ABSTRACT
Having reduced all ideas about social arrangements to underlying sentiments or mental patterns, Pareto had no time for the conventional approaches to moral and political philosophy that dominated his era and continue to dominate ours. To him, modern philosophers – even some of those drawing on the tradition of British empiricism – had not managed to escape the medieval inheritance of metaphysical abstraction. For philosophers of the idealist persuasion who spoke of ‘essences’ or ‘substance’, he expressed nothing but contempt. Typical was his dismissal of the ‘ethical state’, a doctrine holding that the state essentially embodies the ‘spirit’ of society. Pareto points out how this idea is supported with metaphysical argument:
When one speaks about the state, more often than not one speaks about an entity which does not exist, and we are back in those wonderful days when one talked about a substance modified by accidents. It was believed that whiteness could exist independently of white bodies. The state would therefore be something abstract of which governments are the accidents. Thus, everything that is good is the product of the substance – the state – while everything bad is the fault of the accidents – the government. It is easy, then, to demonstrate that the state is ethical and perfect!1
