Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory

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‘What can a crowd do?’: revisiting Tarde after the

demise of the public

Abe Walker

To cite this article: Abe Walker (2013) ‘What can a crowd do?’: revisiting Tarde after the
demise of the public, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 14:2, 227-231, DOI:
10.1080/1600910X.2013.812534

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Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2013
Vol. 14, No. 2, 227–231, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2013.812534

ARTICLE
‘What can a crowd do?’: revisiting Tarde after the demise of the public
Abe Walker*

Department of Sociology, Queens College (CUNY), Queens, NY, USA

Until now, Gabriel Tarde’s essay ‘The Public and the Crowd’ was partially inaccessible
to Anglophone scholars, as Terry Clark’s 1969 translation – the only version in English –
omitted nearly half the essay. As a result, the essay is typically understood as a diatribe
against the primitive, uncivilized crowd, cast as the diametrical opponent of an
eminently reasonable and thoroughly modern public. The pages that follow correct
this lapse by providing the remaining portions of Tarde’s essay in English. As will
become clear, this translation reveals that Tarde was no champion of modernity, nor
did he consistently celebrate the ascendant public’s conquest of the savage crowd. In
the process, the translation casts doubt upon rigidly ideological readings of Tarde,
while lending support to a more politically ambivalent interpretation of his ideas. In
its most open-ended moments, the newly translated segments recall Tarde’s early
affirmative statements about crowds and are suggestive of clear continuities
throughout his work.
Keywords: communication; crowds; imitation; mob mentality; publics; suggestion;
Tarde

Although the recent wave of Tardiphilia is shifting interest toward his more philosophical
writings, ‘The Public and the Crowd’ (hereafter TPC) is in no danger of losing its standing
as the flagship Tarde essay in the Anglophone world.1 In the first instance, TPC is a diatribe
against the primitive, uncivilized crowd, cast as the diametrical opponent of an eminently
reasonable and thoroughly modern public. According to conventional wisdom, TPC rep-
resents break from Tarde’s early optimistic statements about crowds in works like The
Laws of Imitation (Tarde 2009). For example, in his extended introduction to a collection
of Tarde’s writing, Terry Clark provides an assessment of TPC that is characteristic of the
dominant interpretation. As Clark would have it, TPC is Tarde’s dismissal of the crowd
form in favor of a more advanced social category: the docile and rational public: ‘The
concept of a public was more appealing to Tarde than that of a crowd’ for he ‘[dealt] by
preference with the more civilized aspect of human behavior’ (Tarde, Clark, and Janowitz
2011, 52). Later, he reluctantly acknowledges ‘nevertheless, his treatment of publics is only
comprehensible in conjunction with the work on crowds’ (52). Yet for Clark, and most
Anglophone Tarde scholars that followed him, the crowd is nothing more than an obligatory
footnote to the public’s urbane sophistication and modernist drive. It provides a convenient
analytical contrast to the public’s civilizing impulse, but is of little merit on its own terms.

*Email: awalker@qc.cuny.edu

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

228 A. Walker

Perhaps unsurprisingly, TPC therefore received the broadest reception in the contemporary
field of media studies, where Tarde’s public is viewed as an early precursor of Habermas’s
public sphere and other liberal-democratic communication models.
But Anglophone scholars were relying on incomplete information, for, until now, the
text was partially inaccessible, as Clark’s 1969 translation – the only version in
English – omitted nearly half the essay. The pages that follow correct this lapse by provid-
ing the remaining portions of Tarde’s essay in English. As will become clear, this translation
reveals that Tarde was no champion of modernity, nor did he consistently celebrate the
ascendant public’s conquest of the savage crowd. In the process, the translation casts
doubt upon rigidly ideological readings of Tarde, while lending support to a more politically
ambivalent interpretation of his ideas. In its most open-ended moments, the newly trans-
lated segments recall Tarde’s early affirmative statements about crowds and are suggestive
of clear continuities throughout his work. As Christian Borch has written (primarily in refer-
ence to Tarde’s earlier texts), ‘the positive understanding of imitation-suggestion that lay at
the heart of [Tarde’s] sociological theory entailed an implicit appreciation of the crowd’
(Borch 2012, 58). Even if TPC is at face value a condemnation of the crowd, Tarde’s
‘implicit appreciation’ of crowds, though evidenced more strongly in his early writing, is
not entirely absent.
To be clear, the translation that follows does not directly challenge most extant interpret-
ations of TPC. In general, the existing Anglophone commentaries and criticisms of this text
will remain fundamentally valid. Yet this translation has significant implications for Tarde
scholars and other crowd theorists, including the scholars of postmodernity featured in this
volume. At minimum, I believe this translation will introduce a layer of nuance, by demon-
strating, among other revelations, that the ‘early Tarde’ was not far removed from the ‘late
Tarde’. If the early Tarde is sad to emphasize the crowd’s transformative possibilities, the
late Tarde should no longer be thought of as only focusing on its destructive nature. Instead,
Tarde in both moments was deeply ambivalent about the status of the crowd. The newly
translated portion of the essay consists broadly of three parts: a series of reflections on
crowds with ‘positive’ (pro-social) tendencies, an extended discussion of criminality in
both crowds and public, and concluding remarks that discuss the continuities between
the crowd and the public.
Tarde asks a provocative question in the concluding pages of Clark’s translation: ‘What
can a crowd do?’ This question bears at least a passing resemblance to Spinoza’s more
famous query: ‘What can a body do?’ Yet while Spinoza’s answer is encouraging and affir-
mative, Tarde answers bluntly: a crowd is capable of ‘doing’ nothing of value to civiliza-
tion. For Tarde, the verb ‘to do’ implies productive activity from the standpoint of the state:
building houses, schools, and other constructive projects with obvious social benefit. In his
view, a crowd is capable of only the opposite: wanton destruction. At least this is what
Clark’s incomplete translation would have us believe, since it cuts off immediately after
Tarde bemoans the crowd’s destructiveness. Yet just paragraphs later, in the first of many
layers of nuance, Tarde singles out the crowd of the patriotic festival and the crowd of
the funeral procession for praise. Tarde is almost self-consciously aware of the paradoxical
nature of his writing: ‘In sum, crowds rarely deserve the criticism that people, including
myself on occasion, have said about them’. And later: ‘Though I hate to say it, there is a
widespread type of devotion-motivated crowd that plays a critical and beneficial social
role’. Of course, Tarde’s celebration of the nationalistic crowd does not stand up well to
the events of the twentieth century. For many readers, Tarde’s praise for the ‘crowd of
love’ (translated below as ‘devotion’) will instantly recall the Third Reich. But nevertheless,
 Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 229

Tarde’s (partial) defense of the crowd in this passage is no mere caveat, but an indication of
his deep ambivalence toward the crowd form.
If the first half of the essay obeys a binary logic, presenting the crowd as a force of evil
and the public as its antithesis, the second half casts doubt upon this simplistic binary. Of
course, Tarde’s normative frame is fairly straightforward, since anything that contributes to
sociality is ‘good’ and its opposite ‘bad’. But in the second half he tempers his position
slightly, both by allowing for the existence of ‘good’ crowds, and by discussing at
length the possibility of ‘bad’ publics. Indeed, Tarde describes at length his concern that
publics might deteriorate into mere crowds. Undoubtedly, Tarde’s thinking on these
issues was inspired by the Dreyfus affair, which for Tarde epitomized the devolved
public that had assumed crowd-like characteristics. For him this process is a disintegration,
a regression toward a more primitive form. Through enlightened intervention, especially the
promotion of a free press, he believed such unfortunate possibilities could be avoided.
By allowing for the existence of crowd-like publics, and by explaining that the various
negative attributes of crowds might equally apply to (certain) publics, Tarde complicates his
analytical frame. Indeed, he notes that the public motivated by hatred is at least as danger-
ous, if not as violent as the crowd, for ‘The public’s rage is more perspicacious’. And later:

[The crimes of the public] differ from those of the crowd in four ways: First, they are less repul-
sive; second, they are less vindictive and more involved; third, they are more widely oppressive
over the long run; finally, they are also more guaranteed to act with impunity.

It should be noted moreover that Tarde is generally ambivalent on the relation between the
public and the crowd within his classificatory schematic. At times, the public is but a par-
ticular permutation of crowd – a subset of the larger category ‘crowd’. At others, the public
is a distinct and non-overlapping category with unique attributes. But throughout the second
half, the public and the crowd are presented not as mutually exclusive designations, but as
countervailing tendencies along a continuum, with most actually existing cases falling
somewhere in the middle.
Tarde’s engagement with these ideas must be understood in relation to its historical
context. The mob mentality thesis – or the idea that angry crowds confound individual
reason and give rise to (post-)collectivist passions – has always been among the more con-
tentious claims in the social sciences. According to the strong versions of this claim, the
crowd itself acquires a ‘group mind’ that replaces the rational subject with a madness
freed from social constraints. This thesis gained wide acceptance by the late nineteenth
century and correlated closely with elite fear not only of mobs but of raucous public gather-
ings of all sorts. Tarde, LeBon, Durkheim, and Freud all argued in various registers that
crowds allow the individual to disappear into the throng. This notion proved deeply trou-
bling to many, since for centuries the notion of the individual as autonomous actor and
juridical subject has been the basic building-block of the Enlightenment project. But
these early theorists were quite explicit about their political sympathies. Their descriptions
of crowds as animalistic, deranged, and prone to unrestrained violence only authorized the
repression of crowds in the most brutal ways possible.
The disparagement of crowds by early theorists eventually provoked a backlash. By the
1960s, an ascendant wave of sociologists flatly rejected the mob mentality thesis and sought
to redeem crowds as rational political actors. Carl Couch’s landmark article, for example,
attempted to rescue crowds from charges of insanity: ‘Crowds are not homogenous entities,
crowds are not unanimous in their motivation, and crowds do not cripple individual cogni-
tion’ (Couch 1968). As recounted by Brennan (2004), Gould (2009), and Borch (2012), the
230 A. Walker

rationalist explanation eventually won out as the pathological crowd beholden to animalis-
tic instincts fell victim to the intelligent, politically savvy crowd of leftist sociology.
Yet the work from these ‘enlightened’ 1960s sociologists only confounded matters
further: by rebelling against the tendency to pathologize crowds, these sociologists
pushed back too far in the opposite direction by attempting to reduce the crowd to
nothing more than an attenuated public. Indeed, the left-liberal reaction to early crowd scho-
larship suffered from equally serious, if quite different, flaws. Having dispensed with the
concept of the crowd mentality, sociologists focused instead on a crowd’s measureable attri-
butes, especially its composition. In the discipline of sociology, the field of social move-
ment studies therefore developed a close partnership with demography, even when their
politics were at odds. Thus, sociological studies of crowds are often plagued by a maniacal
obsession with counting heads, as if the size of a crowd were its essential characteristic
(Mueller 1997; McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996).
Positioning Tarde in relation to these debates is a confounding task. Following Deleuze,
Tarde is earning a reputation as a proto-postmodern thinker (e.g. Latour in Joyce 2002;
Lazzarato 2002). But Latour’s Tarde is a figure not unlike Hardt and Negri’s Spinoza or Fou-
cault’s Nietzsche – a distorted, Cubist rendering, stretched almost beyond recognition. These
‘left’ readings of Tarde have provoked a backlash of their own, typified by Alberto Toscano
(who it should be noted clings to a more literal interpretation) writing, ‘Tarde’s political
thought […] provided a model of governance – an anti-democratic theory of democratization,
and an anti-political theory of political power […]’ (Toscano 2007, 610). Of course, given
Tarde’s well-acknowledged conservative political orientation, any left interpretation of
Tarde requires reading the author against himself. Those who purport to discover a latent
radicalism in Tarde’s thought have been answered, not unconvincingly, by those who point
out that Tarde’s politics need not be left to speculation. It is worth noting, for example,
that Tarde, himself of aristocratic origins (his family having dropped the royalist prefix
‘de’ from its surname following the Revolution), exudes glowing praise for the festivals of
the Fête de la Fédération in 1790, which, he claims, provided a ‘moment of pacification’
between years of revolution. Yet had this moment signaled the end of the Revolution, as mon-
archists desired, the King would have remained in power. Likewise Brighenti is quick to note
that Tarde was a loyal adherent to the schools of ‘positivist criminology and hypnotist psy-
chology’ (Brighenti 2010). In short, Tarde’s personal political orientation locates him firmly
in the reactionary camp. But just as Brennan, Gould, and other recent crowd scholars have
argued, the conservative politics of Tarde and his contemporaries should not constitute
grounds for the outright dismissal of their ideas.
In sum, while the first half of TPC portrays the crowd as a fearsome entity, the second
emphasizes the transformative possibilities inherent in crowd behavior. Even if Tarde ulti-
mately believed that the solution to the crowd’s excesses was the imposition from above of
leadership in the form of what he explicitly described as a father-figure, he recognized that
crowds have an indeterminate quality that binds the ‘heroic’ crowd to its ‘criminal’ Other.
Thus a crowd’s manifest content is aleatory, largely impervious to the gaze of the social
scientist. The crowd’s malleability may also explain its longevity. In an ironic twist
Tarde could not have foreseen, far from dying off, emergent digital and analog crowds
are increasingly rendering publics obsolete, and putative publics increasingly revert to
the crowd-form as their command structure disintegrates.
The implications of this translation are threefold: It should guard against a simplistic
reading of Tarde where the public and the crowd stand in perfect opposition. While
Tarde obviously aligns himself with the public, his attitude toward the crowd lacks both
the certainty and the polemical force that many commentators have imputed to it. Certainly,
 Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 231

the new translation will bolster Borch’s somewhat heterodox reading of Tarde, which stres-
ses not the eventual triumph of the public over the crowd but the liminal and indeterminate
boundary between the two master categories: ‘The main contribution of his late writings is
not, I claim, the idea of an epochal domination of publics (rather than crowds). The real
contribution is his identification of the intricate and very delicate relation between
publics and crowds’ (Borch 2012, 65). By extension, this translation renders problematic
a clear political reading of Tarde, where he is cast as either a harbinger of radical political
formations (Lazzarato 2002) or a defender of the neo-liberal order (Toscano 2007). And
lastly, given that Tarde’s ‘public’ is now the universal aspirant of free society (see, for
example, Michael Burawoy’s touting of ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy 2004)), Tarde’s con-
flictual attitude toward his own object of desire should make hegemonic claims about
‘publics’ a bit more troubling.

Note
1. Tarde’s essay was originally published in 1898 as ‘Le Public et la Foule’ in La Revue de Paris,
and later republished in Gabriel Tarde’s L’opinion et la foule (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901). The
essay was partially translated into English by Terry Clark in 1969 as ‘The Public and the
Crowd’ in Gabriel Tarde on communication and social influence. Selected Papers, ed. by
Terry N. Clark (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

Notes on contributor
Abe Walker is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center,
and teaches sociology at Queens College.

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