ABSTRACT
A number of Italian Fascist intellectuals actually did call themselves followers of Pareto; they presented themselves as nondecadent bourgeois taking over the role of a decadent bourgeoisie. They justified their violence by claiming that it was a necessary response to the violence of the workers. According to Vilfredo Pareto, a logico-experimental study of nonlogical behavior should be morally and politically neutral, free of value judgments and sentiments; he himself repeatedly says that there is no logico-experimental solution to the problem of human behavior. Pareto was of noble family, a marquis, and favored a moderate and refined version of Epicureanism; he was hostile to the extreme forms of Puritan moralism and asceticism. Pareto's rationalism is also a critique of the rationalist illusion in psychology, an illusion that sees men as being, in the last analysis, led by reason or by arguments to an ever greater rationality.
