ABSTRACT
Pareto wrote at a time when the worship of science, which had been gathering pace ever since Newton’s physics triumphed over Descartes’s apriorism, was being challenged by various forms of idealism. Whereas the champions of scientific method saw fit to treat even man himself as part of nature, a machine, governed by ‘social physics’, the neoidealists favoured the interpretation of human behaviour in terms of a Geist. For this new methodological dogma, generalisation could only mean a grasp of cultural totalities in all their uniqueness, and this grasp took the form of ‘intuition’ rather than empirical analysis. History done on Hegelian lines was posited as the model for human studies – and the apriorism integral to this understanding of the historical method came to be known as hermeneutics. It was an axiom of this method that the self-conscious, meaning-generating, and reflexive nature of human activities undermined the search for invariant laws of social behaviour. Since human institutions, practices, and beliefs are conditioned by the understandings that participants (or believers) have of them, they defy all attempts at measurement and quantification. The natural and human sciences are therefore ontologically, and logically, discrepant. The point of the latter is to make human behaviour intelligible by interpreting it in relation to subjective intentions, and this is where ‘intuition’ comes in.
