ABSTRACT
IN A volume devoted to Pareto’s life and work,1 Professor Bousquet relates that the obituary article devoted to Pareto in the socialist daily, Avanti, described him as the ‘bourgeois Karl Marx.’ I do not know that a man can rightly be called ‘bourgeois’ who never missed an opportunity to pour contempt on la bourgeoisie ignorante et
lâche. But for the rest, the analogy conveys very well the impression that Pareto had made upon his countrymen: they had in fact raised him to an eminence that was unique among the economists and sociologists of his time. No other country erected a similar pedestal for his statue, and in the Anglo-American world both the man and the thinker have remained strangers to this day. There was, indeed, a short Pareto vogue in this country that followed upon the translation of his sociological treatise.2 But it died out soon in an uncongenial atmosphere. Moreover, so far as the small circle of pure theorists is concerned, Pareto came to exert considerable influence on Anglo-American economics in the 1920’s and 1930’s, that is, after the publication of Professor Bowley’s Groundwork. But both in England and the United States, Marshallian and post-Marshallian economics offered enough in the line in which Pareto excelled to prevent him from gaining much ground of his own even before other tendencies took away whatever he had gained.
