Gabriel Tarde’s Crowded Publics: Rediscovering the Work of a Forgotten Media Theorist

Abstract

Despite a revival of interest in the work of Gabriel Tarde, he remains an underappreciated, patchily translated, and often misrepresented thinker. When he is invoked, it is typically as the “forefather” of actor–network theory, as claimed by Bruno Latour; as the advocate of the power of conversation in media influence, as promoted by Elihu Katz; or as a useful, but inaccurate, citation for comparing rational publics with irrational crowds. This study aims to correct certain misconceptions and broaden knowledge of Tarde’s work as a media and communications scholar by focusing on two texts, “The Public and the Crowd” (where anglophone readers have typically relied on incomplete translations) and Les Transformations du Pouvoir (which remains untranslated). Tarde teaches us that the media was always social and that the line between physical crowds and mediated audiences was always blurry.