The Laws of Imitation

The MediaBook studio presents a work on collective psychology by the French sociologist and criminologist Jean Gabriel Tarde, one of the founders of the subjectively-psychological direction in Western sociology.

“In fact, the public that forms the special main subject of this study is nothing other than a scattered crowd in which the influence of minds on minds has become action at a distance, at increasing distances. Finally, the opinion that is the result of all these actions at a distance—or during personal contact—forms for the crowd and the public something like what thought forms for the body. And if among these actions that produce an opinion we search for the most general and permanent, then we will without difficulty see that it is conversation (communication), an elementary, social relation, completely forgotten by sociologists.”