PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

SINCE the first edition of this book I have published its sequel and complement under the title of La Logique sociale.

In saying this I think that I have implicitly answered certain objections which the reader of The Laws of Imitation might have raised. However, it will not be useless to give a few brief points of explanation on this subject.

I have been criticised here and there “for having often called by the name of imitation certain facts which this name did not at all fit.” This criticism, coming from a philosophic pen, astonishes me. In fact, when a philosopher needs a word to express a new generalisation, he must choose between two things; he must choose a neologism, if he is put to it, or he must decide, and this is unquestionably better, to stretch the meaning of some old term. The whole question is one of finding out whether I have overstretched—I do not say from the point of view of the dictionary definition, but from that of a deeper conception of things—the meaning of the word imitation.

Now I am well aware that I am not conforming to ordinary usage when I say that when a man unconsciously and involuntarily reflects the opinion of others, or allows an action of others to be suggested to him, he imitates this idea or act. And yet, if he knowingly and deliberately borrows some trick of thought or action from his neighbour, people agree that in this case the use of the word in question is legitimate. Nothing, however, is less scientific that the establishment of this absolute separation, of this abrupt break, between the voluntary and the involuntary, between the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not pass by insensible degrees from deliberate volition to almost mechanical habit? And does the same act absolutely change its nature during this transition? I do not mean to say that I deny the importance of the psychological change that is produced in this way. But on its social side the phenomenon has remained the same. No one has a right to criticise the extension of the meaning of the word in question as unjustifiable unless in extending it I have deformed or obscured its sense. But I have always given it a very precise and characteristic meaning, that of the action at a distance of one mind upon another, and of action which consists of a quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive plate of another brain.¹ If the photographic plate became conscious at a given moment of what was happening to it, would the nature of the phenomenon be essentially changed? By imitation I mean every impression of an inter-psychical photography, so to speak, willed or not willed, passive or active. If we observe that wherever there is a social relation between two living beings, there we have imitation in this sense of the word (either of one by the other or of others by both, when, for example, a man converses with another in a common language, making new verbal proofs from very old negatives), we shall have to admit that a sociologist was justified in taking this notion as a look-out post.

I might have been much more justly criticised for having overstretched the meaning of the word invention. I have certainly applied this name to all individual initiatives, not only without considering the extent in which they are self-conscious—for the individual often innovates unconsciously, and, as a matter of fact, the most imitative man is an innovator on some side or other—but without paying the slightest attention in the world to the degree of difficulty or merit of the innovation in question. This is not because I have failed to recognise the importance of this last consideration. Some inventions are so easy to conceive of that we may admit the fact that they have arisen of themselves, without borrowing, in almost all primitive societies, and that their first accidental appearance here or there has little significance. Other discoveries, on the contrary, are so difficult that the happy advent of the genius who made them may be considered a pre-eminently singular and important chance of fortune. Well, in spite of all this, I think that even here I have been justified in doing some slight violence to common speech in characterising as inventions or discoveries the most simple innovations, all the more so because the easiest are not always the least fruitful nor the most difficult the least useless. What is really unjustifiable, on the other hand, is the elastic meaning that is given by many naturalistic sociologists to the word heredity. They use this word indifferently to express the transmission of vital characteristics through reproduction and the transmission of ideas and customs, of social things, by ancestral tradition, by domestic education, and by custom-imitation.

Let me add that a neologism from the Greek would have been the easiest thing in the world to conceive of. Instead of saying invention or imitation I might have readily forged two new words. Now let me dismiss this petty and uninteresting quibble. I have been sometimes charged with exaggeration, and this is a more serious thing, in the use of the two notions in question. It is rather a commonplace criticism, to be sure, and one which every innovator must expect even when he has erred on the side of too much reserve in the expression of his thoughts. We may be sure that if a Greek philosopher had undertaken to say that the sun might possibly be as big as the Peloponnesus, his best friends would have been unanimous in recognising the fact that there was something true at the bottom of his ingenious paradox, but that he was evidently exaggerating. In general, my critics did not consider the end which I had in view. I desired to unfold the purely sociological side of human facts, intentionally ignoring their biological side, although I am well aware that the latter is inseparable from the former. My plan allowed me to indicate, without developing to any extent, the relations of the three principal forms of universal repetition, especially the relation of heredity to imitation. But I have said enough, I think, to leave no doubt as to my views on the importance of race and physical environment.

Besides, if I say that the distinctive character of every social relation, of every social fact, is to be imitated, is this saying, as certain superficial readers have seemed to believe, that in my eyes there is no social relation, no social fact, no social cause, but imitation? One might as well say that every function of life could be reduced to reproduction and every vital phenomenon to heredity because in every living being everything is a matter of generation and inheritance. Social relations are as manifold, as numerous, and as diverse, as the objects of the desires and ideas of man, and as the helps or hindrances that each of these desires and ideas lends or presents to the similar or dissimilar tendencies and opinions of others. In the midst of this infinite complexity we may note that these varied social relations (talking and listening, beseeching and being beseeched, commanding and obeying, producing and consuming, etc.) belong to two groups; the one tends to transmit from one man to another, persuasively or authoritatively, willingly or unwillingly, a belief; the other, a desire. In other words, the first group consists of various kinds or degrees of instruction; the second, of various kinds or degrees of command. And it is precisely because the human acts which are imitated have this dogmatic or commanding character that imitation is a social tie, for it is either dogma¹ or power which binds men together. (People have seen only the half of this truth, and seen that badly, when they have said that social facts were distinguished by their constrained and coercive character. In saying this, they have failed to recognise the spontaneity of the greater part of popular credulity and docility.)

Therefore I think that I have not erred through exaggeration in this book; and so I have reprinted it without eliminating anything. I have sinned rather through omission. I have said nothing at all about a form of imitation which plays a big rôle in societies, particularly in contemporary societies, and I shall make haste here to make good this omission. There are two ways of imitating, as a matter of fact, namely, to act exactly like one's model, or to do exactly the contrary. Hence the necessity of those divergences which Spencer points out, without explaining, in his law of progressive differentiation. Nothing can be affirmed without suggesting, no matter how simple the social environment, not only the idea that is affirmed, but the negation of this idea as well. This is the reason why the supernatural, in asserting itself through theologies, suggests naturalism, its negation. (See Espinas on this subject.) This is the reason why the affirmation of idealism gives birth to the idea of materialism; why the establishment of monarchy engenders the idea of republicanism, etc.

Let us say, then, from this wider point of view, that a society is a group of people who display many resemblances produced either by imitation or by counter-imitation. For men often counter-imitate one another, particularly when they have neither the modesty to imitate directly nor the power to invent. In counter-imitating one another, that is to say, in doing or saying the exact opposite of what they observe being done or said, they are becoming more and more assimilated, just as much assimilated as if they did or said precisely what was being done or said around them. Next to conforming to custom in the matter of funerals, marriages, visits, and manners, there is nothing more imitative than fighting against one's natural inclination to follow the current of these things, or than pretending to go against it. In the Middle Ages the black mass arose from a counter-imitation of the Catholic mass. In his book on the expression of the emotions, Darwin very properly gives a large place to the need of counter-expression.

When a dogma is proclaimed, when a political programme is announced, men fall into two unequal classes; there are those who are enthusiastic about it and those who are not enthusiastic. There is no manifestation which does not recruit supporters and which does not provoke the formation of a group of non-supporters. Every positive affirmation, at the same time that it attracts to itself mediocre and sheep-like minds, arouses somewhere or other in a brain that is naturally rebellious,—this does not mean naturally inventive,—a negation that is diametrically opposite and of about equal strength. This reminds one of inductive currents in physics. But both kinds of brains have the same content of ideas and purposes. They are associated, although they are adversaries, or, rather, because they are adversaries. Let us clearly distinguish between the imitative propagation of questions and that of solutions. Because a certain solution spreads in one place and another elsewhere, this does not prevent the problem from having spread in both places. Is it not evident that in every period, among people in constant communication, particularly in our own day because international relations have never before been so manifold, is it not evident that the calendar of social and political debates is always the same? And is not this resemblance due to a current of imitation that may itself be explained by a diffusion of wants and ideas through prior contagions of imitation? Is not this the reason why labour questions are being agitated at the present moment throughout Europe? No opinion is discussed by the press, about which, I repeat, the public is not daily divided into two camps, those who agree with the opinion and those who disagree. But the latter as well as the former admit that it is impossible to be concerned for the time being with anything other than the question which is thus forced upon them. Only some wild and undisciplined spirit will ruminate, now and then, in the whirl of the social sea in which he is plunged, over strange and absolutely hypothetical problems. Such men are the inventors of the future.

We must be very careful not to confuse counter-imitation with invention, its dangerous counterfeit. I do not mean that the former is worthless. Although it fosters the spirit of partisanship, the spirit of either peaceful or warlike division between men, it introduces them to the wholly social pleasure of discussion. It is a witness to the sympathetic origin of contradiction itself; the back currents themselves are caused by the current. Nor must we confuse counter-imitation with systematic non-imitation, a subject about which I should also have spoken in this book. Non-imitation is not always a simple negative fact. The fact of not imitating when there is no contact—no social contact through the practical impossibility of communication—is merely a non-social relation, but the fact of not imitating the neighbour who is in touch with us, puts us upon a footing of really anti-social relations with him. The refusal of a people, a class, a town or a village, of a savage tribe isolated on a civilised continent, to copy the dress, customs, language, industry, and arts which make up the civilisation of their neighbourhood is a continual declaration of antipathy to the form of society in question. It is thereby declared absolutely and forever alien. Similarly, when a people deliberately undertakes not to reproduce the examples of its forefathers in the matter of rights, usages, and ideas, we have a veritable disassociation of fathers and sons, a rupture of the umbilical cord between the old and the new society. Voluntary and persistent non-imitation in this sense has a purgative rôle which is quite analagous to that filled by what I have called the logical duel. Just as the latter tends to purge the social mass of mixed ideas and volitions, to eliminate inequalities and discords, and to facilitate in this way the synthetic action of the logical union; so non-imitation of extraneous and heterogeneous models makes it possible for the harmonious group of home models to extend and prolong themselves, to entrench themselves in the custom-imitation of which they are the object; and for the same reason non-imitation of anterior models, when the moment has come for civilising revolution, cuts a path for fashion-imitation. It no longer finds any hindrance in the way of its conquering activity.

Is the unique or principal cause of this invincible obstinacy—momentarily invincible—of non-imitation, as the naturalistic school was led to think some years ago, racial difference? Not the least in the world. In the first place, in the case of non-imitation of ancestral examples, in revolutionary periods, it is clear that this cause could not be brought forward, since the new generation belongs to the same race as the prior generations whose traditions it casts aside. Then, in the case of non-imitation of the foreigner, historical observation shows that resistance to outside influences is very far from being in proportion to the dissimilarities of the physical traits which differentiate populations. Of all the nations conquered by Rome none was more allied to her through blood than the populations of Greek origin; and yet these were precisely the communities where her language failed to spread and where her culture and genius failed to be assimilated. Why was this? Because they alone, in spite of their defeat, were able to retain their fierce pride, their indelible feeling of superiority. On the side of the idea that it is impossible for separate races to borrow from one another one of the strongest arguments that could have been cited thirty years ago was the hermetical shutting out by the peoples of the Far East, Japan and China, of all European culture. But from the still recent day when the Japanese, foreign as they were to us in colour, lineaments, and physical constitution, felt for the first time that we were their superiors, they left off trying to shut out the imitative radiation of our civilisation by the opaque screen they had used before. They gave it, on the contrary, the warmest of welcomes. The same thing will happen to China if she ever makes up her mind to recognise that in certain respects—not in all, I hope, for her sake—we have the better of her. It is idle to argue that the transformation of Japan in the direction of Europe is more apparent than real, more superficial than deep, that it is due to the initiative of certain intelligent men who are followed by a part of the upper classes, but that the great mass of the nation remains hostile to this foreign inundation. To argue after this fashion is to ignore the fact that every intellectual and moral revolution that is destined to utterly recast a people always begins in this way. A chosen few have always imported the foreign examples that come little by little to spread by fashion, to be consolidated into custom, and to be developed and systematised by social logic. When Christianity first reached the Germans, the Slavs, the Finns, it started in the same way. Nothing is more consistent with the “laws of imitation.”

Does this mean that the action of race upon the course of civilisation is overlooked from my point of view ? Not at all. I have said that in passing from one ethnical environment to another the radiation of imitation is refracted; and I add that this refraction may be enormous without its leading to any consequence that is in the least contradictory to the ideas developed in this book. Only race as I see it is a national product where, in the crucible of a special civilisation, different prehistoric races have been melted together, intermingled, and assimilated. For every given civilisation that is formed of ideas of genius, hailing a little from everywhere and brought into logical agreement somewhere or other, creates in the long run the race, or races, in which it is for a time embodied; and the inverse of this is not true, namely, that every race makes its own civilisation. This means, at bottom, that different human races, which are quite different in this respect from different living species, are collaborators as well as competitors; that they are called upon not only to fight and destroy each other for the good of a small number of survivors, but to aid each other in the age-long achievement of a common social work, of a great final society whose unity will be the fruit of their very diversity.

The laws of heredity that have been so well studied by naturalists do not contradict in any respect the “laws of imitation.” On the other hand, they complete them, and there is no concrete sociology that could separate these two orders of consideration. If I separate them here, it is, I repeat, because the proper subject of this work is sociology pure and abstract. Besides, I do not fail to point out what their place is in the biological considerations which I am purposely ignoring because I am leaving them to more competent hands. And this place is three-fold. To begin with, in expressly developing the nation from the family—for the primitive horde is made up of emigrants or exiles from the family—I have clearly affirmed that if the social fact is a relation of imitation, the social tie, the social group, is both imitative and hereditary, in the second place, invention, from which I derive everything that is social, is not, in my opinion, a purely social fact in its origin. It arises from the intersection of an individual genius, an intermittent and characteristic racial product, the ripe fruit of a series of happy marriages, with the currents and radiations of imitation which one day happened to cross each other in a more or less exceptional brain. You may agree, if you wish, with M. de Gobineau, that only the white races are inventive, or with a contemporary anthropologist, that this privilege belongs exclusively to the dolichocephalic races—all this matters little from my point of view. And I might even pretend that the radical and vital separation that is thus established between the inventiveness of certain privileged races and the imitativeness of all races is fitted to emphasise, a little unjustifiably, as a matter of fact, the truth of my point of view. Finally, I have not only recognised the influence of the vital environment upon imitation, an environment in which it spreads while it is refracted, as I said above, but in stating the law of the normal return of fashion to custom, the rooting of innovations in customs and traditions, have I not again made heredity the necessary prop of imitation? But we may accord to the biological side of social facts the highest importance without going as far as to maintain that there is a water-tight bulkhead between different races, presumably primitive and presocial, which makes any endosmosis or exosmosis of imitation impossible. And this is the only thing which I deny. Taken in this false and unjustifiable sense, the idea of race leads the sociologist who has taken it for a guide to conceive of the end of social progress as a disintegration of peoples who are walled about and shut off from one another and everlastingly at war with one another. This kind of naturalism is generally associated with a defence of militarism. On the other hand, if we take the ideas of invention, imitation, and social logic as a guiding thread, we are led to the more reassuring perspective of a great future confluence—alas, that it is not immediate—of multiple divisions of mankind into a single peaceful human family. The idea of indefinite progress, which is such a vague and obstinate idea, has neither a clear nor precise meaning except from this point of view. The necessity of a progressive march towards a great but distant goal is an outcome of the laws of imitation. This goal, which becomes more and more accessible in spite of apparent, although only transitory, set-backs, is the birth, the development, and the universal spread,—whether under an imperial or federated form is insignificant,—of a unique society. And, as a matter of fact, among all the predictions of Condorcet relating to social progress, the only ones that have been realised—that, for example, relating to the extension and gradual levelling down of European civilisation—are consequences of the laws in question. But if he had considered these laws he would have expressed his thought more exactly and precisely. When he predicts that the inequality of different nations will continue to diminish, he should have said social dissimilarity, and not; inequality. For between the smallest and largest states the disproportion of power, of territory, and even of wealth, goes on increasing, and yet this condition does not stand in the way of a constant progress of international assimilation. And is it certain that inequality between individuals must continually diminish in all respects as our illustrious philosopher also predicted? Inequality of genius or talent? Not at all. Of comfort and wealth? I doubt it. It is true that their inequality before the law has disappeared or will before long disappear altogether. But why is this so? Because the growing resemblance of individuals between whom all the customary barriers of reciprocal imitation have been broken down, and who imitate one another more and more freely, to be sure, and yet more and more necessarily, makes them feel with a growing and, eventually, irresistible power the injustice of privilege.

Let us be sure, however, that we understand one another about this progressive resemblance of individuals. Far from smothering their true originality, it fosters and favours it. What is contrary to personal pre-eminence is the imitation of a single man whom people copy in everything. But when, instead of patterning one's self after one person or after a few, we borrow from a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand persons, each of whom is considered under a particular aspect, the elements of thought or action which we subsequently combine, the very nature and choice of these elementary copies, as well as their combination, expresses and accentuates our original personality. And this is, perhaps, the chief benefit that results from the prolonged action of imitation. We might demand to what extent this collective dream, this collective nightmare of society, was worth its cost in blood and tears, if this grievous discipline, this deceptive and despotic prestige, did not serve to free the individual in calling forth, little by little, from the depths of his heart, his freest impulses, his boldest introspection, his keenest insight into nature, and in developing everywhere, not the savage individualities, not the clashing and brutal soul-stuffs of bygone days, but those deep and harmonious traits of the soul that are characteristic of personality as well as of civilisation, the harvest of both the purest and most potent individualism and of consummate sociability.

G. T.
May, 1895