The Italian sociologist, political theorist and economist, Vilfredo Pareto he is best known for his influential theory of ruling elites, and for his equally influential theory that political behavior is essentially irrational.
Vilfredo Federico Pareto (born Wilfried Fritz Pareto) was born in Paris, July 15, 1848. His father, a Genoese aristocrat, was a political exile in France, where he arrived around 1835, due to his support for the Mazzinian republican movement. He returned to Piedmont in 1855, where he worked as a civil engineer for the government.
Vilfredo He continued his father’s profession after graduating from the Turin Polytechnic Institute in 1869. He worked as a director of the Rome Railway Company until 1874, when he secured a position as general director of an iron production company, with offices in Florence
In 1889 Pareto married a young Russian woman, Bakunin Dina, resigned his position in the iron company for a consultancy, and for the next 3 years he wrote and spoke against the protectionist policy of the Italian government in his country and its military policies in the outside. His reputation as a rebel activist led him to become close friends with the economist Maffeo Pantaleoni. From this friendship was born his interest in pure economics, a field in which he quickly became a renowned expert. Due to his reputation, he obtained, in 1893, a call to occupy the prestigious position of professor of political economy at the University of Lausanne.
In 1894 Pareto published his first work, “Cours d’économie politique“, which provoked a great deal of comment from other economists. Two years later he inherited a small fortune from an uncle, a stroke of luck that made him consider retiring to pursue research. He then began to develop the theories by which which is more famous, elitism and irrationalism in politics.
In his early political career, Pareto he had been an ardent activist for democracy and free trade, just as his father had been before. The reasons for the marked change in his political outlook have been widely debated, ranging from a neo-Freudian analysis to the explanation that he simply changed because of the results of his own extensive studies. At the moment in his next book, “Political Economy Manual“, published in 1906, his ideas about elites and irrationalism were already well developed. The following year he resigned from his chair of political economy at Lausanne to devote all his energies to researching his theories.
Pareto He retired to his villa in Céligny, where he lived a lonely existence, except for his 18 Angora cats (the village was called “Villa Angora”) and his friend Jane Regis, a woman 30 years younger than him, who was He had joined their home in 1901 when his wife left him. In 1907 he began to write his best known and most influential work, the “Sociology Treatise“; which he completed in 1912 and published in 1916.
The elitism theory of Pareto it is sometimes explained simplistically on the basis of his aristocratic heritage. However, recent studies have shown that, throughout his life and in his works, he often expressed extreme dislike towards the Italian aristocracy as well as his feeling “anti-socialist, anti-interventionist, anti-colonialist, anti-government. militaristic, anti-racist, and anti-anti-Semitic. ” He was attracted to fascism when he first came to power in Italy, but later opposed it. He was perhaps best described as an iconoclastic individualist.
His work “The mind and society“is at the same time a discredit of Marxism and the bourgeois state. Pareto it is inductive or positivist, scornfully rejecting natural law, metaphysics, and deductive reasoning. Based on very extensive historical and empirical studies, Pareto He argued that in reality and inevitably the true form of government in any state is never a monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, or democracy, but rather that all social organizations, including states, are always governed by a ruling elite. This ruling elite, which has greater vitality and utility than other elites, dominates them until it is in turn overridden by a more powerful one; this is the famous “Pareto theory of circulation of elitesPolitical behavior itself, both of the masses and of the elites, is basically emotional and not rational. The function of reason is to justify past behavior or to show the way to future goals, which are determined not by reason. but for emotional needs.