Michael,
	I appreciate your response: courteous, informed, and thoughtful, a
good example for all of us.

	Glad to learn about Norberto Bobbio's reaction; mine too! It wasn't
just Pareto's Limbaugh-like language, though, it was years before I read
Pareto himself.  It was the thought behind it, and its ability to sway the
Berkeley professor, Earl Rolph, who first pushed it on me seriously. Rolph
was a stimulating and I think a fair teacher, but opportunities for dialogue
were limited during the big crush of vets in 1948. I thought I saw holes in
Pareto, but mine not to reason why, mine but to prepare for the Quals. Nor
is this the venue to debate Pareto now. 

	When Pareto writes that his sentiments lead him to "liberty", we
need to know how he defines "liberty". Neo-cons today use it as a euphemism
for deregulation, or at least selective deregulation of kinds that favor the
influential donors behind most new thinktanks, and many established
universities. Like "liberal", "liberty" has many meanings - and that is just
in one language, English. Maybe it has more meanings in Italian. It would be
useful to know Pareto's meaning. Maybe you can help us - I am not an avid
student of Pareto.

	As to what is uniquely "fascist", I would oversimplify thus:
communism is dictatorship of the proletariat; fascism is dictatorship of the
rentiers. Pareto (like Hayek et al.) clearly would choose the latter, to
curb what they call the "excesses of democracy". Pareto's rejection of
cardinal utility and insistence on only ordinal utility, carried to its
logical extreme, says that if one person owns all the wealth, and everyone
else owns none, there is still no case for transferring one iota of wealth
to the starving, thirsting, naked, homeless freezing majority as they die in
agony. Every time some economist writes of "Pareto-superior" distributions
he is silently endorsing that world-view, and Pareto has taken over his
mind.

Mason Gaffney

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Michael McLure
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2012 4:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] FW: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] FW: [SHOE] R: [SHOE] allusion to Pareto

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