Vilfredo Pareto: An Intellectual Biography Volume II

Vilfredo Pareto

“…This, according to some psychoanalytical interpretations, such as that proposed by Borkenau (1936) , originated from the radical confl ict between the young Vilfredo Pareto and his father Raffaele, a political and intellectual fi gure who played a crucial role in the diffusion of Mazzini's ideas in Italy and Europe. This interpretation is hardly demonstrable, especially in the light of the new biographical evidence produced by Mornati (2018a ;2018b ). What seems to us more relevant for the purposes of our discussion is to note how Pareto's political commitment corresponds to a consistent epistemological stance: liberalism, in its conception, fully implements the principles of positivism and defi nes the methodological individualism that would inspire all his subsequent intellectual production.…”

Did Elitists Really Believe in Social Laws? Some Epistemological Challenges in the Work of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto

“…Pareto extremely convincingly shows how social phenomena are interdependent, but his attempt to build a generalequilibrium model was probably too ambitious. Long before the Trattato was struck, Pareto had no confidence that a mathematic formalisation would fit the nature of sociology, not least because many variables cannot (and never will) be measured (Pareto 2005: §584, §610; Pareto 1964: §2062ff; see: Mornati 2018). However, the determination of social orders is a question not only of dealing with a more complex system of equations (see Powers and Hanneman 1983) but of a different underlying logic.…”

“…As will be explained more fully in the rest of the paper, such a debate deserves attention because Vilfredo Pareto has been considered one of the founding fathers of policy analysis(Samuels 1974). 2 In the case of Pareto, the other major source of influence was the notion of 'equilibrium', developed by Warlas, and which Pareto himself refined significantly in the field of economics(Mornati 2018) and eventually tried to extend in the field of sociology. The whole social system, in Pareto's understanding, should have been conceived as a more complex system, where the equations leading to the equilibrium in the economic domain interact with those determining the equilibrium in the domains of power and beliefs(Powers and Hanneman 1983).…”