ABSTRACT
Vilfredo Pareto's unapologetic temperamental and intellectual elitism, and momentary acceptance of fascism before he died in 1923, of course, help matters. The stunning collapse of Pareto's sociological reputation from its extraordinary height in the late 1930s to its virtual disappearance in the 1950s must be attributed as much to the celebratory liberal-democratic postwar political climate as to meaningful evaluation of his ideas themselves. Once an engineer, always one, as clearly exemplified in his ready resort to calculus and the Cartesian axis when addressing any puzzle, mechanical or human. Pareto then quotes Livy, concluding that "we are impressed with the slight change that has occurred during more than 2000 years in the forces that mould and animate society. Pareto's Trattato is a socio-cultural cornucopia that defies comparison. When Parsons and his three colleagues assembled their gargantuan Theories of Society, they included no fewer than six excerpts from Pareto's works—more than those by George Herbert Mead and Georg Simmel.
