DAVID GLADSTONE PARETO, WILFREDO (1848–1923)

Influential sociologist, economist and engineer, and leading proponent of elite theory, Wilfredo Pareto was born in Paris in 1848, to an Italian father of noble extraction—who had allegedly fled Italy on account of his republican beliefs—and a French mother of humble origins. The family moved to Piedmont in the mid-1850s, and after being

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educated in technical schools, Pareto entered the prestigious Turin Polytechnic, seeking to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer. The five-year course in civil engineering paved the way for much of Pareto’s subsequent intellectual development. The first two years were devoted to mathematics, a subject in which he excelled. His proficiency as mathematician underpinned his later work as an economist. His graduation thesis on The Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium in Solid Bodies afforded a paradigm for his subsequent vision of both economics and sociology.

After graduating in 1870, Pareto entered business, and became the managing director of an iron-mining company based in Florence. He moved in wealthy circles, but espoused progressive republican and democratic ideas. He denounced militarism and religion as ‘the greatest scourges afflicting mankind’, and became a staunch defender of free trade. With the advent of the left to power in Italy in 1876, the drift towards protectionism and what seemed the increasingly corrupt character of parliamentary politics turned Pareto into a vehement critic of the Government and its policies. In 1882 he stood unsuccessfully as an opposition candidate. More and more he found his business activities being hampered by the need to broker deals with Members of Parliament and ministries, and he longed to retire. It was around this time that his views on the ruling class in Italy began to crystallize: he saw it as a nexus of influence and pressure, using power to win economic favours and buy votes, and whose activities were hidden behind a smokescreen of elections and representative Government.

In 1891 Pareto retired to Fiesole with his young and penniless Russian wife, Dina Bakunin. He threw himself into a crusade against the protectionist and militarist policies of the Government and produced dozens of brilliantly polemical articles. His journalistic forays brought him into close contact with other Italian free-trade publicists, and it was through one of these, Maffeo Pantaleoni, that he was introduced to the new economic theories of Léon Walras. Pareto’s skilful exposition and elaboration of Walras’s mathematically expressed equilibrium system in the Giornale degli economisti rapidly gained him international recognition, and in 1893 he succeeded Walras as Professor of Political Economy in Lausanne. Three years later his first major publication appeared, the two-volume Cours d’economie politique (1896–7), a work that highlighted the interdependence of society and the economy, and which proposed a situation of efficiency or optimality (the so-called ‘Pareto optimum’) in which nobody could be made better off without making someone else correspondingly worse off. This concept was to

be fundamental to modern welfare economics. Implicit in the Cours was a mechanistic and essentially illiberal vision of history. Human nature, according to Pareto, was constant, and the social divisions that stemmed from the distribution of wealth were more or less unchanging. Any idea of progress or evolution was accordingly illusory. ‘We must learn to accept that the optimistic belief…according to which the structures of society can be radically changed, is a myth’,

he told the Italian socialist leader Filippo Turati. ‘Man is an ugly beast, and an ugly beast

he will remain for many, many centuries to come.’ Mounting socioeconomic unrest, and the Government’s brutal response to episodes such as the workers’ riots in Milan in May 1898, intensified Pareto’s pessimism. So, too, did a growing disenchantment with politics in general and with socialism in particular. He came to see the rise of trade unions as simply heralding the replacement of bourgeois privileges with workers’ privileges, and one form of oppression—that of the middle classes—with another—that of the

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proletariat. His earlier faith in democracy waned, and during the last two decades of his life he became increasingly anti-democratic in outlook.

This shift in Pareto’s outlook was further intensified by a new intuition, one that was to inspire his major sociological writings from the turn of the century. This was the idea (which came to him as a result of reflecting on the astonishing—since in his view so wrong-headed—popularity of what he called the ‘new gospel’ of Marxism in Italy in the 1890s) that much of human activity was the product not of reason but of feeling. He set out his new views in Les Systèmes socialistes (1901–2), a work that examined the history of socialist ideas from ancient times to the present, and which argued that the power of these ideas lay not in their capacity to produce a better world, but in their ability, through myths, to foster hopes that could galvanize the masses into action. Socialism, he suggested, was politically more powerful than liberalism because it appealed to emotion rather than reason; but in practical terms there was little to choose between them: both simply enabled ‘elites’ to capture and keep power.

Pareto developed his sociological ideas further in the Manuale d’economia politica (1906) and the monumental Trattato di sociologia generale (1916). In this latter work he explored the relationship between human behaviour and society, and drew a distinction between logical actions—those, and they were relatively rare in his view, where the means were appropriate to the ends—and non-logical ones. Non-logical actions were frequently just a ‘bundle of idiocies’, but they could be ‘socially useful’. They were often kitted out in justificatory rational terms (what he called ‘derivations’), but were in reality just instruments for the satisfaction of basic human emotions and instincts (what he called ‘residues’). He regarded all political doctrines as abstractions that could not change the fundamental opposition between elites and masses that was to be found in every society. All elites governed using force and cunning, and were replaced in due course by other elites claiming to speak for the oppressed or disadvantaged. History was thus little more than ‘a graveyard of aristocracies’.

Despite serious ill health, Pareto continued to write until the end of his life. He died in 1923.

DAVID GLADSTONE PARETO, WILFREDO (1848–1923)