ABSTRACT
Vilfredo Pareto, a trained engineer, was an economist, political scientist and sociologist.
The age in which he grew up was dominated by belief in social and material progress, in human perfectibility, and in scientific positivism. The paths by which thinkers and believers reached these common conclusions were various, but the outcome was much the same. In their various ways the fashionable arguments reached a consensus for democracy and rationality, for free trade and the market economy, for pacifism and humanitarianism…. Pareto was from ten to fifteen years older than either Freud or Durkheim or Bergson or Weber, but as his interest in social science awoke so late in life, he came to it at roughly the same time as they did-in the 1890s. At the outset he was a devout, albeit critical, believer in the dominant philosophies of reason, democracy and progress. With ten years, however, in complete independence of these contemporaries, he had run up against their common problem and came up with a similar answer. Like them he sensed the intrusion of the human personality into the framing of what had hitherto been regarded as objective laws established by naked intellect…. He became an antidemocrat; and this new attitude intensified with every passing year.1
