Thanks for your post Mason.  Your first paragraph was, I think, directed at me and I would like to take the opportunity to respond.

I should start by noting that my point primarily related to the disproportionate emphasis on Pareto's link with fascism, not the existence of such a link per se.  A simple example may clarify this further.  While it is commonly observed that Pareto was nominated to the Italian senate by Royal Decree in 1923; it is rarely pointed out that Pareto refused to submit the relevant documents to the Senate and that his appointment to the Senate was not approved by the Commission responsible for verifying credentials. One unfortunate outcome of the disproportionate interest in the Pareto-fascism topic has been that some very serious HET scholars have been completely deterred from reading Pareto's sociology.  

I fully agree with Mason's observation that there are passages in which "Pareto snarl[s] with contempt for liberal democracy".  Norberto Bobbio (1964) also astutely wrote that Pareto's Treatise "ruins weak stomachs and paralyses the strong" and I, like others, found that reading Pareto's sociology for the first time was a very confronting experience.  But did Pareto write his sociological text in this way because he was a pre-cursor of fascism and wanted to persuade us of a better 'non-liberal' way of life by insulting our sensibilities?  The answer, in my judgement, is certainly not!  I say this for four main reasons.

In his first major sociological book 'Les Systèmes Socialists' (1901, 1902) Pareto wrote that: "my sentiments lead me to liberty; I therefore took care to react against them, but in so doing one may say that I exceeded the measure and that, for fear of giving the arguments in favour of liberty too much weight, I have not have given them enough weight." (Busino Italian edition 1974, p129). That is, Pareto's criticisms of liberal democracy do not mean automatic rejection of liberal democracy (let alone acceptance of Fascism).  

Second, Pareto did express concerns with liberal democracy, and with humanitarianism more generally, but he did not do this to persuade people to behave in a non-democratic and a non-humanitarian manner.  His target readership was social scientists, a very small subset of society, and his primary goal was to highlight to them his concerns with theory and scholarship that did not account for the world as it is.  He was a persistent advocate of 'positive' science and dismissed many scholarly writings, such as those on 'liberal utopia', as metaphysical phantasies.  In Pareto's view, observable facts associated with patron client relationships between the governed and the governing (including in liberal democracy) cannot be ignored in studies of the social state.  His secondary goal for such comment appears less noble and rather unpleasant - one get the impression that he wants to simply ridicule the social doctrines of reformers when such doctrines don't, in his judgement, reflect the major characteristics of the world they seek to reform. 

Third, Pareto's sociology deals with elites, ideology and the mix of persuasion (or consent) and force, which may superficially appear fascist in origin but I think that that conclusion is wrong and very misleading.  I live in liberal democratic society that is rich in political spin (i.e. persuasion, from political and other sources), has a system of laws backed by legal sanction (i.e. force, to incarcerate law breakers) and interest groups and political groups appear to have the elite elements that Pareto talks about.  I don't see anything uniquely fascist in these aspects of Pareto's work.  Rather, they appear to be general social ideas that have application to many diverse forms of the social state.

Fourth, I don't accept Mason's suggestion that we need to consider "that Pareto might have inspired Mussolini".  Not just because of Mussolini's fidelity to Pareto was rather dubious (the system of economic corporatism developed under Italian fascism does not appear Paretian in any profound sense), but also because people who proclaim to be putting the ideas of great scholars into practice are not always the best interpreters of those ideas.  In view of this, I happily read Marx without trying to understand his work with reference to the actions of Lenin, Stalin or any subsequent figure, and I tell my HET students they may do the same.  Similarly, I try to understand Pareto's sociology without worrying too much about Mussolini.  Of course, if understanding Mussolini was my research topic, I would ask whether he was inspired by Pareto.

I should like to conclude this post (which is already too long - apologies)  by stating the obvious: Pareto's work certainly needs to be read with a very critical eye.  In striving to produce a general science of society, his work has the great merit of identifying and the existence of social phenomena that can be observed in many different forms of society and creating a 'general' theory, but it  also has the serious shortcoming of not considering the difference in the incidence of such phenomena across the different forms of the social state.  Indeed, if he had explicitly observed that the balance between consent and force in a liberal democratic society is very different to that of a collectivist society (with the former placing relatively greater emphasis on consent and the latter placing relatively greater emphasis on force), then debates over the individualistic v. collectivistic position of Pareto may well have been resolved years ago. 


-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of mason gaffney
Sent: Thursday, 19 July 2012 8:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] FW: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] allusion to Pareto

Many contributors have been speculating on connections between Pareto and Mussolini. One writer says that Pareto could not have followed Mussolini because Pareto died so soon after Mussolini took power.

That is hardly dispositive. Consider also that Pareto might have inspired Mussolini. Many passages in Pareto snarl with contempt for liberal democracy
- I can supply chapter, verse and text on demand. It is also possible that both were swept along in the same current, going with the same flow. The Allies may have won the war, but when the soldiers came home and learned modern economics on the G.I. Bill they were instructed in part by followers of Austrian and Italian philosophers openly skeptical of and even hostile to democracy when "carried too far". 

Likewise with the question of Hayek and Pinochet. Knight and Stigler disputed Hayek and earlier Austrians about periods of production and all that, and apotheosized J.B. Clark, and even kept Hayek out of the core Dept.
of Econ., but when it came to Pinochet, neither side seemed to be troubled by the problem of les desaparecidos. The end justified the means.

Today we have Grover Norquist with his no-tax pledge. He could not have led and inspired James Buchanan, but Buchanan  with his "Public Choice"
certainly could have inspired Norquist, and made him socially and academically "respectable". Again, both could be carried along in the same anarchistic flow with Rand, Thatcher, Reagan, Greenspan, and dozens of others we could all name.

So I suggest it is mere quibbling, in the worst sense of "academic", to deny the obvious ideological ties that bind the above critics of social democracy who dedicate themselves to keeping if from being "carried too far".

Mason Gaffney