At a time when the sciences of politics were studying the state, Gabriel Tarde made power the subject of a nascent “political sociology,” most notably in a work published in 1899, Les transformations du pouvoir, a book based on two series of lectures that combined the quite unsystematic approach characteristic of their author with an excessive taste for digressions. These very features have perplexed the few sociologists who have discussed that book (Favre 1983). In the present contribution, I intend to summarize its content into a limited set of consistent claims. I will then show to what extent Tarde's sociology of power helps clarifying a neglected aspect of his thought. Finally, I will ascertain the three tenets that enable one to draw that sociology closer to the sociology of institutional power developed during the twentieth century.

The Means, Sources and Modes of Constitution of Power

Power, at once circumscribed as “political power,” is, according to Tarde, an unevenly distributed capacity akin to privilege: “the privilege of being obeyed” enjoyed by “public authorities” (Tarde 1899, 15). Everywhere, public authorities represent “social superiorities,” or “social prestiges” (prestiges sociaux). Any aristocratic body, the army and the Church, according to circumstances, are examples of such social superiorities, but even wealth (property), knowledge (education) and the mere fact of living in the city rather than in the country might turn out to be prestigious (ibid., chaps. 5– 6). The way in which public authorities can be said to be representative of social superiorities is twofold. It consists both in the exercise of an office and a resemblance, according to the following logic: authorities act as substitutes for the superiorities the status of which they partake in. They are a section, specific and specialized, of these very same groups.

Simultaneously, and in accordance with common usage, Tarde denotes by the term “power” the holders of that kind of privilege, as when one says that “power demands” or that such and such event “suits power.” As a consequence, the transformations of power considered by Tarde result from the fact that authorities and, primarily, the prestiges from which they derive, change over time.