ABSTRACT
Pareto acknowledged a great debt both to Karl Marx and to one of his Italian popularisers, Achille Loria. He even referred to the idea of class struggle as profoundly true. Yet Pareto was no Marxist. He took strong exception to that assumption of causal asymmetry between economic and political power which is most pronounced in the earlier works of Marx and Engels. Pareto admitted to basing his sociology upon maxims of Machiavelli which hold as true today as they were in his time'. He would certainly have agreed with Machiavelli's core assumption that: The primary subject-matter for political science is the struggle for social power in its diverse open and concealed forms. Pareto articulated his Machiavellian assumptions about personality more through his many references to what he termed his residues' than by any other means.
