Gee’s Reviews > Pareto and Political Theory > Status Update

It is indeed one of Pareto’s complaints against normative moral and political philosophy that the premises of the logical demonstration are always selected to deliver the desired outcome.

The truth is that Pareto somehow managed to be subversive and conservative at one and the same time. This duality pervades his work. Consider his critique of demagogic plutocracy. In his determination to ‘unmask’ the hypocritical elitism and tawdry self-seeking of liberal ‘democracy’, he was a match for any left-wing firebrand. Yet his attack on trade unions and social spending was inherently reactionary.

No civilisation can do without its myths and deities, according to Pareto.

Pareto – as we have also seen – maintained that calculations of aggregate happiness were intrinsically inconclusive, mainly because neither ‘happiness’ nor its supposed determinant ‘pleasure’ could be defined with precision or finality. Utilitarians, he felt, surreptitiously inserted their own subjective values into what were meant to be objective calculations.

Thomas Hobbes, who, like Machiavelli, rejected essentialism in all its forms. Society, on this understanding, is not a means for the achievement of any ‘purpose’ or ‘telos’ inherent in human nature. Man as such has no purpose; only individuals have purposes, and these are all related to survival.

On this Pareto was in complete accord with Machiavelli. Conflict and diversity are inherent in the human condition, which negates the possibility of what followers of Habermas would call a ‘rational consensus’

The parallels between Pareto and Machiavelli are obvious. Most striking was their shared contempt for normative political philosophy, as epitomised by Plato, who fruitlessly ‘strains all his intellectual capacities to discover what ought to be’ and thus ‘rise to the sublime heights of creation’

Being sceptical rather than deontological, his liberalism originated in doubt, not in the certainties of natural law and social contract – doctrines he despised. In this sense, Pareto was heir to the anti-metaphysical tradition whose modern progenitor was Machiavelli.

we may infer that Pareto favoured devolved and minimal government, where the ‘fiction’ of representation is replaced as much as possible by direct consultation with the people. Whether the Swiss model could have been transplanted into large countries like Italy is debatable;

If democracy is a sham, a disguised form of repression and exploitation, then why bother to defend it against the fascist assault? According to Luigi Montini, Pareto thought that the ‘majoritarian fetish’ was destroying bourgeois freedoms and standards.