Masa, público y comunicación. La recepción de Gabriel Tarde en la primera sociología de Robert Park

Abstract

The Chicago School was the first institutional development of the United Status sociology. In this country, the Robert Park proposal was pioneer connecting multiple traditions as American pragmatism, Simmel’s sociology and French-Italian crowd’s psychology. In this context the paper analyses, first, the Park’s PhD dissertation in the crowd’s psychology framework focusing the link between the American sociologist and the contributions of his French colleague Gabriel Tarde. Second, it examines the uses of crowd and public as key concepts in Tarde’s studies in 1901, where we find the differences between both objects in the communication process as a main theoretical approach. Finally, the article studies the role of communication and public opinion in the Park analysis, one of his major interests in his future career.