Vilfredo Pareto’s Treatise on General Sociology has long been considered one of the seminal works of modern sociology. One list even ranked it among the hundred most influential books ever written in Western history.
Pareto’s Treatise first appeared in French between 1917 and 1919, with a second and final Italian edition in 1923. During the 1920s, there was a flurry of academic and popular writing about Pareto in the United States that became known as “the Pareto vogue.” This vogue reached its apogee in the late 1930s when his magnum opus was translated into English in 1935 and published in four volumes as The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology.
Pareto’s 2,033-page tome quickly became one of those classic texts that few scholars any longer read, although everyone purports to have read about it in some secondary source. Today Pareto’s work rarely warrants more than a few lines in books on political science and political sociology despite its enduring influence on those disciplines.
While Pareto had a significant impact on the methods and concepts of post–World War II social science, he is now remembered mostly as a founder of power elite theory. His thinking about the fate of governing elites and the ways in which they become decadent and depraved seems especially timely now in light of the contemporary US political scene.
Vilfredo Pareto was born in Paris on July 15, 1848. His father, Raffaele Pareto, was an Italian marquis from Genoa and a supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini’s nationalist revolutionary movement who had fled to France due to his anti-monarchist political views. In 1854, the Pareto family returned to Italy. Five years later, Vilfredo matriculated to the Leardi Institute to study physics and mathematics.
In 1864, Pareto graduated at the top of his class at the age of sixteen and entered the University of Turin. In 1867, he received degrees in mathematics and physics and was immediately admitted to the university’s School…
Auteur: Clyde W. Barrow
