased cooperation and harmonization, or ‘mutual aid’, which he recognizes in the modern division of labour (in a polemic with socialist visions of polarization) is not sufficient per se to govern the social field. Political collaboration (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 55, 174), to use his terminology, must politically configure the currents of cooperation. Politics is inescapable, and society cannot be relied to self-organize its own modes of governance, especially under conditions of planetary expansion. It is on the basis of this recognition of the paradox of social expansion, to wit that the more the social expands the more the political moment comes to the fore, in conjunction with the belief in the importance of social invention for politics, that Tarde presents his vision of politics as fundamentally consisting in the management of social flows. This unique view of the function of government is encapsulated in the following crucial passage: Social life consists in multiple currents of examples which intersect, interfere with one another, akin to an anastomosis. Political life consists in directing these currents, either by containing them or activating them, in the direction of their greater convergence or lesser divergence. (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 53) In other words, the politician, or the political agency, is the one who continues, perfects and carries on the ‘imperial’ tendency to greater sympathy, collaboration, and so on. Inasmuch as anastomosis refers to the recombination of evolutionary lineages or to a network whose streams both branch out and reconnect, politics is envisaged by Tarde as a kind of network management
whose criterion is the intensification of communicative adaptation (what I’d refer to as ‘empowerment’) and the prevention of the kind of frontal oppositions (namely, the war between labour and capital) that threaten to trigger a radical narrowing of the political field (Tarde 1999 [1897]: 376). Crucially, Tarde never posits that the tendency towards Empire through amplifying repetition is strictly irreversible, nor that it could be treated as a social dynamic of cooperation which can do without specifically political forms of organization. To take Tarde as a thinker that allows us simply to bypass, rather than transform, the thinking of nation, state and sovereignty is mistaken. Indeed, Tarde himself is very explicit about the role of the state within his overall social theory: ‘the task of the State, keeper of power, is to direct or re-establish this convergence of all the national forces towards the same ideal, to note its progresses or retreats’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 49). To borrow a term from Herman and Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’ in Manufacturing Consent
a model itself drawn from the theory of public relations in the formation of which Tarde’s own work played a considerable role
the Tardean state is not so much a subject of planning as an agency of Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification 609 filtering social processes and inventions (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Tarde 2003 [1899]: 255). Despite Tarde’s assertion regarding the uncircumventable character of sovereignty, this new figure of the state as manager of filter of flows and manager of inventions is not a unified figure: ‘the state is almost never unified, it is almost always multiple, like the self [moi ], almost always prey to internal rebellions, to dissidences that tend to fracture the nation into two or more factions’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 64). This multiple state is thereby also prey to the semantic equivocity that characterizes Tarde’s approach to the notion of power, being variably defined as the total force of administration, the supreme authority, the nation as a whole, and so on. Tarde thus combines a thinking of a multiple state managing multiple flows, with the persistence of personalized politics and the ‘imperial’ tendency to the expansion of the social field. Rather than simply seeing in this an inconsistency on Tarde’s part, it might be more fecund to regard the ambiguities in Tarde’s political thinking as the effect on his thought of the very real contradictions of political power that marked the epoch of the writing of Les transformations, a period when the imperial/ colonial functions of the state’s puissance, its biopolitical and propagandistic management of the population, and its attempt to manage the innovative character of industrial society formed an unstable complex, one faced with the profound challenges of social turmoil and class struggle. Tarde himself, aside from his own political proclivities
which placed him as a supporter of the ‘inventive classes’ against the claims of labour (as evident from his discussions of value)
was a very perceptive witness to these tensions, for instance, in what concerns the contradiction between the personal concentration of power and the diminution in the moral authority of the powerful: All the inventions that tend to facilitate and multiply communication among men, thereby lengthen the arms or tentacles of Power, which are armed moreover with the most formidable military machines. So that if, through the ever more rapid spreading of its secrets and plots, Power is less and less respected, it is increasingly rigorously obeyed because of its growing means of action. This inverse progression of Prestige and Power in the governing, of the respectful submission and forced obedience among the governed, creates a situation whose anomaly, in an other respect, we have already indicated, an anomaly that anarchist theories have taken advantage of. (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 95) Tarde’s social thought, in which his theory of the state plays an important if unrecognized role, is also an attempt to prevent the oppositional politicization of the tensions arising in the midst of the expansion of the social field. The question which preoccupies him throughout is precisely that of forestalling the ‘essentially tyrannical excesses of political life’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 64), the political ‘contraction of the social field’ (Tarde 1999 [1897]: 376), which the stifling of adaptation by opposition threatened to enact. If the political problem of nineteenth-century sociologists derived from their social and historical Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 610 Economy and Society positioning between the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution (Therborn 1976), we can say that Tarde’s theoretical solution is nevertheless unique, both in its concept of the state (or Empire) and its model of social and economic change. It is precisely due to the singularity of this model that it proved influential in the development of new practices of governance through suggestion and consumption. Rosalind Williams has indicated the importance of Tarde’s analogy between the dream state and the social state, and its importance for a new sociology, and a new politics, of consumption. Tarde’s social man is a ‘somnambulist’, and, as Williams notes, ‘this limited capacity for rational and independent action does not particularly distress [Tarde]. He is not convinced that deliberate choice among models is superior to imitation based on unreflective impulse or habit derived from traditional concepts of prestige’ (Williams 1982: 350). It was precisely Tarde’s notion that men could have ideas suggested to them and believe that they were their own spontaneous productions (Williams 1982: 347) which proved to be such a key insight for the political project of public relations, as incarnated in the figure of Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the founder of PR (Ewen 1996). The project of Bernays and his colleagues, which was intrinsically political in motivation, and which President Hoover pithily summarized in a meeting with Bernays where he quipped that the PR man wished to turn human beings into ‘constantly moving happiness machines’, was aimed at the ‘transformation of citizens potentially dangerous to the public order into docile consumers: rulers, Bernays thought, could act as they wished as long as they could channel the interests of the population towards and through the individual desire to consume’ (Gorz 2003). The government of and through consumption, as theorized and practiced by Bernays, shared with Tarde a number of crucial features: a political anthropology of ‘passionate obedience’, the image of political power as an activity of filtering and managing flows, and the objective of neutralizing those forms of oppositional politics which posed a risk to the expansion of the social field understood primarily through the lenses of accumulation and consumption. In this respect, rather than representing a lost alternative to the supposed modernist rigidities of social theory, Tarde’s political thought was not just a potent anticipator of real transformations in the nature of power, it also provided a model of governance
an anti-democratic theory of democratization, and an anti-political theory of political power
which was variously enacted (not necessarily with reference to Tarde) throughout the twentieth century. Tarde’s thinking of what I have called ‘empowering pacification’ is obviously attractive in a period when the tendencies he anticipated appear to some, under the guise of ‘globalization’ or ‘Empire’, to be verifying themselves. But, in my view, it is rather in his thinking of the state that we should look for Tarde’s contribution, that is, in the manner that Tarde’s writings register the contradictions and countervailing tendencies within the globalizing expansion of the social field, and especially in his suggestion that Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification 611 the dynamics of social cooperation cannot obviate the role of political collaboration, and of the (multiple) state within which such collaboration is played out. To the extent that it refuses to rely on social tendencies alone, Tarde’s vision of empowering pacification remains politically wedded to an elite model of pacification. In this respect, it can be approached as a unique analogue of contemporary models of social pacification which seek to link together a transformation in the form of the state, a critique of the claims of labour, and a political anthropology based on affective and subconscious currents. It is precisely this political specificity of Tarde’s social theory which seems to be forgotten in current attempts to present his work as a source of new concepts to think the present, or even as the harbinger of a new model of radical politics. The persistence of the political in Tarde, on the contrary, shows us that pacification is not a mere social tendency, but a political project, borne by the multiple agencies of the state, driven by specific interests (e.g. the inventing classes) and aimed at neutralizing a form of oppositional politics which is depicted as destructive of value and social harmony. Notes 1 Not least in the political technology which goes under the name of ‘public relations’ (Ewen 1996). 2 It is because invention is ‘the true source of value’ that Tarde can argue that ‘the most inventive class in a society, be it the idlest
especially if we may imagine that relative idleness is an indispensable condition for freedom of mind and fecundity of imagination
has a right to its large share of social goods’ (Tarde 1884). This passage from a theory of invention to a justification of differential income is a mainstay of Tarde’s polemic against socialism, which is founded on the idea that since labour is not the main source of value, the demands of the workers’ movement and the socialist parties are excessive and unfounded. 3 In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson makes an interesting allusion to the role of the concept of federation for nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopian politics and science fiction. Tarde, especially in Underground Man , is an eminent emblem of this trend (Jameson 2005: 224
6). 4 In this respect, I disagree with Lazzarato’s all too linear claim that Tarde’s understanding of tendency lends itself to a vision of an ‘end of (the philosophy of) history’ and an ‘emergence of an ahistoric time, the time of creation’, in which the ‘advent of Empire is the symptom of a new unheard of opportunity for humanity: the socialisation and accumulation without precedent of knowledges and riches as the precondition for a metamorphosis of the modern categories of the social and the individual, which announce a future history’ (Lazzarato 2002: 383, 385). 5 Tarde shares this understanding of originary heterogeneity with a number of philosophers of process and individuation, for instance, Charles Sanders Peirce (Toscano 2006). 6 Despite his cosmopolitical affirmation of the tendency towards harmonization and interpenetration, Tarde maintains this thinking of the inassimilable in another striking passage of Underground Man , where he tells of the encounter between the new subterranean civilization and the ‘other’ experiment in underground life originating in China. As proof of the ‘love’ that has come to define this new civilization, the encounter Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 612 Economy and Society with the Chinese untermenschen , luridly depicted as utterly devoid of culture and succumbing to cannibalism, leads to the following colonial dilemma: ‘Now, what did our settlers [nos colons ] do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy? Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and to appropriate their dwelling-place. . . . Others proposed to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up’ (Tarde 1905: 159
60). 7 On the resonance between Tarde’s emphasis on individual initiative and Schumpeter’s concept of the entrepreneur, as well as on their overall social philosophies, see Taymans (1950) and Lepinay (this volume). 8 For Tarde, cities replace the nobility as the eminent sources of invention, the fulcrums of innovation. This is why he refers to them suggestively as ‘impersonal aristocracies in democratic times’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 117). 9 Tarde does not spare his readers from the gendered variants of this apologia of submission, such as when he writes that ‘It is a living joy for the woman to be mastered and protected at the same time by the man’ (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 70). Passages such as this should be read in conjunction with Tarde’s insistent fear of the female crowd, as dramatized in some striking pages of L’Opinion et la foule. 10 Belief and desire even provide the criteria for Tarde’s reflections on the evaluation and limitation of political power, that is, for his sui generis interpretation of political liberalism (Tarde 2003 [1899]: 198, 279). ‘Good’, or enlightened, authority is based on belief, whilst ‘bad’ tyrannical authority is driven by desire, just as the supposed limitation of power on the part of the powerful takes place through the tendency of belief to limit desire. However, this interaction of belief and desire seems to miss out the domain of fantasy and ideology, of what Slavoj Zizek has identified, in a Lacanian
Hegelian mode, as the question of ‘how things really appear to me’ (Zizek 2006: 170
4). In a sense, we could say that Tarde’s model of submission is still too rational, dealing with subconscious calculations, where psychoanalysis opens up a dimension of unconscious enjoyment which short-circuits any utilitarian political anthropology. 11 What I have referred to as Tarde’s notion of empowering pacification, especially as it concerns the tendency to federation or Empire, can also be understood in the terms of a process of taming or internalizing brute puissance, transforming it into a moral pouvoir. References Barnes, H. E. (1919) ‘The philosophy of the state in the writings of Gabriel Tarde’, The Philosophical Review 28(3): 248
79. Donzelot, J. and Estèbe, P. (1994) L’Etat Animateur, Paris: Seuil/Esprit. Ewen, S. (1996) PR! A Social History of Spin , New York: Basic Books. Gorz, A. (2003) L’immatériel. Connaissance, valeur et capital, Paris: Galilée. Hayek, F. A. (1960) ‘Why I am not a Conservative’, The Constitution of Liberty Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (1988) Manufacturing Consent , New York: Pantheon Books Jameson, F. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future, London: Verso Katz, E. (2006) ‘Rediscovering Gabriel Tarde’, Political Communication 23: 263
70 Kautsky, K. (1970 [1914]) ‘Ultra-imperialism’, New Left Review I(59): 41
6 Latour, B. (2004) ‘Never too late to read Tarde’, Domus, October. Accessed online Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 22:41 31 March 2015 Alberto Toscano: Powers of pacification at http://www.bruno-latour.fr/presse/ presse_art/GB-DOMUS%2010-04.html Lazzarato, M. (2002) Puissances de l’invention. La psychologie e´conomique contre l’e´conomie politique, Paris: Seuil/ Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. ** (2005) ‘Biopolitique/Bioéconomie’, Multitudes 22. Accessed online at http:// multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php? article2038. Losurdo, D. (1993) Democrazia o bonapartismo, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Tarde, G. (1884) ‘Darwinisme naturel et darwinisme social’, Revue philosophique XVII. ** (1895) ‘Le transformisme social’, Revue philosophique XL. (1905) Underground Man (with a preface by H. G. Wells) , London: Duckworth & Co. (1999 [1897]) Lopposition universelle, Paris: Synthélabo. (2001 [1890]) Les lois de l’imitation , Paris: Seuil/Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. ** ** ** 613 (2003 [1899]) Les transformations du pouvoir, Paris: Seuil/Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. Taymans, A. C. (1950) ‘Tarde and Schumpeter: a similar vision’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 64(4): 611
22. Therborn, G. (1976) Science, Class and Society, London: New Left Books. Toews, D. (2003) The new Tarde: sociology after the end of the social’, Theory, Culture & Society 20(5): 81
98. Toscano, A. (2006) The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Williams, R. H. (1982) Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zizek, S. (2006) The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ** Alberto Toscano is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and sits on the editorial board of Historical Materialism. He is the author of The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave, 2006), translator of Alain Badiou’s The Century (Polity, 2007) and Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford, 2005), and co-editor of Alain Badiou’s Theoretical Writings (Continuum, 2004) and On Beckett (Clinamen, 2003). He has also co-translated and prefaced Éric Alliez’s The Signature of the World (Continuum, 2004) and Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes (Verso, 2007). He has published several articles on contemporary philosophy, ontology and social theory. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Raving with Reason: The Politics of Fanaticism.