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Pareto & Mosca

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(The back cover blurb)
Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca remain inseparably - and at times incongruously - linked in the history of Western thought. Both mens were Italians who rejected the egalitarian ideals of democracy as well as the sconomic determinism of Marxism. At a time when nineteenth-century liberalism was on the declined and the seeds of fascism and communism were being sown, they reformulated, in different ways, traditional theories about the nature of political power.
This book combines explications with critiques of these two controversial theorists who have challenged, even as they have infuriated, the liberal sociological imagination. The essayists - authorities in their own right - reveal the inconsistencies, the fallacies, and yet the continuing relevance of the ideas developed by Pareto and Mosca. Both thinkers analyzed the relationship between the control of power and the will of the governed, confronting one of the fundamental truths which has been so brutally dramatized in modern times: that despite constitutional guarantees, the Few will always rule the many.
Contributors include: Werner Stark, Sidney Hook, N. S. Timasheff, Talcott Parsons, Morris Ginsberg, Franz Borkenau, Raymond Aron, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Franco Ferrarotti, H. Stuart Hughes, C. Wright Mills, James Hans Meisel, and Carl J. Friedrich.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

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About the author

James Hans Meisel

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Hans Meisel studied at the universities in Berlin and Heidelberg ; he graduated in 1922 with the doctorate of philosophy . From 1925 to 1933 he was the local editor of the Berliner Vossische Zeitung . After the Nazi occupation , he had to go to exile in Italy in 1934; In 1936 he went to Austria, where he worked as a lecturer of the S. Fischer publishing house . After the "Anschluss" of Austria to the German Reich in 1938 he fled again to Italy and further to the United States . From 1938 to 1940 he worked as a secretary of Thomas Mann in Princeton (New Jersey). He then taught at Colleges in Idaho and Pennsylvania . From 1945, Meisel was a lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor ; In 1956 he was appointed professor. After his retirement in 1971 he lived in the state of Washington.

Hans Meisel became known in 1927 by his novel Torstenson , in which he portrays the development of a general as dictator. For this work, he was awarded the Kleist Prize in the same year. As a result of the emigration, Meisel did not continue his scholarly career. After his youthful memories A gondola made entirely of glass appeared with Aguilar in 2001 or The departure of another novel from the estate , written in 1937.

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