ABSTRACT
Pareto’s major work in sociology is the Treatise on General Sociology, otherwise known as The Mind and Society. Within the modern sociological community Pareto’s name evokes more the image of a distant and somewhat odd ancestor than the respect due to a genius who, like few others, penetrated sociological frontiers still unsettled today. Pareto’s theory of the sentiments — of the human biogram — had its beginnings in the 1890s and was for all practical purposes completed by 1908, when talk of genetics was still rare. In being the judges in the final instance of what shall be added to, or abstracted from, the social order, the persistences are for socio-cultural systems what natural selection is for the rest of the animal kingdom. Life in society necessarily rests on a certain reciprocal goodwill between individual and individual. For the moment, the central point is that revolution is an expression of extreme incompetence in the governing class.
