ABSTRACT
Along with Weber and Durkheim, Pareto is generally considered one of the three ‘great’ political sociologists who challenged the Marxist theory of society. His analysis of the cyclical fluctuation of elites is justly famous, as is his emphasis on the ‘non-rational’ in human behaviour and practice. And yet, compared with the other ‘greats’, he receives surprisingly little attention from the scholarly community. While he did have his hour of glory in America on the eve of the Second World War, when his writings were enthusiastically explored by sociologists like Homans and Parsons, he has effectively been ‘put in quarantine’, like a man suffering from a communicable disease.1 According to one commentator, who describes Pareto as an ‘undisturbed theoretical corpse’, the word ‘quarantine’ is too weak an image to convey the reality of the situation.2 Living as we do in an age when even obscure and minor figures in the intellectual landscape generate a vast scholarly literature, how can we explain this relative neglect? Why, in particular, are his ideas almost totally ignored by people who describe themselves as political theorists or political philosophers?
