In this chapter, I trace the late-nineteenth-century sociological equivalent to the idea of tensional individuality, demonstrating that this notion formed part of early foundational reflections in the discipline. I do this by reconstructing the considerations of individuality of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. On the one hand, Tarde promoted an image of the so-called ‘somnambulistic myself’, the notion that the individual is multiplicitous and that every person is constituted through the mimetic influences of others. On the other, Tarde maintained that this somnambulistic constitution of the individual co-exists with an anti-mimetic core: elements that persist despite external mimetic influence. What transpires out of this is, I posit, a conception of tensional individuality – one that, in contrast to the psychotherapy discussions detailed in Chapter 1, is then placed at the centre of early sociological thinking. The chapter identifies its relevance in a broader theoretical landscape stretching from fin-de-siècle philosophy to twentieth-century psychology. The chapter also discusses Tarde’s disputes with Emile Durkheim about the role and nature of sociology. I argue here that the supposed antagonism between Durkheim and Tarde is overblown and that the two found common ground on several important issues.

In this chapter I show that it is possible to identify across a range of different thinkers a shared analytical investment in collective behaviour that allows one to distil the notion of social avalanches or social avalanching. The fundamental claim I make is that Durkheim, Simmel, Tarde and many others sought to respond to an experience that gained particular prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: various forms of social change increasingly produced situations in which individuals felt the ground disappearing beneath them, carrying them away in a collective turbulence which, once set in motion, acquired its own self-organising properties. In addition to developing the notion of social avalanching from late-nineteenth-century social theory, this chapter explores the prosocial character of avalanches. Elaborating on the concept of social avalanching, I examine the extent to which a metaphor such as ‘avalanche’ merits inclusion in the realm of proper sociological concepts and connect it to discussions within physics about self-organised criticality. Finally, I discuss the notion of social avalanching in relation to social action as conceived in the sociology of Max Weber.