ABSTRACT
The Italian and semi-Italian representatives of the Machiavellian school—Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels—do not rank among the most creative minds of the early twentieth century. In terms of wide-ranging imagination and a sophisticated understanding of the categories of social thought they cannot be placed alongside Freud or Weber or their countryman Croce. Mosca alone worked out his theories in an exclusively Italian setting. His Sicilian birth and the fact that he had passed his whole youth in the Italian south gave the decisive steer to his political thinking. The fashion, however, in which he qualified his allegiance was of more than incidental importance. For it recalled the original ambivalence that Pareto had displayed toward his Mazzinian inheritance. Mussolini himself in his customary fashion took pleasure in citing Pareto as one of his masters. Everything is obvious about him, and everything is strange.
