ABSTRACT
The place of Vilfredo Pareto in the history of science is secured through his contribution to economics. He is one of the pioneers of econometrics. This is an unusually cumulative part of the social sciences, enabling a person's contribution to be fairly precisely ascertained. To remove the theorems that Pareto contributed would be a noticeable loss. Pareto concentrates his attention on existing and potential elites, and has rather little to say about other parts of society. Faced with the multitude of human actions, Pareto searches for a few less variable elements—in reatise styled "residues"—which, in combination with more variable elements, make up the broad repertoires of human actions. Pareto's theory that people are usually motivated by sentiments rather than by logic came as a welcome explanation in the interpretation of the findings. Pareto's conclusion that the change of elites occurs most readily when the religious sentiment is on the rise stands much elaborated and somewhat corrected after P. Sorokin's investigations.
